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I don't know about reprogramming satellites but its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective. Or it

I don't know about reprogramming satellites but its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective. Or it's just a moveable spy satellite that can hover over whatever it needs to. Funny you mention the Chinese doing that to us. I just finished Snowden's book and he mentioned how he only learned what the NSA was doing after having to research what the Chinese were doing. Turns out, same thing!

catalogia 7y ago
The only place a satellite can 'hover' is directly above the equator in a geostationary orbit. Anywhere else and the best you can do is a highly eccentric orbit with a high inclination so you get lots of "hang time" over the target area, but that also means being very high up. From what I understand the X-37b was tracked by amateur astronomers to have a reasonably high inclination this time around, but an almost circular orbit. Traditional spy satellites have very high inclinations because this lets gives them coverage of more of the planet (as the planet rotates beneath them.) The X-37 has thusfar to my knowledge not flown at a severely high inclination, from what I understand the most recent launch was somewhere around 54 degrees, and previous flights were lower. For reference the ISS is around 52 degrees. The figures are all imprecise and the X-37b supposedly has the delta-v budget for relatively dramatic inclination changes, but even so 54 degrees is very far away from where earth-observing spy satellites traditionally are. > its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective. Honestly that seems neither easy, effective, nor subtle. To grab and deorbit something like that you'd need to grab it in such a way that let you thrust through it's center of mass which doesn't seem easy to do for a few reasons (not least because the distribution of mass inside the target satellite may not be known.) And since spy satellites can be massive, you'd need to burn a lot of fuel to do it. It's conceivable they're doing something a bit trickier, like slapping a time delayed ion thruster onto the side of victim satellites which would then slowly deorbit the target after the X-37 is long gone, but I'd still wager on the victim figuring out what was going on. Such anomalous thrust is something that would be noticed.

catalogia 7y ago

The only place a satellite can 'hover' is directly above the equator in a geostationary orbit. Anywhere else and the best you can do is a highly eccentric orbit with a high inclination so you get lots of "hang time" over the target area, but that also means being very high up. From what I understand the X-37b was tracked by amateur astronomers to have a reasonably high inclination this time around, but an almost circular orbit. Traditional spy satellites have very high inclinations because this lets gives them coverage of more of the planet (as the planet rotates beneath them.) The X-37 has thusfar to my knowledge not flown at a severely high inclination, from what I understand the most recent launch was somewhere around 54 degrees, and previous flights were lower. For reference the ISS is around 52 degrees. The figures are all imprecise and the X-37b supposedly has the delta-v budget for relatively dramatic inclination changes, but even so 54 degrees is very far away from where earth-observing spy satellites traditionally are. > its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective. Honestly that seems neither easy, effective, nor subtle. To grab and deorbit something like that you'd need to grab it in such a way that let you thrust through it's center of mass which doesn't seem easy to do for a few reasons (not least because the distribution of mass inside the target satellite may not be known.) And since spy satellites can be massive, you'd need to burn a lot of fuel to do it. It's conceivable they're doing something a bit trickier, like slapping a time delayed ion thruster onto the side of victim satellites which would then slowly deorbit the target after the X-37 is long gone, but I'd still wager on the victim figuring out what was going on. Such anomalous thrust is something that would be noticed.