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X-37B Secret Space Plane's Second Launch Today
garymortimer writes "The X-37B will launch soon for a second 240 day flight and the cat and mouse game of following it will begin. Amateur astronomers have been able to find the orbit changing high flying UAV on at least two occasions after it altered height. For the first X-37B OTV mission, Air Force officials focused on testing and evaluating the performance capabilities of the vehicle. This second mission will build upon the OTV-1 on-orbit demonstration, validate and replicate initial testing and fine tune the technical parameters of the vehicle tests."
maybe an open secret...like your Dad's porn folders. if it was a real secret...it would be like your Mom's.
> I guess there is a new definition of "secret" that I'm not aware of.
Geeze, we get these comments from people attempting to be clever every single time there's a X-37 article. It's secret in the sense that nobody without security clearance has any idea of what its full mission is, what orbital shifts it's going to be making, or what's inside of its payload bay. If you want to be super strict about it then there's no such thing as a secret satellite launch, since any major country can tell when you're launching something into orbit.
Robots. And this just seems to seal the deal. It can go up for 8 months. Doing that with humans is an absolute pain (carrying enough food alone is a non-trivial task). I personally think we should look at a combination moon shot style effort and moratorium on "manned" space flight for say 20 years, at the end of which we plan to have a functioning moon base (because there is water on the moon, gravity to keep people semi healthy, and you can just live underground and avoid most of the radiation/etc.) that will support X (an arbitrary number) of humans indefinitely (which means we need algae farms and whatnot). I'd rather see a short term reduction of people in space for long term gain than this piddly "space exploration with humans" program we currently have as a species.
> The fact that this craft has cross-range capability might mean they're doing something that a disposable rocket launch couldn't achieve. Maybe launching a few smaller sats, then retrieving them?
With conventional launches, one major downside is that their orbits are very predictable. Basically anybody can track their trajectory as they're being launched, and once they're in an orbit only slow/minor orbital changes can be made. Since any rival country knows when spy satellites are overhead, they can just time maneuvers/operations to when they know they won't be watched.
One hypothesized major benefit of using a winged payload vehicle is that it opens up the possibility of dipping into the atmosphere and performing a hypersonic orbital plane change maneuver. This could potentially enable a spaceplane to essentially disappear and make its ground observations completely unpredictable.