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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.
...it should be able to remain in orbit indefinitely without deteriorating.
This ain't rocket surgery.
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.
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?
Yet reusables have proven to be the way to go with every other form of transport. Or, to put it another way, it's a really bad idea to draw sweeping universal conclusions based on a first generation system.
Radar Operator: Colonel, you better have a look at this radar.
Colonel: What is it, son?
Radar Operator: I don't know, sir, but it looks like a giant...
Jet Pilot: Dick. Dick, take a look out of starboard.
Co-Pilot: Oh my God, it looks like a huge...
Bird-Watching Woman: Pecker.
Bird-Watching Man: [raising binoculars] Ooh, Where?
Bird-Watching Woman: Over there. What sort of bird is that? Wait, it's not a woodpecker, it looks like someone's...
Army Sergeant: Privates. We have reports of an unidentified flying object. It has a long, smooth shaft, complete with...
Baseball Umpire: Two balls.
[looking up from game]
Baseball Umpire: What is that. It looks just like an enormous...
Chinese Teacher: Wang. pay attention.
Wang: I was distracted by that giant flying...
Musician: Willie.
Willie: Yeah?
Musician: What's that?
Willie: [squints] Well, that looks like a huge...
Colonel: Johnson.
Radar Operator: Yes, sir?
Colonel: Get on the horn to British Intelligence and let them know about this.
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.
X-15 and Dynasoar were first generation reusable.
Shuttle and Buran were second generation.
Yes, reusable have proven to be the way to go, but other forms of transport aren't going 17,500 miles an hour, getting up to 5,000 degrees and going millions of miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-109 - 3.9 million miles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-80 - 7 million miles
That's relevant to the things that electronics can test for. (A very small subset of the things that are tested/inspected on and SSME.) Not to mention that if such things were truly practical (electronics substituting for inspection and/or teardown), commercial aviation would be using it for jet engines.
Not to mention that they haven't removed the engines after every flight for over fifteen years, and haven't rebuilt them every time they're removed for over a decade.
This vehicle's (single flight) test data is roughly meaningless compared to the thirty years of flight experience for the Shuttle itself. Seriously, the Shuttle's problems don't stem from lack of CAD. CAD is just a fancy version of Microsoft Paint - you still need the engineering information behind the design. Without that information it doesn't matter if you use chisels on stone tablets or the latest engineering workstation.
There lies the key problem with the Shuttle, lack of funding, lack of basic technology research, lack of engineering development, and a healthy helping of excess ambition on the part of NASA and successive Congresses and Administrations. The Shuttle went wrong when those three collectively decided not to expand on the groundwork laid by the X-15 and the various lifting body projects in favor of Buck Rogers stunts.
One that wasn't an orbital craft, and one that never flew at all. So, no, they aren't first generation craft in any useful sense.
Ok, so what? The shuttle goes fast and far, doesn't mean there cannot be a reusable orbital craft. Not to mention that 99.99999% of the 'far' is spent in almost no stress drifting around. It's nearly meaningless, even though it sounds impressive to the uneducated.
I was thinking 6,000,000,000 mg myself.
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
Wrong on every count.
There is no 'original' version of the Shuttle - but there were a couple of dozen competing designs and concepts, some of which used ceramic tiles while others used titanium or other exotic metals in the form of shingles. However shingles were not only very (very) expensive and considerably heavier than tiles, the engineering work required to develop the shingles would have been considerably greater. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that the thin shingles and their complex system of attachment to the structure (to deal with both thermal expansion of the tiles and thermal expansion of the structure, ditto with vibration) would have been any cheaper to build or operate than the ceramic tiles.
To the extent that NASA was discouraged from using titanium, that was because of the increasing and projected to further increase demand for titanium by the USAF and USN. In the end the superbombers and deep divers that would have used all that titanium were all cancelled in the late 60's and early 70's because of their expense.
Oh wait, wasn't the Shuttle budget sharply limited at the same time? Shit, it was. So much for your bean counter theory - the whole budget was being sharply trimmed around then. Sorry to introduce another fact showing how even more wrong you are, but I like completeness and accuracy.
Duh, that's exactly what happened. The engineers offered a design and the bean counters (or more correctly the engineers responsible for cost estimation) said "no way Jose", and the rest of the engineers went back to the drawing board.
Well, seeing as you're wrong about the bean counters and the Shuttle, it's only symmetrical that you're wrong about the Saturn being viable. It's one of only two launch systems that make the Shuttle look like a bargain. (The other being the late and unlamented Titan IV.)