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."

Comments

Re:Launched April 22?

[Aqualung812]

You mean it's been in the air for seven months?

Yup, that's the cool part of it. Imagine the possibilities for an orbiter that is fully automated, can change orbit, and return to Earth & be refueled. Put a nice camera on that & you have a spy sat that can't be tracked easily. You might even be able to put a weapon on that since it can be reloaded.

Thank God

[cbraescu1]

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.

Re:I, for one, have childlike faith...

[khallow]

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".

What does the military see in the X-34

[voss]

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.

Re:What does the military see in the X-34

[FatLittleMonkey]

I thought rods from god was a good idea until I did the calculations... turns out dropping a 16-ton weight at 4km/sec is the same as about 30 tons of TNT.

Except it's not the same. The number of Joules released may be the same, but the TNT is an explosion, the rods-from-god is a bullet. Different game. Even a shape-charge can't put all it's energy into one tiny area.

(15 years or so ago there was a small iron-meteorite impact near here, size of a golf-ball, hit a swampy area, penetrated a metre of water and sludge and a couple of metres of solid rock. Probably had the E(k) of a hand-grenade. Hell of a different outcome though.)

Re:Black and White

[tomhudson]

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!

Re:Can anyone tell me?

[Teun]

Space (vacuum) + earth's gravity cause a free-fall.

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.

Re:Black and White

[arth1]

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?

Re:flamebait?

[Haeleth]

i wonder which government agent modded this down?

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?

Re:I, for one, have childlike faith...

[guyminuslife]

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.)