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X-37B Found By Amateur Sky Watchers
otter42 writes "It seems that X-37B couldn't stay hidden forever. Launched a few weeks ago, The Flying Twinkie disappeared shortly after separation. Now it has been found in an orbit that takes it as far north as 40 degrees latitude. No additional information has been found about the spacecraft's capabilities or purpose, except for a US Air Force statement that the satellite has no space-weapons purpose. The X-37B is intended to fly for 9 months at a time, opening the door to possible space longevity experiments in addition to its spying tasks."
It might not have space weapons, but it's cloaking device sure failed.
"in addition to its spying tasks." What tasks are these? Please elaborate, for the sake of accuracy of course.
"I find it amazing they've created a spaceship that can stay up in the sky for up to 9 months at a time."
Really? There are craft up there that will stay thousands of years.
And most of them are powered by solar arrays (though that's not what's keeping them up there)
Really? There are craft up there that will stay thousands of years.
That's like saying we shouldn't be impressed by subs being underwater for months because of all those shipwrecks doing it for centuries.
I find it amazing they've created a spaceship that can stay up in the sky for up to 9 months at a time.
How's that? There are no humans to feed or otherwise keep comfortable and alive. Small craft, electronics for spying, stable orbit. Sounds like it could stay up longer if needed.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
It isn't using solar panels for propulsion. It needs hardly any propulsion, once it's in orbit, since it will naturally tend to stay in its orbit, "flying" by its own momentum (though it will use a bit to counteract the tiny atmospheric resistance that exists even at that altitude). The panels allow it to go on long missions not by keeping it in the sky, but by giving it power to run its computers, comms, and its payload, assuming the payload uses electricity. This avoids the expense of launching very large batteries.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Does this spacecraft look like a satellite to you?
My blog
Forgot to mention that the ISS has been continually powered by solar panels since 1998.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
When it won't carry people, and has no more the cargo capacity of a pickup truck?
Not really - put a space craft into the correct orbit and it will stay there until its systems fail. Longevity is not really a new thing introduced by the X-37B, its been a staple of geostationary satellites for decades.
though it will use a bit to counteract the tiny atmospheric resistance that exists even at that altitude
I'd say that it probably doesn't have to use any fuel for that. The ISS is at a similar altitude, and it is boosted to a higher altitude a few times a year, but the ISS is intended to stay in orbit for a long time. Since the X-37B is only intended to stay up for nine months, it is possible that it does not need any boosting. Besides, it is also possible that it can minimize the drag by using a certain attitude profile, such as pointing the nose forwards. If horizontal w.r.t. the ground (inverted or not), it might even be able to use its wings to counteract the aerodynamic resistance, like a glider.
But this thing is a very low earth orbit sattellite. It has a very fast shifting orbit, and it has much more athmospheric drag (though, granted, still not all that much). The orbit is "close" (certainly in space terms), low-latency, but a bit of a bitch to navigate in.
If we could deploy 100 of these quickly and cheaply we could have fast broadband with tiny latencies everywhere on the planet, from New York to Antarctica (worst case you'd need a roof antenna, and given performance of iridium handsets that's not necessary except in highrises in city centers). Since you have clear line of sight to just about any location on the planet, very high bandwidth applications are within the realm of possibility. Inter-satellite links can use the exact same technology used on fibers (except for the need to aim them), and thus COTS components will get you an inter-sattellite bandwith of 160 Gbit per transmitter, with no real limits on the number of transmitters.
This is the one technology that truly has the potential of getting high-bandwidth links into outlying rural areas.
LEO and this type of technology could be the future of the internet. Unstoppable, unfilterable, available anywhere and anytime (because of the possibility of having extreme directionality in the tranceivers, the only real option you have is taking out the satellite, you can't even find who's using this internet connection. Iran and other countries' censorship would be thoroughly fucked), usable with cola can sized devices costing $150 able to link up to playboy online right under the nose of Ahmadinejad. Able to tell any Chinese what happened at Tiananmen, and provide that same porn to increase the customer base.
An all-wireless internet is not "the future" no matter how many times the "omg it has noe wiers!!!1" crowd say it is.
Show me a stable 10 Gbps transatlantic connection using satellites that requires little to no maintenance and which doesn't risk randomly interfering with other links (or being interfered with by other links) and I'll believe it's getting close. Until then fiber is still king no matter how much some people scream about "wireless!!1" like it's the second coming of christ.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
But this thing is a very low earth orbit sattellite. It has a very fast shifting orbit, and it has much more athmospheric drag (though, granted, still not all that much). The orbit is "close" (certainly in space terms), low-latency, but a bit of a bitch to navigate in.
