Slashdot Mirror
X-37B Secret Space Plane To Land Soon
Phoghat writes "The highly classified X-37B Space Plane is scheduled to land soon. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on April 22 atop an Atlas 5 rocket, and the Air Force is still being very secretive on all aspects of the flight. We do know that it's set to touch down at Vandenberg Air Force Base's 15,000-foot runway, originally built for the Space Shuttle program. In many ways, the craft resembles a Shuttle with stubby wings, landing gear and a powerful engine that allows the craft to alter its orbit (much to the dismay of many observers on the ground). Its success has apparently given new life to its predecessor, the X-34, which had been mothballed."
Highly classified spaceship carrying highly classified cargo returns to earth semi-unclassifiedly. Slow news day on /.
You mean it's been in the air for seven months?
#DeleteChrome
Yes I notice the first few comments are retarded jokes. How about a serious reality check instead?
These warmongering black budget toys that the common taxpayer funds and has no say-so in need to be completely eradicated from the face of the Earth. There's a secrative corporate cabal operating within the government that is abobe the federal government and the united states congress and president, that answers to absolutely no one and uses your tax dollars to fund whatever they wish; mostly warmongering toys that perpetuate our neverending wars. Yes, you pay for all of this without ever having the privlidge to know what they are doing with your money nor do you have any say so in how the money is spent. This is all done under the farce of of "national security". Fuck the military industrial complex and these corporate cabals. It's time for the American people to wake up and stop being pussified by the CIA propaganda that is terrorism. If you would like to know who the real "terrorists" are, please kindly watch the 2 minute video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XpXpl8uzFk&feature=player_embedded
Yes, the United States of America are the terrorists, lead by secret societies that go back far before babylon.
I wonder if there is some subtle psychological reasoning behind painting the NASA X-34 white and the military X-37B a shining Darth Vader helmet black....
At first I thought, "oh, to make it harder to see with a telescope," but then I RTFA and noticed that amateur astronomers have been tracking the thing in orbit, so I guess the paint job is just to make it look cool. Really, though, if I were in charge of a super secret space plane, I'd want it to look cool, too.
Black surfaces radiate more heat than other surfaces so it is better for a heat shield to be black.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Sorry but what do you mean black? Only the bottom looks black to me. It looks like almost the same colors as the shuttle. A lot of the colors are for thermal management and some because that is the color of the material. Almost none of it is "paint" except for some of the id stuff.
paint doesn't tend to do well at those temps.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Try reading before posting next time....
From your answer:
Emmisivity, or the ability of a black body to radiate or re-radiate in some cases, is highly dependent on many variables. Try re-asking the question.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Thank God you didn't forget to post the above message as an "Anonymous Coward"!
I shiver to think what your punishment would be from the "secrative" cabal that goes back far before Babylon.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
That somebody will explain how our superiority in the highly competitive black-ops space-plane carrying mystery cargo arena will eventually be converted into a solution for the fact that we can't seem to fight a ground war against a 14th century tribal rabble armed with 1950's eastern bloc shit without getting our stuff blown up all the time...
You might find this surprising, but most military powers find it difficult to fight wars without getting their stuff blown up all the time. I think it has something to do with the presence of a "foe".
These space planes were developed largely in response to fears that the NASA space shuttle program would be cancelled as a result of the Challenger incident in 1986. Further problems with Columbia forced the Air Force to pick up the pace and sealed the fate of the remaining space shuttle program.
My blog
I suspect it would still be cheaper to design the satellites for a shorter life span and keep launching them into different orbits.
Consider the advantage of maneuverability in a hostile (as in being shot at) environment, or in a situation where the geographical points of interest keep changing, or changing the time required to orbit so that someone on the ground can not predict an overflight very easily. The X-37 may carry more fuel, or have engines offering greater delta-v, than a satellite.
which part of you got offended the most? The 49 yo, the grandmother, the feminist or the c programmer? I'm thinkin 20 years of programming is going to make anyone a bit touchy.
I would suspect it's the "49 years old" ... no woman likes to admit they're about to hit the big 5-0, and many of us stay 39 years old well into our 50s just like most guys suddenly have a second childhood, complete with sports car and 20-something girlfriend, around that age. Neither sex is immune to denial :-)
It can't be the 20 years of c programming, because I'm in the same situation - you generally don't stay a coder that long unless you enjoy it.
