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US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward orbital record
- CapitalistCartr 4y agoIf the X-37s were civilian, they would be lauded as a fantastic step forward in space tech. They would carry numerous public experiments. But because we use them to spy on the rest of the World, they remain mostly shrouded.
- FredPret 4y agoI wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, it’s worth the wait
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoWhat if it increases it by 1%?
- moffkalast 4y agoWhat if 73% of statistics get made up on the spot?
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoWell that's one stat in the world that you definitely want to know the sign of at least!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 4y agoKnowing where the other powers' silos and possibly subs are is better than worrying about it. Having them know that you know means it's not worth it for them to press the big red button. Military intelligence supports the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which is what's keeping us all alive.
- jdironman 4y agoThis is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.
- jimmydorry 4y agoLibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.
- jdironman 4y agoTo be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.
- unionpivo 4y agoDepending on what you do. We need to process, millions of documents a day, and headless libre-office is a lot faster (an order of magnitude) than driving word. So far no other library does what we need (I mostly just administers the cluster that does this). I know that's not what people mean when they compare "speed" of office suits, but some thing's libre office does are a lot faster than MS office. Another place where libre office is better than excel is opening and manipulating huge CSV files, with millions of rows.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
- jcfrei 4y agoWhy is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves? Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades (actual war is mostly a numbers game so having a plane that's 2x better is not very useful if the other side has 10x as many). If anything militaries around the world tend to oversell their capabilities.
- y0ungarmanii 4y agoLol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.
- AustinDev 4y agoI was going to comment exactly this... There is a reason Google X and Microsoft R&D hire so many former DARPA PM's.
- walls 4y agoProbably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields. Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.
- WillPostForFood 4y agoF-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Background_and_Have_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...
- deleted 4y ago
- willis936 4y agoIt doesn't take much guess work. The Delta IV has been used for more military missions than public or commercial ones. That's the space vehicle of choice for military satellites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%9319) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launc... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoIt's an incredible waste. The best and brightest slaving lifetimes away for things that will hopefully never be used, and if they are, for death. If only we could just agree to staff military research on all sides with the biggest wasters and toxic personalities and let the rest of the world get on with something that doesn't leave other humans splattered across some battlefield.
- baybal2 4y ago
- golem14 4y agoJa, let's put all the Hitlers in charge of the militaries. What could go wrong ?
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoWell everyone's taking that wayyyyy too seriously. Put the assholes together and let them fight it out uselessly. They probably won't be able to agree whose name goes at the top of the table, let alone figure out to rocketry. Pardon me if burning a good propertion of the brainpower of the species on killing each other seems wasteful. Obviously you can't actually do that because that's basically a prisoners' dilemma with bombs.
- coffeeblack 4y agoAnd then there is this thing called “reality”.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI get what you're saying, it does seem wasteful, but sadly pacifists are no match for tyrants. It is admirable to want to be left alone in-peace, but as long as there are other human beings willing to use force, it cannot be. The less a society puts towards its war-fighting capabilities the more likely it is to be conquered by some adversary. It is also probably the case that our brainpower didn't invent warfare, and that this phenomenon isn't unique to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
- lizardactivist 4y agoI think it's a weapon (projected radio, radar interference, etc.) rather than a tool for spying.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoCertainly not optical spying, it's not big enough because of diffraction limits. The old NRO telescopes are basically Hubbles that point down, so they have a mirror about 2 metres across and probably a resolution somewhat better than Hubble (30cm on the surface). They even donated the chassis of some[1] to NASA once they were thoroughly obsolete. Imagine what the new ones can do if a Hubble-alike was such old hat it didn't even need to be secret. Also imagine if we'd been able to put a fleet of Hubbles out there rather than just one! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
- krono 4y agoThe article mentions several publicised experiments that were on this mission. Who knows what else it might be carrying or doing - anti-satellite weaponry, ICBM counter-measures, or for all we know it's been coasting about in standby mode with an empty bay all this time and the B in its name stands for "bluff" :)
- jackmott42 4y agoWhen we built the Space Shuttle, russia saw that we were building it, did some napkin math and decided it made absolutely no sense what we were doing, and that it then must have had some secret military purpose rather than any stated purpose. So they built their own lest their be some kind of space weaponry gap. Turns out that, while there were of course some military plans for the space shuttle, it just actually didn't make sense, and Russian paranoia led to the irrational design being built twice!
- Swenrekcah 4y agoUnless the real military objective was to bait the USSR to spend their resources on a fool’s errand!
- cronix 4y agoThey didn't just go out and build some. The KGB was stealing NASA's plans. NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles. The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.[1] Then the USSR collapsed. Currently they are sitting in decaying hangars in Baikonur, just rotting away. There's video on youtube of people sneaking in (it's a guarded base), flying drones around them and climbing around in and out of them. It's pretty cool. [2] [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogue-one-how-the-soviets-stole-nasas-shuttle-plans https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM
- 4y ago
- BMc2020 4y agoI think its real purpose is to deliver a nuclear warhead with less warning and less attention than a traditional ICBM launch.