The International Space Station has a standard orbit of between 181 miles and 189 miles and only needs a boost a few times a year, while the X-37B was spotted at 255 miles up where the atmopshere is significantly thinner - 9 month longevity should not be hard to achieve, especially as the X-37B includes the ability to boost its orbit.
There is a point at which bandwidth becomes pointless. If you have a low latency system that has enough bandwidth to display HD videos for example, you no longer need to download movies, you can just watch them. The same can be applied to your entire computer desktop. Of course resolutions will be increasing and so on but so will the technologies.
That system might not be here yet, but it will be eventually. I doubt it will be in orbit due to the latency (even low latency is too much), but radio travels as fast as fiber and lasers are wireless too and won't interfere. Actually an advanced system of lasers might work much better than fiber, you don't have to lay the cables and you can just keep adding beams and receptors, just need a simple deployable system, like wifi except with multiple lasers that automatically locate receptors in range (maybe with some 2ndary radio system for the general direction) and aim a beam towards them.
In addition to that, there are many low bandwidth/low latency applications. Imagine giving all the villages/people in Africa cheap solar $5 OLPC style computers with built in internet access without needing a hub, server or whatever. They might not be able to do anything more than basic web browsing but that would be a huge revolution. They dropped a computer into an Indian village, came back a few months later and all the children now spoke English.
cat
"How's that? There are no humans to feed or otherwise keep comfortable and alive. Small craft, electronics for spying, stable orbit. Sounds like it could stay up longer if needed."
Yet another demonstration of why remote-manned space systems offer far greater ROI than carrying expensive tourists.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It does take some fuel to maintain an attitude, and using wings to generate lift also increases drag, so that doesn't really work out so well. The ISS's orbit is boosted by its main engines or by a docked spacecraft. Fortunately, it doesn't take much acceleration to maintain the low Earth orbit that these things live in, so a little bit of fuel can go a long way, but it does take some.
Shuttle can have only short mission because it depends on fuel cells simply for powering ("keeping alive", up there) its systems; actually, it has a possibility to "steal" this power from ISS and prolong it's mission...a bit.
But several months alone is nowhere near impressive. Almost every damn spacecraft did at least that, "spacecraft"/"spaceship" not being somehow more real if it looks like the popular depiction of "spaceplane" - the latter (and hence X-37B) are actually very poor all around "real spaceships". Built primarily with atmospheric phase of the flight in mind; which might make sense for military LEO vehicle, and not much else.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Gliders don't use their wings to counteract the aerodynamic resistance, quite the contrary (somewhat; directed in a specific way). Fall all the time, and are way below the Karman line.
One that hath name thou can not otter
What? Somebody still believes the fairytale that satellite access can be better & cheaper (and less wasteful...) from cables and cellular towers? O_o
In case you didn't notice, the business plan for Iridium was:
- go in deep debt building ridiculously overpriced communication network, valuable to few customers with much influence (military)
- go bankrupt
- debts dissapear
- rely on profits from said customers with much influence
Plus Iridium orbit is not much higher than this thing does now; 100 vs 70 satelllites also doesn't make much difference.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Hello....this is the government, do you really expect them to give the real data on orbital longevity? Duh.
This platform is nothing more than a RCS fuel tank with interchangeable payload bay. Highly maneuverable, more so than the permanent spy satellites. As for being weaponless, return to base, change out the payload, relaunch, target, boom.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I see, so instead of simply lying fiber and dealing with last mile how is appropriate for given area...you would like to see "wireless fiber", with lasers travelling through the air (coordinated in some magical way between moving users (going inside is useless, everybody can get used to little rain, snow and cold) and satellites), and all this at nice a cost of, say, trillions of dollars.
So we can transmit one HD video.
One that hath name thou can not otter
But that would not make it more "real spaceship"; just another contribution to the immense waste of US defense (nice newspeak) industry.
And it makes space warfare nowhere near practical. Weaponising LEO is moronic. At first sight of it, any entity which thinks it can "lose" will simply launch few dumb rockets with millions of ball bearings, triggering Kessler syndrome.
One that hath name thou can not otter
So they're saying the benefits of the mission, which "probably centers at least partly on testing" sensors , aren't worth the cost. They don't have a clue what the mission is or it's benefits, how can they possibly say it's not worth it?
Even if you ignore all other possibilities for the mission and it's just for testing sensors, they have no idea what kind of sensors are being tested. What do they detect? Nuclear weapons? Underground gold and oil deposits? Are they just testing better cameras or perfecting Smell-o-vision? Some sensors might be more than worth the cost.
This sentence no verb.
It seems like they could be though - solar panels could generate lift via a tether.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I'm afraid that save for arming it with a nuke, it would be a terrible waste of money. Anything else can be deployed from the surface for much less $$$.
