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US Air Force Launches Secret Flying Twinkie
Spectrummag writes "One of the most secretive US Air Force spaceflights in decades, launched this month, is keeping aficionados guessing as to the nature of the secret. The 6000-kilogram, 8-meter X-37B, nicknamed the flying Twinkie because of its stubby-winged shape, is supposed to orbit Earth for several weeks, maneuver in orbit, then glide home. What's it for? Space expert James Oberg tracks the possibilities."
"That's a big twinkie..."
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Well, obviously it's to nuke the site from orbit, you know why. Then again, They might just want us to think that. They always do...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
60000 kilograms & 8 meters long? That's a big Twinkie
...it should be able to remain in orbit indefinitely without deteriorating.
This ain't rocket surgery.
What this is is an experimental spacecraft that NASA gave up, and should reclaim in my opinion. Turning this into a manned flight precursor would be a good way for President Obama to regain status in the astronaut community.
A scaled up version of this could replace capabilities that the shuttle provided to the military.
Sure they launch sats on rockets now, but they can't do any of the maintenance with a rocket. Also is folks listened to the MIT lectures on building the shuttle, they mentioned that the engines in the shuttle wouldn't have to be torn down and rebuilt between flights if the electronics were built onto the engine such the engines could be tested without removing them.
I'm sure there are other what if style improvements that the shuttle built from blueprints could benefit from in the age of CAD that would aid in the rapid turnaround of any new vehicle designed with the Twinkie's test data.
So the article speculates that this is a testbed for on-orbit threat detection systems, which given the number of countries getting into the space gig seems like a reasonable thing to be working on.
So here's why bit I don't get: Why build it into a space plane rather than a regular satellite? Seems to me that you're adding an order of magnitude to the complexity of the mission -- do they really need the sensors back that badly, or is this maybe for something else?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I wonder what they’re calling it behind closed doors, though?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Black Mesa
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
This is just conjecture. On a 'big' war day we are going to want to disable enemy satellites. We have ground based interceptors -- but there can be delays in launch windows, plus the 'bad' guys are going to be on guard and can take some evasive actions.
How about our little X-37 with a cargo bay and manipulator arm goes and pays those 'nasty' satellites a visit right now and attaches a few pounds of high explosive with a radio detonator. When the war starts you push a button and they all disappear!
Just in case they send a maintenance flight up, our little bomblets can also be equipped with a radio controlled 'spring' that detaches them from the satellite. No one is the wiser.
Possible?
1. A robotic platform for working on, refueling, repairing and monitoring satellites, like Tekfactory talked out.
2. On station orbital weapons platform
3. Electronic warfare system for monitoring foreign satellites and disabling them.
Personally if I were an alien, a "Flying Twinkie" would make me want to visit a planet...
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet
-Steven Hawking
Or maybe this giant Twinkie IS the protection against the satellites: the delicious-decoy.
put to the test systems that enable satellites to protect themselves from enemy attack
//yes I am being sarcastic
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
I thought that was Lindsey Graham's nick name!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Radar Operator: Colonel, you better have a look at this radar.
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its would make sense if they were close to single stage to orbit vehicle
but that's more like wishful thinking
few pounds? a single hand grenade would take out any satellite. Imparting the energy from a single grenade or even a C4 charge will spin it out of control that the bird will never recover from.
you don't have to destroy it, just make it useless.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I imagine the russians and maybe the chinese would both notice an object going from sat to sat to sat.
That's no moon. It's a cream-filled space station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel
You know what happens to remarkable enemy scientists at the end of a war? They "defect".
I question the 'one of the most secretive' part of TFS based on the fact that this is posted on Slashdot. /tinfoilhat
Possible?
No not really.
Besides its not like it would need high explosives. Squirting some water on the satellites would cause some interesting damage that would be hard to track down.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Or..., attach something that can futz with the function of the bird. Killing it outright certainly removes an asset from enemy hands, but turning that asset can, under certain conditions, be even more valuable.
