X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "The secretive X-37B robotic space plane has returned to Earth after a seven-month mission. This was the vehicle's first flight. Looking like a cross between a Predator Drone and the Space Shuttle, it landed at Vandenberg AFB in California, which was to have been the military's shuttle launch facility. Speculation is that the X-37B is an orbital spy platform."

Comments

Mmmm... Secrets.

[Nefarious Wheel]

http://www.universetoday.com/75537/secret-x-37b-space-plane-disappears-again/

More pics here:

[molo]

http://www.universetoday.com/81224/gallery-x-37b-space-plane-returns-to-earth/

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/photos-x-37b-robot-space-plane-landing-101203.html

-molo

Spy plane makes no sense

[jollyreaper]

One of the big "it's not as logical as you'd think" headslappers of the space age is that the cost of launch dwarfs the cost of hardware. The space shuttle made a whole lot of sense with the idea of repairing satellites in space until you realized that with launch costs what they were, it was cheaper to sent up a new sat than fix an old one. The Hubble remains a very special case and I'm sure some people could make a case that it would have been cheaper to build and launch a series of Hubbles with incremental improvements on the usual $100 million a launch expendable vehicles than service it with $500 million a launch shuttles.

Aaaanyway, the only useful mission that fits this flight profile is as a crew transfer vehicle. If it's just a spy sat, why bring it back? Back in the early days the spy sats actually took film and the cannisters were dropped down from orbit. Specially-equipped C-130's had to catch the cannisters before they went in the drink. A flyback cannister could make sense but the sats started beaming back their data yonks ago. The only thing I can think of is if they're trying to test out hardware and need to put the old eyeball on it directly to see how it's fared in space. But we've been doing a pretty good job designing sats without that kind of inspection for a long time. Color me stumped.

Re:Spy plane makes no sense

[FTL]

I agree completely that the X-37 makes no apparent sense. The only argument I can come up with is that returning is just a nice side effect of its real purpose: inclination changes. Chaning altitude and period and phase is all relatively easy with onboard thrusters (and X-37 has an orbital maneuvering engine almost as big as the Space Shuttle's). But the amount of thurst needed to change oribal inclination from, say equatorial to ISS, is vast. I calculated it recently as being equivalent to the delta-v provided by an earth to LEO launch.

What X-37 might be capable of is dipping into the atmosphere, banking, then thrusting back up to orbit. That's exactly what the Air Force's previous space plane was designed to do, the Dyna-soar. Once one has this capability, returning from orbit to a runway landing is a freebie since you already have the wings.

The recently concluded X-37 test flight did not show an inclination change. But look for it on a future flight. This would allow extreme flexability in imaging enemy action at completely unpredictable times.

Re:Spy plane makes no sense

[offrdbandit]

This project can be summed up quite simply: the military will not allow the future of the US space program to be at the mercy of a fickle political atmosphere.

Re:Spy plane makes no sense

[DerekLyons]

One of the big "it's not as logical as you'd think" headslappers of the space age is that the cost of launch dwarfs the cost of hardware.

Well, no. Except for fairly simple payloads, and payloads like comsats that are built more-or-less on an assembly line basis, the cost of hardware is generally on par with or dwarfs the cost of launches. That's one of the big reasons there's been no particular reason to drive down launch costs. (The extraordinarily low demand being another.)
 

The space shuttle made a whole lot of sense with the idea of repairing satellites in space until you realized that with launch costs what they were, it was cheaper to sent up a new sat than fix an old one.

Well, no, not entirely. The idea was that you economize on your expensive hardware by repairing it with cheap launches - then two things happened that broke that paradigm.
 
First, the Shuttle turned out to be nowhere as cheap as it was thought it might be. Partly because they built it and they didn't come, partly because they couldn't reach the planned flight rates. (Even when they offered subsidized launches, they didn't come.) The latter was/is particularly ruinous because the bulk of the Shuttle programs costs are fixed costs which are incurred regardless of how many times it flies, meaning they were amortized over fewer flights.
 
Second, the digital revolution happened. Technology, and hence capacity and performance, was/is evolving at such a rate that it made less and less economic sense to repair/refurbish existing satellites on orbit. (And the decreasing size, weight, and electrical demand of the electronics meant it was easier to provide redundancy and space capacity.)
 

The Hubble remains a very special case and I'm sure some people could make a case that it would have been cheaper to build and launch a series of Hubbles with incremental improvements on the usual $100 million a launch expendable vehicles than service it with $500 million a launch shuttles.

The problem with that case is that it relies on a whole raft of hidden and questionable assumptions. Like finding a $100 million launcher to launch it on. (There isn't one.) Like relying on Congress to steadily fund a stream of replacements when the old one(s) were still working. (And Congress isn't really too unusual in this respect, it's almost always easier to get money to keep something running than it is to start something new.) Etc... etc...

Re:Spy plane makes no sense

[drolli]

I think it does. If you have special hardware for special observations its better to have a flexible platform. 40 years ago you knew where the spy sattelite should be in the next 20 years (soviet union), what it should do (listen to soviet communications and take photos of bases/harbors), and how that would roughly work (no, the soviet union would not swap their whole communication systems withing a few years).

Nowadays, who knows which country makes the biggest problem in five years, who knows what needs to be done there (listen to GSM networks, listen to military communications, take high-res photos, etc.). And you can always pack the newest hardware. Having a flexible platform makes sense.

Re:Spy plane makes no sense

[vertinox]

Color me stumped.

No. The answer is obvious.

This shuttle vehicle is designed to retrieve satellites deemed too risky to fall back to earth in any shape or form.

Also... It has the ability to retrieve foreign satellites. This is more of a chilling effect as they seem to want everyone to know they have this ability so before Russia or China decided to send up anything of note in the spy department that they will have to be aware that the Americans can pull it down to find out what makes it tick.

It makes sense this thing is unmanned as such satellites have been known to be able to self destruct if it is believed to be falling back to earth anyways.

Post-landing videos and photos

[FleaPlus]

A neat video from a thermal camera showing the X-37B immediately after landing, while taxiing down the runway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTxMbda-j4Q

There's also a bunch of post-landing photos at the Air Force Space Command's Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=265891&id=78118717073&l=f24f107baa

Re:And no manned shuttle...

[Penguinshit]

It's a test bed for a reusable satellite. Make a stock platform which you can de-orbit and upgrade every few years instead of the Shuttle plucking and returning as was originally planned. You can also put one up for temporary missions instead of moving an existing bird.

Re:How did it land?

[FleaPlus]

> Was the landing fully automated, or was it manned remotely?

I'm guessing fully-automated, since there's a long period of communication blackout during atmospheric reentry.