Ezekiel 23:20
They don't want the warranty to expire.
Sshyeah. All you'd need is some way around weather patterns and LOS issues. Maybe you could set up some towers and fire the lasers through a glass medium so that they're undisturbed by local weather conditions....
But seriously, I'm on wireless and it's got a looooonnnggggg ways to go before replacing wires and fiber.
Forgot to mention that the ISS has been continually powered by solar panels since 1998.
The propulsion is not solar powered. On GOCE of the other hand, it is. It is only 270 km (170 mi) up where the atmosphere is relatively thick and it will stay up for 20 months.
Spacecraft without human pilots aren't good PR.
"Look what we did, we sent these guys to ...." is a much bigger sensation than "Look at the chunk of metal we sent up."
From the PR standpoint, the ISS is a big deal, because there are people on it. There's little interest in the almost 1,000 operational satellites floating around above us.
No one would care if Glonass 712 fell out of orbit. It would make a blurb on the news, and that would be the end of it. Now, if the ISS were to suddenly and uncontrollably deorbit, that would be international news for months or years.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
> “If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”
True for some of our adversaries, but not all. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a big hubbub in DC when a web site or two went up to track our spy satellite launches. Pre-internet, it was generally just a few big governments who had the resources to track them. But with the amateur community helping, suddenly anyone with a web browser could get some idea of when satellite coverage would be available for a given area. This is one of a very few areas of government operations where I tend to favor secrecy. Not for the money spent--knowing within an order of magnitude how much we're spending on a massive defense program is important if we are to retain any civilian control over the military-industrial complex--but for the actual launches and orbits.
We compromise intelligence assets when we do anything else, and that can mean our leaders are making decision with even worse information. Those decisions cost lives.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Yeah, yeah, you will always have the rights & means to shutdown any rocket launch, heh...
You underestimate what millions of objects on erratic orbits would do. And it doeasn't have to be strictly metal ball bearings...or not ball bearing at all. Might as well be some fairly undetectable material, it doesn't matter - at those impact speeds, mass is the only thing that matters, any solid matter behaving like liquid anyway. Well, and this one type of spacecraft might have a chance at escaping, sometimes, quickly wasting practically all its fuel to do so; well, mission accomplished.
Fuck yeah, America!
One that hath name thou can not otter
The Prompt Global Strike, a prototype that can hit any target around the world in less than an hour, was also launched the same day.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7106714.ece
Have they found that yet?
It's a Bagel.
Golden Hard Vacuum Resistant Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling
r. this thing has large engines to move from leo to meo if it needs to.
That's an understatement.
With a delta-v of 3.3, this thing can go to the moon, if needed. (Won't come back, though).
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Of course, if the public knew, they'd find out about Cheyenne Mountain too.
You do realise transatlantic and transpacific cable have basically the same business model, right ? They've gone broke at least 5 times in the last 10 years or so.
Besides, even intra-US fiber is not exactly a goldmine of profits for their owners.
it would be a terrible waste of money.
When has the government been known to do anything economically? Remember, an elephant is a mouse with government design specifications.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
They are breeding satellites to save on launch costs. Just raise the new satellite babies in orbit. Only the female sats need to stay aloft for 9 months though....
Given that Iridium phones operate perfectly well in a snow storm ... what weather conditions are so very detrimental to LEO communication if I may ask ?
We're talking extremely directional communication with only tiny amounts of interference very close to one of the tranceivers (ie. the one on the ground). This is not a hard problem.
The hard problem in wireless transmission is obstacles "mid-flight" (so to speak). Because the earth is round, and thus there is a "mountain" between any two points anywhere on the planet, and that the highest point of this mountain tends to be ... smack in the middle (the exact place you can do the most damage to a signal).
Fortunately we're not in avatar and there are no mountains floating miles above the surface, so once you clear buildings you have a clear shot to any satellite floating above.
And since athmospheric drag in LEO is not zero, there is hardly any space debris to destroy satellites. The only potential (realistic) colissinos are with other satellite constellations, and therefore by definition any satellite in LEO has a working propulsion system (or it would not be able to resist athmospheric drag).
Those are at mosy problems with weird implementations. Backbone where I live doesn't seem to have many; besides, does it need to be a "goldmine" to be insanely more viable from satellites?...
Transatlantic and transpacific cables give very tangible benefits for their cost, and could be rerouted through hardly any deep ocean to speak of; heck, "transpacific" one needing in practice not much more than 100km of underwater cable.
One that hath name thou can not otter
i thinks you're missing the point... 9 months really IS a feat of longevity, considering that the on-board astronaut has no outhouse! thanks fer lis'nin' seekertom