I have good inside information they carry large amounts of water... capable of maintaining a shark with a laser. So what if the inside information is coming from the voices inside my head. It's still inside.
It's a space station. (Ben Kenobi)
Why not just scoop the enemy satellite up and bring it home. Or, scoop our own satellite up and bring it home if threatened.
Or does 6000 Kg annoy other people? Shouldn't that be 6 Mg?
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Tallahassee, having exhausted every supply of twinkies on the earth, goes to Cape Canaveral and hot-wires a space shuttle to go after the big twinkie he saw in the sky. "The gang" goes with him. They find Buzz Aldrin (who has creative zombie killing genius only rivaled by Tallahassee) to pilot the shuttle. Columbus and Witchita get to make out in space. Zombies hitch a ride with them and have to be killed. They make a "pitstop" at the ISS, which has more zombies that have to be killed. And the "big twinkie in the sky" turns out to just be a lame USAF space plane experiment with no twinkies on board but is full of more zombies to be killed.
It's obviously Thunderbird 2. You can all leave your geek cards at the door on your way out.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Or, more efficiently, a small cloud of undetectable debris, released on a colission course from an alternate orbit to impart a sufficiently large relative velocity. Make the orbit suitably eliptic and any debris that misses would burn up in the atmosphere within several orbits, and you can avoid collateral damage.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Why an arm? Too slow.
Regular gun fire from a nose cannon or radar controlled short range rocket would do as well. Sats are thin skinned vehicles.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
. . . with Flying Robotic Penguins
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
That seems like a stretch of capabilities considering that enemy satellites don't exactly have open, 'insert here,' interfaces on them where you could easily mount something like that. If the X-37 is going to be used for space militarization, I imagine it is much less about blowing things up and far more about interfacing with things on orbit. The X-37 has a decently sized cargo bay and a manipulator arm. It may well be capable of snagging certain classes of enemy satellites for reverse engineering. It also could probably be used for some sort of autonomous repair/maintenance of friendly satellites which is a field that is currently being researched significantly for both civilian and military purposes. Also, if the X-37 turns out to be fairly cheap and easy to reuse (like the space shuttle was supposed to be) it may become a good deployment mechanism for small scale recon sats in a hot environment. If it can sit on orbit for multiple weeks with a cargo bay full of five or so small orbital cameras, it could deploy those cameras when and where necessary to track enemy movement.
Then again, this is all just conjecture on my part. It may be something as simple as the air force wanting the ability fly up to a Chinese satellite and poke it inappropriately hard with the manipulator arm to break its camera or send it spinning uncontrollably out of its intended orbit.
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Old news. It launched two weeks ago and disappeared going Mach 20 (ish). The atmosphere apparently has a sweet tooth. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/04/27/darpa-loses-contact-with-mach-20-hypersonic-glider-during-test-flight/
I, for one, welcome our new delicious, creme filled orbiting overlord.
First off, while the article is a good one, it was actually written before launch. After the launch, there have been some intriguing details, particularly the fact that NOBODY outside of the classified world has been able to actually locate it in the sky. Normally amateur skywatchers are pretty good at locating satellites after they've launched, but apparently not in this case. Here's two possible explanations for this:
* the X-37B is testing low-visibility features, possibly either a stealthy payload shroud, low-visibility solar panels, or some other sort of camouflage/stealth system
* One possibility posited by Jim Oberg (the article author) elsewhere is that this may be the first test ever of an atmospheric orbital plane change, a technique desired since the 90s or earlier, where a spaceplane uses its wings to dip into the atmosphere while travelling at hypersonic speeds to alter its trajectory. The X-37B apparently doesn't have a high enough L/D ratio to perform an extreme plane change (e.g. near-equatorial to polar), but it may be able to alter its trajectory enough to make it damn hard to track from the ground.
