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It's Baaack! XB-37B Finally Lands

Posted by timothy on from the ready-for-a-nice-classified-nap dept.

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."

9 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese launch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese space launch. It would provide a good evaluation of what Chinese missiles can do.

  2. Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. man in space? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. The future of spaceflight is robotic by warewolfsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It *does* really cost that much. Both in energy (sustaining human life is much more costly, energy-wise, than simply keeping circuits working), and in weight - when you ship people off into space, you have to feed them, water them, house them, carry oxygen for them, dispose of their waste, give them room to live, work, exercise... all of that material you have to ship off into space takes up space, adds additional weight to haul out of Earth's gravity well, and fundamentally limits the distance and duration of any mission you have planned.

      We have space probes launched *decades* ago that are still traveling through space and sending back data. What's the useful life of the ISS again?

      And frankly, I get more enjoyment and benefit out of my pet than I do out of manned space travel, so fuck your manned space dreams. You can use my tax money to send robotic probes and like it, or you can have nothing. How about that?

    2. Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic by JustOK · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We've always boldly gone where no one has gone before, for drugs, for food, for fun, for profit. We're not likely to stop. We'll try not to warp on your lawn, though.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    3. Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Insightful

      no, usually we complain when the budget of nasa is around 4 days in iraq, we arent asking for a majority of funding, just a reasonable amount in relation to the other bullshit we waste money on.

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  5. Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau by JustOK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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