- Kadin 4y agoDoesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. First, unless the satellite / bomb dispenser happens to be in the right orbit at the right time, you'd have to do some significant maneuvering on orbit. This is expensive in terms of energy/fuel. By the time you put the dispenser over or on the correct path to target, it might not even be faster than a conventional endo- or exo-atmospheric ballistic missile (SRBM/IRBM or ICBM). Second, long range nuclear strike is one of the USAF's justifications for its silo missile and bomber fleet, particularly the B-2 and just-started-production B-21 Raider (LRS-B). They're going to have some awkward questions to answer if a big part of their signature stealth penetration bomber's mission could have been done by another system all along. Hell, the USAF has been desperately trying to come up with non-nuclear roles for their existing nuclear delivery systems ("Prompt Global Strike", aka "hitting someone in the head with a reentry vehicle full of concrete going 7000 m/s") for years. Third, it's overly complex for that role. An ICBM warhead dispenser is something that exists; it's called the "bus" on MIRV missiles. If you wanted to put a bomb dispenser in orbit, you don't need a cool spaceplane. You just put a slightly bigger engine (or an extra stage) onto a traditional MIRV bus, so it has the delta-V to get into a stable LEO and sit there until you use or de-orbit it. The Soviets played with this concept extensively during the 1980s, and their "Sarmat" superheavy ICBM is probably capable of it. This was considered pretty destabilizing at the time (since it would avoid north-facing early warning systems) and was banned by treaty. So the US would be opening a can of worms back up that it seemingly tried hard to close in the 1980s, and it's a weirdly complicated way of doing it, vs. just building a superheavy ICBM like Russia did. A lot of the complexity of a Shuttle / delta-plane design is related to getting back from orbit. A weapons dispenser, whether nuclear or kinetic ("tungsten rods from God") wouldn't need to be recoverable at all. Or if you really insist on that as a requirement, it could use a cheap-and-cheerful Apollo-style splashdown design. Why have it land like a plane? Nuclear weapons are pretty robust. You could splash one into the ocean going pretty fast and still have it be recoverable. Which leads me to my personal theory: the design only makes sense if the intent is to bring things back. Fragile things. The NASA Shuttle landed like it did, because it had fragile humans on board. But why would a remotely-piloted vehicle need to? Maybe if it's bringing back things from orbit that were never meant to land on Earth in one piece.
- efrbwrh 4y ago
- simonh 4y agoIt's smart tech, sure, but nothing that hadn't already been done. It's basically a scaled down space shuttle, and the Buran shuttle had autonomous landing capability decades ago. The main capability this provides is significant on-orbit manoeuvre. It's easy to see how that could be useful for military missions, over-flying specific sites and sidling up alongside interesting Russian or Chinese spy sats, but less useful for civilian applications.
- georgeecollins 4y agoDoes someone know approximately how many times per day this plane would orbit the planet? I was wondering to try and figure out how far it has "flown" to date. You could say the plane has an incredible range!
- CapitalistCartr 4y agoNo way to know for us, but typically, 75 to 90 minutes per orbit.
- loeg 4y agoIf we knew the altitude, wouldn't we have a pretty good estimate? And vice verca? I think amateurs have probably observed this already. Here's a claim[1]: > The spaceplane is orbiting at an altitude of about 320 kilometers (a little under 200 miles) 320 km gives an orbital period of ~91 minutes. [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spaceplane-x-37-180957777/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spaceplane...
- Pakdef 4y ago> I think amateurs have probably observed this already. Here a video of it taken by an amateur: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WbpLxDxVDS8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WbpLxDxVDS8 if you can believe it (it's listed in the article)
- robonerd 4y agoSatellites like this can be observed from Earth, so those details aren't really as secret as the government may wish. But yes, about 90 minutes; it's generally around 300-400 km up.
- tiagod 4y agoFrom the article: https://youtu.be/WbpLxDxVDS8 https://youtu.be/WbpLxDxVDS8
- 4y ago
- ncmncm 4y agoThe best publicly available evidence suggests that X-37B is practically useless, but storing it in orbit looks better than leaving it parked in a hangar on the ground. They can pretend it is on "a mission". Whatever instruments it is "testing" clearly could as well have been lofted without the X-37B attached, for less money, as for STS payloads. I.e., instead of X-37B, wrap in a fairing and disposable insertion-burn rocket atop rather smaller booster.
- duxup 4y ago> The best publicly available evidence suggests that X-37B is practically useless Got some links that we can read on that?