Now, some people have been asking why a reusable spaceplane would be useful to the US Air Force. Some possibilities:
* The atmospheric plane change capability mentioned above, which would allow the Air Force to deploy satellites into trajectories unknown by those observed. One major problem with satellites is that other countries typically know when they'll be overhead, so they just make sure that anything they're trying to hide doesn't occur during those hours.
* If you add a retrieval arm or some other docking interface, you can potentially use the craft to alter the trajectory of existing satellites
* Although the X-37B was launched on an expendable Atlas V rocket, the Air Force recently put out a solicitation for proposals for a first-stage Reusable Booster System utilizing a technique known as boost-back. With boost-back, after the booster boosts the payload and/or 2nd stage, it then does a 180 and boosts/glides back to a landing strip so that it can be easily reused. Lockheed Martin tested a secretive prototype of such a system (which they dubbed "Revolver") a couple years ago. If you combine such Reusable Boosters with a beefier successor to the X-37B, you have a rapid-launch reusable "surge" capability long desired by the Air Force. Such a surge capability could be useful when you need to quickly launch many satellites, such as when you need to deploy many satellites over a particular region in wartime or many of your satellites are knocked out by anti-satellite weapons or solar storms. Currently the Air Force has to wait for several weeks or months per satellite.
For anybody interested in watching video of the launch (a rather beautiful launch of the Atlas V rocket), you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCpuv9RCwE
Also, for those who are interested in finding out more, there's a lot of good discussion with plenty of current and former space professionals (including some posts by Jim Oberg, the author of the submission article) over at this NASASpaceFlight.com thread on the X-37B: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=21122.285
What this is is an experimental spacecraft that NASA gave up, and should reclaim in my opinion. Turning this into a manned flight precursor would be a good way for President Obama to regain status in the astronaut community.
Hi, welcome to Politics 101. Pop quiz: of the two statements below, which one will fly through Congress, and which one will fall like a dog turd:
* President requests $10 billion in additional funding for new Air Force project to help secure the skies above our brave troops and protect this great nation from terrorists
- or -
* President requests $10 billion in additional funding for new NASA project for the peaceful exploration of space and expansion of human understanding about our planet and its environment
Only one of these two fly, pick the winner.
One of the most secretive US Air Force spaceflights in decades
wow I wonder if 1 billion of /.ers can keep a secret...besides we don't have any friends to tell, do we?
You're thinking of the hypersonic test aircraft. This is the X-37B. Completely different projects.
You were right about it being old news, considering the launch was almost two weeks ago and the story was a pre-launch piece, and you were on the right planet, at least.
The spacecraft has multiple modes of operation. In one mode there exists an android that gets its ride in the payload bay. Through tele-presence this android can do tasks such as boarding and dismantling other satellites in LEO. Repair and refueling is another option. Another mode is having optics in the payload bay, this is useful if the military needs a spy satellite in a new orbit and with a quick turn-around. Some missions may be so secret that relaying encrypted information back via the satellite relay network is not allowed and data is stored on-board until the craft lands on american soil. Another use for it is possibly to test new propulsion techniques. This is just what I think, not what I think to know.
-p
Sats are thin skinned vehicles.
Says who?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Remember that wormhole that opened up a few months back over Europe?
Yeah, well they are sending some deliveries to the aliens, humans dressed up in semi-transparent latex clown outfits fighting to the death.
They all drew straws and NASA lost.
Nobody will be the wiser either since pretty much everybody lapped up the "it was a rocket" excuse.
It's always those damned stray rockets, eh, running amok without caring about their masters orders.
It's for orbiting Earth for several weeks, maneuvering in orbit, and then gliding home!
Launch capabilities.
Armor is expensive to lift.
Doesn't matter. Kinetic energy tearing thru a sat destabilize it and disables it.
We've already seen what happens
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Although there are a few satellites of a military bent launched from Kennedy Space center, most are west coast launched. Plausible activity "may" cover a recoverable tele-presence unit.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Squirting water in a near-vacuum environment will result in what; either water vapor (instant evaporation) or ice chunks, right?