And it certainly shouldn't be feminists, because feminists nowadays recognize that we don't all have to be pant-suit-wearing, bra-burning, man-hating asexual clones.
And it can't be the "grandmother" thing ... unless you're granny and you
re afraid that your relatives want to stick granny into one of these and fire you into orbit for 9 months without life support. We all probably have one relative who, in our darker moments, we like to imagine might "benefit" from such treatment, but we don't REALLY wish that on anyone.
No, I'd guess it's the age thing.
-- Barbie
we can't seem to fight a ground war against a 14th century tribal rabble armed with 1950's eastern bloc shit without getting our stuff blown up all the time...
Because for some reason we insist on not using 14th century tactics, which would be roughly "kill them all, God will know his own" (actually, 13th century). If we didn't care about non-combatant casualties it'd be over in a week.
-- Alastair
The X-37 proved they could have a shuttle successor without the cost, politics and without Orrin hatch telling them what they had to buy.
Why don't you pull your head out of your ass? Is there some reason that you seem to walk around with a permanent fucking erection for yourself? Is your shit that fucking radioactive hot? Is your wife a fucking super model or something? Jesus. It's people like you that make me think that there is a purpose for torture, because I'd like to see you naked and blindfolded with a fucking battery charger clipped to your cock, in a dark room shackled to the fucking floor.
Wow. Just ... wow.
Hey everybody - Dick Cheney posts on slashdot!
Tom:
Tell your woman to get her own damned Slashdot account.
That is all.
Do the math, and you know that the only countries with enough people to actually be able to raise up a large enough army to win a ground war in Afghanistan (pop. 30 million) or Iraq (pop. 31 million) are China or India, and that neither has anywhere near enough trained soldiers to even think about it.
Even Russia, #1 with 21 million troops, couldn't do it.
Today, it's limited to "Go in, do the job (and make sure you have a clear-cut definition of "the job"), declare victory, and get the heck out." Trying to hold on or succumb to mission creep just gets you stuck in a never-ending morass. Same as Afghanistan was to the Russians, Viet Nam to the US, etc.
The direction of that fall is mainly controlled by the forward motion of the craft and the centrifugal effect by that speed allows it to stay in orbit above the atmosphere.
So once you start breaking this forward speed, usually by firing rockets, the gravity starts to win from the centrifugal force and the craft starts to come down.
When you brake carefully the craft will slowly enter the atmosphere and now be slowed down when encountering the high altitude atmosphere, the problem is the speed at that time is still extremely high causing a lot of friction heat.
Would you brake hard with the rockets the craft would fall out of orbit much quicker and enter the denser parts of our atmosphere much sooner causing extreme friction braking and heat, basically the craft would burn up like a meteorite.
So the trick is to brake in a sensible way and have a craft that can withstand the inevitable friction heat long enough to slow down and enter navigable levels of the atmosphere where the wings can take over.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Black items will ABSORB more light. When light (i.e. the energy contained in a photon) is absorbed by a molecule, there are a certain number of likely fates for this energy. Remember, 'what goes up, must come down'
Yes, remember that. Black items will absorb more light, and also radiate exactly that much more heat.
The perfect absorber is also the perfect transmitter. Anything else would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, and we can't go around breaking them laws, now can we?
Ummmm. no. We could win a war against Afghanistan without putting one person on the group. We could bomb a country like that until not a structure stayed standing and the few who lived would be reduced to living in caves and living off of grass.
We somehow today equate winning a war with winning over the people and making them love us.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We could win a war against Afghanistan without putting one person on the group. We could bomb a country like that until not a structure stayed standing and the few who lived would be reduced to living in caves and living off of grass
And they would still be trying to kill you whenever they could.
We somehow today equate winning a war with winning over the people and making them love us.
I thought you invaded Afghanistan to capture bin Laden, and bring democracy and human rights to the people there? Or is this one of those 'we had to kill the people in order to save them' things?
That's the scary thing. It could have been literally anyone! The conspiracy runs so deep that there barely are any ordinary Americans left. We are all government agents now.
You are one of the tiny handful who are not yet part of the conspiracy. There can't be more than a few hundred of you left, and we are brainwashing you at a rate of about three a month. I wonder if you will manage to uncover the true secret of our ancient mysteries before we discover your identity?