- ncmncm 4y agoYou have already read all you need: reusable launch carrier being reused extremely rarely. An experimental vehicle turning out impractical is absolutely normal. Usefulness is exceptional. (Even the SR-71 / YF-12 was scrapped. The Space Shuttle was scrapped, not soon enough.) But scheming to keep a program running anyway is extremely common. (E.g., again, Space Shuttle. And now STS.) Coolness (e.g. SR-71) is an inadequate substitute. It takes solid evidence to demonstrate usefulness. In its entire absence, the correct conclusion is obvious.
- _kbh_ 4y agoTo be fair the SR-71 was scrapped after being in service for 35 years, a point at which there where already multiple different much cheaper and usable alternatives.
- ncmncm 4y agoSR-71 was awesome, but its reason for existing evaporated. Once it became easy to hit with a missile it could no longer be sent on the missions it had been uniquely qualified for.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
- rektide 4y agoLong endurance flight is a purpose unto itself, alike Ingenuity copter's purpose to prove flight a feasible technology on other planets. Another commenter cracked wise about this being an alternative to just storing the mini-spaceplane in a hanger. Well yes, but with less terrestrial degredagtion (atmosphere & what all), and having some creative/scientific functions (growing seeds. sidenote, i had some like 3rd generation space tomato plants my 5th grade teacher gave us all. great year!) i view this plane, in macro, somewhat like a right-sized shuttle. the shuttle was big & heavy & had vastly cumbersome resposnsibilities to shepard all in all pretty useless humans along for the ride. as a cargo delivery system it made little sense. but an orbital vessel with some orbital control, that can come down & get reused, that has great roboticized automation... it's a drone, for space. it's an automated spaceplane.
- rob74 4y agoI actually wonder what the big fuss is - other objects (satellites, the ISS, etc.) have been orbiting the Earth for decades and nobody gets that excited about it. Is there anything about this record that sets it apart from those set by other artificial satellites? I mean, you can't just decide to call it "flight" because it's a spaceplane, it's in orbit same as zillions of other things. Or is it a record for a craft designed to reenter the atmosphere and land in one piece? Then they should probably wait until the successful landing before declaring a record...
- Aeolun 4y agoI’m not sure if breaking the previous record set by the same plane (same model anyway) should be considered such an achievement?
- voxadam 4y agoI don't know, it was impressive every time Usain Bolt beat his previous record.
- Aeolun 4y agoI guess it’s impressive because I can relate to the time it takes to run 100m. When the airplane flies 580 days where it previously flew 570, I do not assume the 10 extra days are due to some marginal improvement, just to the fact they kept the mission going longer. The 5th airplane could presumably have made it to 580 days too if the mission team had wanted that. Bolt is amazing because he does something every time that you are certain he couldn’t do before (unless he was deliberately slowing down, which doesn’t seem like a winning strategy).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BMc2020 4y agoWhenever the X-37 comes up I always re-state my theory that the real purpose is to keep a nuke in orbit at all times. Why not keep nukes on satellites? - It's against treaty - satellites run out of fuel - it's harder to control where they land on re-entry.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoDefeats the purpose of MAD if you keep it a secret. Only good as a first strike. It's possible but I think (hope) unlikely.
- galangalalgol 4y agoWhy didn't you tell the world eh?
- mike_d 4y agoIt is a deterrence capability that can quickly reposition to protect other satellites in space. As to the actual payload of what it does in these situations, that is the closely guarded secret. Other countries have deployed counter-satellite capabilities (the most interesting is the Chinese one that grabs and flings other objects out of orbit), so this is our counter-counter-satellite capability.
- me_me_me 4y agoNukes need maintaining, without it they become at best much weaker, at worst very impractical paper weights.
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoNukes in orbit are redundant when we have so many waiting to be launched from submarines lurking in the seas around the world.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoFrom the article: > Flight controls and brakes using all electro-mechanical actuation; no hydraulics on board. Why are they bragging about no hydraulics?
- galangalalgol 4y agoIts like servo fuel injectors, they have pros and cons, but they are new and cool.
- cpgxiii 4y agoHydraulic systems can have issues with long term operations in a vacuum, so going all-electrical offers reliability and simplicity benefits for long operations in space. It's also considerably easier to make electrical systems with redundant power supply than it is to make redundant hydraulic systems, especially given the tight volume and mass limits of space travel.
- zeno_walks 4y agoHow does this compare to the state of the art SpaceX is capable of producing?
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoKind of Apples and Oranges, for now. The X-37B is a spaceplane, and nothing SpaceX currently has operational is sort of capable of matching it's capabilities. When they get Starship properly working (past the initial risky flights and into the period where landing the vehicle can be expected to work), it should be able to do everything the X-37B does and more. But that's still years off if not more.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoWhen will we see a Space Force One?
- nefreat 4y agoМир