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Technically, yes it is possible. However, it would require a massive amount of delta-v to rendezvous with a significant number of enemy sats. And, that doesn't provide any reason to make something that can return to earth. You could launch a vehicle capable of your proposed mission on a normal rocket. Also, the enemy would notice that you launched something that is visiting all of their sats. At least, they would know you were doing close-pass espionage runs. They will be monitoring the space near their sats to see if anything is on an intersecting orbit that they need to maneuver away from in order to avoid a collision.
I imagine that there are a bunch of draft proposals floating around the Pentagon with ideas like what you propose. Some probably involve lasers (ground based or bolted onto ISS or something), others involve launching anti-sat weapons as a first strike, some involve predeploying assets in orbit for improved "preparednness." All are probably impractical with current opponents, budgets, and levels of technology.
This is cool..we could send up this bird to pick enemy satellights out of orbit, place them in the cargo bay, and bring them home for inspection. Get the super secret ones so that no one can object...since it never existed in the first place.
Or use the articulating arm to give certain countries the finger as it orbits over head.
Or use it to clean up space junk...like a janitor with a grabber arm
It's a cool way to test out sensor platforms before sending them up permenantly affixed to a cube of batteries and comms equipment.
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. It would beat film canisters....kinda.
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They are doing some testing on the Prompt Global Strike system.
Why would it deploy satellites when it is a satellite itself?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Not only that - "Twinkie defense" just got a whole new meaning with this...
until they get the creme filling based weapons operational... It's gonna look like a giant porn attack!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
... is a sign of U.S. Air Force shedding "don't ask don't tell" policy.
few pounds? a single hand grenade would take out any satellite. Imparting the energy from a single grenade or even a C4 charge will spin it out of control that the bird will never recover from.
you don't have to destroy it, just make it useless.
More importantly, you want it useless in such a way that it doesn't create debris which will then hit your equipment (either next week or next year).
Technically, yes it is possible. However, it would require a massive amount of delta-v to rendezvous with a significant number of enemy sats. And, that doesn't provide any reason to make something that can return to earth. You could launch a vehicle capable of your proposed mission on a normal rocket. Also, the enemy would notice that you launched something that is visiting all of their sats. At least, they would know you were doing close-pass espionage runs. They will be monitoring the space near their sats to see if anything is on an intersecting orbit that they need to maneuver away from in order to avoid a collision.
You don't have to visit all of them in one mission and given the complexity -- why not reuse the vehicle (it would be cheaper). Regarding ground radar, it is not as easy as you think to keep a continual monitor and we probably have the best system there is. The X-37B also has a stealthy shape. The dual rudders is pure F-22. They said it was to fit into the nose of the Atlas for launch -- but it may also reduce radar signature.
No. Delta-v to LEO is between 9.3 and 10 km/s. Orbital velocity at LEO is 7.8 km/s, so to shift from one satellite orbit to another would be almost as expensive as (and possibly more than) sending up a new rocket. I can't imagine the X-37 having a fuel capacity that much in excess of that required to reach LEO. And if that weren't enough to kill ya, the fuel costs of lifting that much more fuel to orbit would be insane (you could go to the moon on that delta-v budget!)
The reason the shuttle is strapped onto the side of its launch stack is because it carries its payload internally. There are only two justifications for the engineering difficulties and operational hazards of this design. One is to have the expensive SSMEs attached to a recoverable part of the vehicle. The other is to give the vehicle the ability to recover payloads from orbit (read: steal enemy spy satellites.) With the end of the shuttle program looming, I'm guessing the Air Force is interested in maintaining that capability. And who knows... maybe they'll be nice and bring back Hubble, too.
Because it may not have a payload attached to it to fulfill it's objectives. It may be cheaper to send a few small satellites up, together, as one bundle, that can be selectively placed on orbit than to send them up separately or with their own orbital maneuvering facilities. Those are just a couple advantages that stem from having a reusable, standard interface for launching. If all you want to do is place a few 5 kg cameras on orbit, there is no sense in bootstrapping a few hundred kgs of maneuvering fuel and machinery on each one to get them there when you have a space plane that they can all hitch a ride with.
