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Air Force Sends Mystery Mini-Shuttle Back To Space
dsinc sends this quote from an AP report about the U.S. Air Force's X-37B spaceplane:
"The Air Force launched the unmanned spacecraft Tuesday hidden on top of an Atlas V rocket. It's the second flight for this original X-37B spaceplane. It circled the planet for seven months in 2010. A second X-37B spacecraft spent more than a year in orbit. These high-tech mystery machines — 29 feet long — are about one-quarter the size of NASA's old space shuttles and can land automatically on a runway. The two previous touchdowns occurred in Southern California; this one might end on NASA's three-mile-long runway once reserved for the space agency's shuttles. The military isn't saying much, if anything, about this new secret mission. In fact, launch commentary ended 17 minutes into the flight. But one scientific observer, Harvard University's Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, speculates the spaceplane is carrying sensors designed for spying and likely is serving as a testbed for future satellites."
Must be over-due for a good conspiracy theory
Military version of the shuttle, etc etc... conspiracy, etc etc ...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Up at the same time 4179 Toutatis makes it's closest flyby? Not a coincidence. While all telescopes will be trained on the 3-mile rock gently drifting past, the true mission of the X-37B will be underway. What's that mission? Oh you know, the usual...space-aliens from Vega.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Why not use the word cowering or is that just too transparently anti-military for the axe-grinding author?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Also, it's not a conspiracy theory if there's actually conspiring a happening.
So does that mean it goes from a Theory to a Law?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The X-37B is not one-quarter the size of the Space Shuttle, it's one-quarter the length of the Space Shuttle. The launch weight of the X-37B is 5.5 tons. The launch weight of the Space Shuttle is 125 tons. This ignorance about the meaning of dimensions reminds me of the Stonehenge scene from Spinal Tap.
It's good to see the USAF with some general-purpose space capability. They now have something that can go up to low orbit for a reasonable cost, stay up for a while, and carry a range of payloads. Useful.
The shuttle rode on the side of the stack for a reason - so it could use it's three main engines for the entire climb to orbit. These engines were designed to be the best rocket engines ever developed (which meant they'd be very complex and expensive) and, therefore, to be re-usable. They were on the back of the orbiter not as an error, but precisely because that meant they would come home for re-use instead of being thrown-away on each flight. What you seem to think was a mistake, was in fact a design feature and part of the argument for making the scheme both technically and financially workable. As long as going to space requires throwing away most of the vehicle, it will remain the exclusive domain of governments and rich businesses/businessmen. Nobody but the super rich could afford to fly from NY to LA if the entire airliner was discarded during the flight and the passenger parachuted onto the LA runway in a small escape pod.
In actual practice, nothing about the shuttle system turned out to be as cheap as initially intended; that rarely happens on the first-generation of any world-leading technology. Had we built a 2nd generation of shuttles they likely would have performed far better with lower turn-around times and costs.
First, the shuttle was not a camel designed by committee, nor was it a bloated whale. In actual use, it ended-up being far cheaper to operate than the old Saturns it replaced (NASA has finally run and published the numbers now that the program is over) it just never came close to the goals that were set for it.
NASA spent years studying many different shuttle system designs and took designs and bids from Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, etc and compared many of these designs not just on paper but with an amazing amount of engineering analysis. In the end, they were forced by a bi-partisan political consensus (including President Nixon and the Democrats who ran congress) to choose the system with the lowest up-front development costs but the highest operational costs (they all wanted small numbers while they were in office and did not care what the numbers would be later when they'd be out of office).
It's a common urban myth that the USAF drove the need for a delta wing; it's not true. The USAF needed that for polar launches from VAFB with aborts back to California instead of mid-ocean (need 1K miles of cross-range in that scenario because the Earth keeps turning after you launch... ) but NASA came to the conclusion that they too needed about the same capability. The USAF gets blamed for this feature only because they were smart enough to see their need first. It is true that the USAF needed the big payload bay with specific dimensions for a certain payload but here, again, the requirement was not particularly different from what NASA wanted anyway.
Finally, the USAF did not happily turn its back on the shuttle; At the time the Challenger exploded, there was a shuttle on the pad at VAFB in California (not for launch, but for facility checkout ahead of the first California launch) and they were gearing-up for many military flights to come. The USAF was ordered to transition to other vehicles in the aftermath of the Challenger accident and investigation. Part of the investigation was a re-assessment of the risks of shuttles and that lead to a decision to abandon the use of systems like the Centaur upper stage for shuttle, which were thought to add far too much risk to an already risky vehicle. If the US had had a mush larger fleet (perhaps 10 orbiters) and the ability to remotely operate them on the riskiest missions, the USAF would likely have continued to use shuttles. As it was, there were military missions and payloads even after Challenger during the transition to EELVs.
This would be more accurate: A standard Atlas payload shroud protects the Atlas from the aerodynamics of having an asymmetrical winged vehicle on its nose during the climb to space.
The Atlas was never designed to have a set of wings and tail fins up on its nose generating unbalance lift and drag vectors during ascent (think: arrow with tail feathers relocated to the nose). That's NOT to say that the Atlas could not handle the situation, but rather that the money has not been spent to study the matter sufficiently and to alter the flight software for the guidance system of the Atlas.
It's also important to note that the X-37 was never designed to be exposed during ascent; the wings and tails might not be up to the loads and parts of the top might not be up to the thermal environment (things get pretty hot on the way up from air friction as you accelerate past mach 2 before you get out of the atmosphere) and the vehicle has a different orientation to the airflow from what it has during reentry). As a NASA project, the X-37 was intended to ride to orbit within the payload bay of the shuttle, where it would be deployed for its test mission and then return home on its own. It was only a test vehicle and was not intended to make many operational flights that way.