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If 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 the

• FredPret 4y ago
  I 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 ago
    What if it increases it by 1%?
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      What if 73% of statistics get made up on the spot?
      • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
        Well that's one stat in the world that you definitely want to know the sign of at least!
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • FredPret 4y ago
      Knowing 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 ago
    This 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 ago
      LibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.
      • jdironman 4y ago
        To 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 ago
        Depending 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 ago
    Why 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 ago
      Lol 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 ago
        I 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 ago
      Probably 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 ago
        F-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 ago
    It 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    Ja, let's put all the Hitlers in charge of the militaries. What could go wrong ?
    • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      Well 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 ago
        And then there is this thing called “reality”.
      • BitwiseFool 4y ago
        I 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 ago
  I think it's a weapon (projected radio, radar interference, etc.) rather than a tool for spying.
  • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    Certainly 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  When 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 ago
    Unless the real military objective was to bait the USSR to spend their resources on a fool’s errand!
    • Fargoan 4y ago
      Just like remote viewing on Mars
    • dwringer 4y ago
      A good cop doesn't really know why he does anything.
  • cronix 4y ago
    They 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 ago
  I think its real purpose is to deliver a nuclear warhead with less warning and less attention than a traditional ICBM launch.
  • Kadin 4y ago
    Doesn'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 ago
  It'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.