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People are coming up with the most ridiculous things when it comes to this spacecraft. None of these exotic purposes require a reusable lander of this shape, or benefit from it. Its aerodynamics don't work for the atmospheric skip maneuver. The landing capability is a hindrance to extreme orbital maneuvering as the wings add to the spacecraft's mass. Anti-satellite missions, stealth etc are much more practical with spacecraft whose shape isn't restricted by aerodynamics. I have no doubt the military is researching these things, but this "spaceplane" isn't it.
The sole possible purpose of glider landing is to bring things down from orbit gently. Given the minuscule size of the X-37b, it's not going to be stealing enemy recon sats any time soon. One of the long term goals for the craft is probably to bring back future miniaturized spy satellites (at end-of-life) to prevent another party from capturing and analyzing them. Launching such satellites with a spaceplane may or may not be useful as well. Generally, launching a spaceplane will only take advantage of its features if the mission brings something back to the ground. Otherwise it's just added complexity and cost.
What all of this means is, the stated purpose of the X-37b is really the only one that makes any sense. It's a vast, huge advantage to the air force to be able to rapidly test space hardware, iterate on the design, and re-test. Normally it takes years if not decades to test fly a new space widget because you have to build a satellite around it. Have a great idea for a new type of maneuvering thruster? You won't fly it until 2020 and the flight will cost $200 million. If anything goes wrong in orbit, you'll never know for sure what exactly happened. But what if you had a standard platform that you could just plug components in? Something that provides you with electricity, a computer to run your controlling software, a method of communicating to the ground, a standard rack to bolt your thing onto. And then it brings your widget back after you're done. Suddenly you can actually beta-test space hardware. It no longer has to be proven to work before the first test (which is where all the time and money goes).
This is going to accelerate the speed of (USAF's) space R&D in a "runaway" fashion and leave everyone else in the dust. It's a radical paradigm shift, far more important and interesting than some silly upper atmosphere maneuvering stunt or something that you can already do with an off-the-shelf missile.
If you wanted to launch an unmanned experiment with return there are incredible number of ways to do that already that don't require an unmanned vehicle and they have been proven out since the 60s. It currently costs on the order of $5000/lb to launch payload to orbit that's a lot of cash to orbit an additional unmanned return vehicle. If you want a quick test and return capsules with parachutes work great and are much cheaper.
Who needs sharks with fricked lasers on their heads when you have ice bullets!
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Yes, but the X-37 is described as being able to remain in orbit for quite a while. Why bring other satellites up when you can just equip it? That way the equipment is even reusable, and leaves less space debris.
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The Megagram, otherwise known as the metric ton.
So it really should be written as 6 tons.
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How about a lump of steel the size of a grenade, with the right velocity relative to the satellite it could hit with more energy than a grenade would ipart on it's own.
A hypersonic grenade otoH....
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You don't need explosives. Just hundred kg or so of ball bearings and enough of a velocity difference so they come in at a few km/sec (and good tracking as well, but we already know how to do that.)
Actually for low orbit satellites, you don't even need an orbital weapon - if your booster can get your "shotgun spread" to the right altitude and location at the right time, the satellite's own velocity does the work for you as it goes thru the cloud.
Satellites aren't armored (and even for military ones it's impractical to do so due to weight considerations.) A few quarter inch ball bearings traveling at a few km/sec impart a lot of kinetic energy when they hit.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Large format film canisters can be brought back with the craft. Thus eliminating the need to jettisoning the canisters from space, floating by parachute, aerial pickup, possibly losing the package for ever or to the "enemy"
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Launch capabilities. Armor is expensive to lift.
Not for a government.
The Iridium satellite is a commercial endeavor, hit by a (defunct?) Russian military satellite.
Military satellites do have armoring to some extent coupled with (limited/unlimited maneuvering?) and refueling capabilities makes them formidable.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.