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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."
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.
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.
We could cryogenically freeze the astronauts and send them up as popsicles. Then, once we invent equipment to defreeze them, we can send that up and thaw them out. Problem solved. With enough creativity, nearly anything is possible.
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.
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.