We somehow today equate winning a war with winning over the people and making them love us.
Well, isn't that the point? I mean, why are we in Afghanistan? Because many of the people there hated us and blew up some buildings. So we decided to kill a bunch of the people who hate us and leave only the people who love us, and make them love us more because we've invaded their country.
(I have to admit, it does sound pretty stupid when you put it like that.)
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Explain the Soviet Union's sojourn in the deserts of Afghanistan, then. They didn't seem to have a problem with civilian casualties.
The answer to the grandparent is that military force can't create a particular civil society. It can sure as fuck destroy a particular civil society, but getting the populace to actually vote the way you want them to isn't easily done by bayonet, unless the bayonet is right there, pointing at them.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Yes, remember that. Black items will absorb more light, and also radiate exactly that much more heat.
Yeah but for a heat shield some heat comes from conduction and that is the same regardless of the albedo of the surface.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I was looking at the photos and was thinking about the wing size. "That's because they fly very fast because they re-enter the asmosphere really fast." But then I thought "why do they need to re-enter that fast? Surely they could use the atmosphere to slow themselves down, and enter at a much slower, cooler and more relaxed pace." Then I thought "well maybe the gravity has a fair amount of time to act on the craft before the atmosphere really begins, therefore giving plenty of opportunity for speed, well before a viable way to slow down"
Am I right? Does someone have a better explaination?
Here's a link with the basics: Nasa's Landing 101
When the shuttle de-orbits, it fires it's engines in the opposite direction to it's orbit's travel to slow it's forward velocity, which is several magnitudes faster than ground speed (17239.2MPH for the ISS). At this point, the shuttle's inertia stops counteracting the pull of gravity, and the shuttle starts "Falling", like swinging a bucket full of water around on a string, then slowing down the rotation.
Given that there is no atmosphere at this height, the shuttle can accelerate (at 9.81m/s^2) to speeds well in excess of "terminal velocity" as there is no drag to slow it. It typically hits the atmosphere (80 miles up) after 30 minutes of freefall, travelling at speeds of at least twice the speed of sound.
The orbiter then uses it's aerodynamic profile to control its descent, making a series of sharply banking turns to brake it's speed as it descends through the atmosphere, the friction of the air moving against the underside of the orbiter heating the heatproof ceramic tiles up to white hot.
So, here's the answer to you question is "Because gravity has been pulling them down for half an hour before they even hit the atmosphere". In theory, they could use retro thrusters to brake their descent before they hit the atmosphere (Like the Apollo missions did with their lunar landers), but as that would take immense amounts of fuel (close to that required for blast-off) it would make the orbiter's payload capacity virtually nil. Therefore it is easier for them to take the descent into the atmosphere with the best high-speed aerodynamics they can, using the friction of wind resistance to slough off the excess speed, trading it for heat that can be dealt with as they aerodynamically slow their descent and approach the ground at a safe speed.
Except the people who blew up the buildings were mostly Saudis. None of them were Afghanis. The Taliban provided shelter to Osama Bin Laden, who was a member of one of the most powerful Saudi families. We supposedly went in to get Bin Laden - who is still supposedly on the loose, despite being on dialysis. Most likely, he died of kidney failure long ago. So why are we still there?
Not in this house, Lisa
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
In fact...
A new University of Georgia study has found that despite overwhelming military superiority, the world's most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II.
39% hardly equates to *most*.
Everyone knows that BLACK is like the coolest color EVAR.
And space is like very cool. And black.
And that is why they paint the cool stuff like the supersecret space plane black - so it would be even more cool.
Like in space cool.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Except the British in (what was then) Malaya managed it against a force of communist insurgents and they didn't have 4 x the population of the country. Malaysia (as it is now) is now one of the most developed, peaceful and stable Asian countries - a testament to so many people there striving hard for peace. Other advantages: a reasonably respected 'prime minister' and population who bought into the idea that independence had to wait (over a decade) until the insurgents were defeated and potential communist recruits / supporters being looked after instead of massacred (with one possible exception).
Proviso: I say British, but the force that countered the insurgents was composed of Malayans, British, Gurkhas, Indians, New Zealanders and Fijians (possibly others too). The UK masterminded most of the plan. In case any reader is curious, the method was to consider it a police action - ie, really led by police intelligence working with civilians. The military was brought in only when killing was going to happen.
