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It's Baaack! XB-37B Finally Lands
ColdWetDog writes "The US Air Force / DARPA 'baby shuttle,' the Boeing-built XB-37B has just landed after 469 days in orbit. No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days other than 'because we could.' I, for one, welcome our long duration, unmanned orbital overlords."
After all, you pay for it, you dimwit
Same day the Chinese launch their most ambitious manned mission thusfar? Mmmkay.
"Hey, that mars rover still works, can we keep him running?"
"No. Mission time is over, hit the self destruct button, or i will!"
Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese space launch. It would provide a good evaluation of what Chinese missiles can do.
Or, they brought it down because the Chinese thought they might swing by to look at the XB-37B while they were up there.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So much for the lie that the US doesn't have a way to get to the space station.
uhh, you do realize that unmanned generally means that it doesn't havel ife support systems. We can get shit to the space station; we demonstrated that with the dragon capsule. However, we still don't have a way to get a man in space.
Your thinking that the Chinese might learn something they don't already know?
No, the Chinese have their own plans for space, I suspect they could care less what anyone else is doing. I mean, they may be running for a couple of important points - the polar regions of the Moon, or something - but I'm guessing that, if things go well, the focus of Chinese expansion is going to be on leaving Earth's gravity well.
On another note, I noticed that all the North American news agencies are calling the Chinese female, going into space, an "astronaut". Isn't the correct term "taikonaut"?
Lets face it, it's just too expensive to keep puny humans alive in orbit, the advent of highly advanced space faring robotics will see the end of long endurance human spaceflight.
You've been watching too much Firefly.
"No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days"
No official explanation, but anonymous sources on the inside report that spacecraft's internal clock was off by 199 days. Aliens could not have been reached for comments.
Ezekiel 23:20
Make something up. Claim it is for weather monitoring and no one would even have given it a second thought
Since one of the supposed roles of the XB-37B is repositioning satellites I would have to assume that it has the ability to change it's own orbit.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
We should start a kickstarter to bribe the chinese to plant a chinese flag where ours was, just so congress will get all fired up and get our space program going again.
We could cryogenically freeze the astronauts and send them up as popsicles.
CORBIN...DALLAS!!!!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
No. "Taikonaut" is a term some western media outlet came up with to sound cool. The Chinese government themselves refer to them as "astronauts" in their own English press releases.
They are experimenting with timetravel. It took 469 days to travel backwards 270 days. In other words, they now know how the presidential elections will turn out.
No quite, it actually moves the earth with special space warping technology. If that's not true, why hasn't the Air Force denied it?
rewriting history since 2109
Although it's been proposed many times, nobody has ever put up a small, reusable manned spacecraft. The USAF had the DynaSoar program in the 1960s, but that was cancelled. Virgin Galactic is making noises about a small orbital spaceplane. Nothing like that has ever flown, but there's no fundamental obstacle.
The near future of earth orbit space may be Space-X's Falcon Heavy for freight, something from Virgin Galactic for humans, and robotic vehicles for military tasks.
I've been addicted to building and launching my own multi-stage rockets into orbit (and beyond) in a Minecraft-esque (at least in business model) vidja game called Kerbal Space Program. They have an older version on their site that you can download for free so if you're interested Google it.
I'd rather watch the Summer Glau. :-)
Seriously, is re designating as a bomber some attempt at a conspiracy theory by OP or just cluelessness?
To bring to its homeworld.
No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days other than 'because we could.'
DARPA needed the extra time to ensure that the XB-37B would not get fooled by the Iranians' GPS spoofing.
There is no such thing as "too much Firefly".
Eventually the people will revolt and we'll do the same thing over again!
Actually if they just went to the moon, dropped a flag larger than ours, then stated how small shriveled American Penis no longer is bigger than Chinese Space Penis I'm pretty sure that would spur America on to get back into space as rapidly as possible. And if not, it would at least make for a hilarious yearly viewing of the Chinese press release for it where it's making insulting comments about America's size and thus firing up national penis envy (the fastest way to get financing for stuff behind child porn, illegal substances, and whatever is 'religious issue of the week.')
Not unless it had a big honking fuel tank that nobody saw. Changing orbit takes a huge amount of energy.
Could have been "out of gas"...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wait, we went to the moon? I thought that was a hoax. (waits to duck flying beer cans)
Surely the females are, rightly, termed asstronauts, it's the males that are wrongly named......they should be Dickonauts! No!....OK never mind.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Why would they need anymore reason than 'because we could'? Of all places, Slashdot should be full of people who would understand...
I think it's a lot simpler than that. Stuff in space that can do stuff is rare and expensive so you don't remove it when it's up there. If it doesn't "have to" come down, it won't until the reasons to land exceed the reasons not to. Experimental devices often are used for actual useful work while being tested if they're tested long enough anyway.
Not since they cancelled it.
Why do you think Congress would make the effort, when they could just ban kickstarter?
Banning kickstarter after the damage is done. You can read congressmen minds, can't you?
..all the things the gobbermint tells you. Even if gobbermint talks to you in the name of NASA.
..take some press releases metaphorically. If you can't decipher the metaphorical message, forget it. By default, forget gobbermint propaganda immediately. Helps a lot.
The "crashed" drone looked quite perfect. How do you explain this, and how do you actually know ? Because you are in the All American Rah Rah Club ?
"military P code is encrypted and the US protects it heavily" As a crypto-nazi comment, there is only proper crypto and your-sister-cannot-break crypto. "heavily" is a stupid word next to "encrypted". Also, I recall people stating that only the "precision bits" are encoded, but the "coarse" bits are in the plain. Also, all of it does not seem to be crypto-checksummed. Can someone explain ?
Yes, but does it run Linux? [ducks]
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
That's why the underside of the drone was completely concealed with banners, and why BOTH wings had clearly been reattached?
Your definition of "quite perfect" must be quite different from mine. Your reply also doesn't address why drone flights had gone on for three years prior and continued uninterrupted if Iran had such a capability. I guess they downed it with their UFO technology!
It came down for a few days because it forgot its iPhone charger.