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US 'Space Warplane' Spying On Chinese Spacelab
PolygamousRanchKid sends this excerpt from El Reg:
"The U.S. Air Force's second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China's space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1. Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong-1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on [the lab]. ... The lab is unmanned for the moment, so all there'd be to study is the technology of the craft and what experiments it's doing. Still, the U.S. is hugely suspicious of China's space endeavors, so it's more than possible that they'd want to get a look at Tiangong-1 just in case it's doing anything unexpected."
Update: 01/06 21:50 GMT by S : Further calculations have shown that this is not the case after all.
Rival countries spying on each other's technology... what else is new? According to TFA the X37-B launched before Tiangong, and later shifted its orbit to track the Chinese station. If true, that would be an impressive trick.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Exactly. TFA puts it thusly:
"The X-37B is in a much lower inclination which means it can only see a very narrow band of latitudes, and the only thing that's of real interest in that band is the Middle East and Afghanistan.
There's nothing the US would want to look at in the Middle East, right? If it catches side glances at a Chinese space station, that's just gravy.
The article does end on a winner:
Wilder theories have also reared their heads, such as that both Tiangong-1 and the second X-37B spotted "something else" in space and went to have a look at it - but that seems a little bit like wishful thinking from ET-loving dreamers.
Yup, that's totally it. I can see Michael Bay's next screenplay forming...