It's worth reading about as it's one of the few times that insurgents have been soundly defeated and a stable country left behind once the military have left.
bang goes my karma... again...
The emissivity of a material (usually written or e) is the relative ability of its surface to emit energy by radiation. It is the ratio of energy radiated by a particular material to energy radiated by a black body at the same temperature. A true black body would have an = 1 while any real object would have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I've seen interesting comparisons between Germany/Japan and Afghanistan/Iraq by historians, and they make the point a little more bluntly than you do: Germany and Japan were beaten in war, which is to say the entire country went to war and lost, so the victor rebuilding the country in a friendly fashion was, not a right so much as about what a defeated enemy expected. The population absorbed the psychic shock of losing, of being on the wrong side, and so were receptive to pretty much whatever happened afterwards.
Not so in Afghanistan and Iraq, where 1) there was little popular identification with the regime in charge, and 2) individuals felt little personal loss when Coalition forces toppled the government in a surgical way. The populace never felt beaten. They never felt like they simply had to accept the replacement government, and judged it in the same way they judged the previous regime: Something outside their personal lives that had to be dealt with, either with acquiescence or insurgency or some straddling of the two options.
The upshot of this analysis is that it simply wasn't possible to execute "regime change" in Iraq and Afghanistan because the population was never going to be receptive to an American government. Government-by-forceful-imposition is doomed to fail.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Ughhh. Wrong. White paints can rival some of te darkest paints for high emissivity. The critical issue is the alpha to epsilon ratio, or the ratio of absorption to emission. I do this for a living...the black is likely used to minimize reflection. In other words, to remain optically stealthy. That's it. Heck, regular white appliance epoxy comes close to .94 emissivity with only around .20 absorptivity. It's gleaming white, and comes close to fancy black coatings by Lockheed or others. The difference? I can see the mission from 300 miles away after launch with a small celestron telescope with no problem...just look for the large flash. If it were black, I doubt I'd ever find it downrange. Nothing fancy or mysterious about hwy they are doing this. The last thing they want is a mission making Iridium-like flashes all over the place. It's a significant part of the design for a lot of these satellites.
So the broke-ass, deficit-obsessed USA cannot afford to keep the Space Shuttle or any other NASA launch programme in operation for science, but no problem funding an even better shuttle for the CIA/NSA. Because those spooks are doing such a great job protecting us from the Qaeda and copycats, protecting our allies from N Korean bombing, protecting the world from Iranian nuke programmes...
--
make install -not war
It's about +3.5 average (2.2 - 4.5) magnitude. It's orbital inclination is 40 degrees making it visible in the twilight sky when conditions are right anywhere between about 45N and 45S latitudes. It's orbital altitude is getting lower and it is maneuvering, both of which make predictions of where to look less precise, but http://www.heavens-above.com has predictions. It travels west to east.
The question is a valid one, despite all the ridicule that is being heaped
on the parent. Why exactly don't we do low-speed, low-friction
reentries by using the upper atmosphere's low-density layers for slow
braking?
Slow reentry is a thing that has been seriously considered for a long time:
Just slowly drop down in increasingly dense air, use the increasing lift you
can get there to stay aloft, and wait. After a while, the spacecraft will be
low and slow enough to land, with much less stress on crew and equipment,
and without needing any fancy thermal protection shield.
And that's one of the problems: if your spacecraft has no thermal shield, this is
the only reentry mode possible. Emergency aborts from orbit? No can do.
So for manned missions, you better bring a heat shield just in case. And if you
already bring it, why not just use it? It's faster, easier, and more predictable:
The low-drag reentry trajectory and duration is dependent on the quite
variable conditions in the very high parts of the atmosphere. It would be
impossible to determine an exact flight path - and the point at which the
spacecraft is slow enough to "just drop" - in advance, up to not even
knowing on which continent the landing will have to happen.
Slow reentry is still a very alluing thing (this flaming reentry thing is just
so archaic, right?), that's why there are always a handful of people working
on it. At the moment, those are mostly Japanese as far as I know. There's even
a proposal for a JAXA project for an experiment with paper planes
as proof-of-concept.
Slow reentry might eventually become the thing to do, but we'll need a
lot more confidence in our spacecraft (no need for quick aborts) and
much more detailed real-time knowledge about atmospheric conditions
at the edge of space to make it practically viable.