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US military's X-37B space plane lands, ending record-breaking mystery mission
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoCan someone please explain the picture in the article: Why are the technicians dressed like astronauts? They're not going to space in the vehicle.
- jleyank 4y agoToxic fuel vented?
- addaon 4y agoHydrazine (used for maneuvering thrusters) is not your friend. Tanks will not be fully empty — draining them safely requires safety gear.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lost_tourist 4y agoDoes it evaporate if little drops on the ground (I know it's bad to breathe it)
- ericbarrett 4y agoRead it and weep: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrazine#section=Safety-and-Hazards https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrazine#section=...
- badwolf 4y agoprotection against possible hypergolic fuel
- Quekid5 4y agoThe stuff of nightmares. You might say... nightmare fuel.
- PhasmaFelis 4y agoNow you're just being hypergolic. (But seriously that stuff is awful)
- throwanem 4y agoJohn Clark's "Ignition!" is back in print, as it happens. It's a personal history of liquid rocket fuel research in which there's a lot of chemistry of which I understood none, but the stories made it worth reading anyway.
- eesmith 4y agoAvailable at https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 and https://archive.org/details/ignitioninformal0000clar https://archive.org/details/ignitioninformal0000clar .
- Quekid5 4y agoI... might get that one. I've only read snippets, but the "running shoes" bit always gets me :D
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eesmith 4y ago"Why are these people wearing SCAPE Suits near the X37-B?" at https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/39544/why-are-these-people-wearing-scape-suits-near-the-x37-b https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/39544/why-are-thes... adds slightly more context beyond what the other HN'ers have already said here.
- dpkirchner 4y agoTIL space-based solar power beamed to earth is in the experimental phase. For some reason I thought it was still just speculative. https://www.space.com/x-37b-space-plane-solar-power-beaming https://www.space.com/x-37b-space-plane-solar-power-beaming
- vkou 4y agoWhy would anyone do this when solar farms produce electricity at too cheap to meter rates?
- heavyset_go 4y agoYou could reflect light from the sun to places on Earth that are experiencing night.
- iancmceachern 4y agoExactly, it's always sunny in space. Also, a big part of the inefficiency in conventional power collection (in the case of solar) is transmission losses in the power lines. This converts light directly into microwave energy that can then be transmitted without power lines. That's a game hanger, just like wifi is to ethernet
- tehbeard 4y agoGiven how stodgy and variable WiFi tends to be, I'll stick with the Neanderthal way of copper lines.
- iancmceachern 4y agoWifi is a marvel of modern technology. It's neither stodgy or variable. Maybe upgrade your stuff?
- undersuit 4y ago
- BMc2020 4y agoWhenever I see an X-37B post, I like to remind people its real purpose is to keep one or more nukes on-orbit at all times. Do I have proof? No. Why not a satellite? Satellites run out of fuel, eventually break and need to be de-orbited before they do. It's against treaty to keep nukes in space. X-B37 has plausible deniability, and the nukes don't take up the whole cargo bay so you can still have room for experiments. Why? It's a great first strike weapon without a detectable missile launch. If terrorists are building a nuke you can drop it on them and make it look like they blew themselves up. Last ditch asteroid defense. Am I against it? Not really. But I do believe in an informed citizenry. YMMV.
- zeristor 4y agoIsn’t the main point of a deterrent to deter people? If no one knows about it, it wouldn’t really deter them.
- guhidalg 4y agoMaybe Space Force knows that China is doing the same with their space station, and they can’t use the ISS for the same given the Russians onboard.
- guenthert 4y ago"It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday."
- akmarinov 4y agoIn this case, this changes the power dynamic, it’s something that other countries have no defense against. If it’s known, those countries will have no choice but to strike first.
- fooblaster 4y agoSo you think it would be useful to deploy one or two nuclear first strike weapon in space on the x37, versus let's say the Navy's 18 Ohio class submarines already actively deployed, each of which has the capacity to take out a small country? This makes no sense at all.
- aae42 4y agosuspiciously after the classified Space Force launch of falcon heavy on Nov 1
- rektide 4y agoI wonder if we'll get any reports on the purpose of these vehicles in our/my lifetimes. It was only a decade ago we heard about Key Hole 9 - Hexagon, a 1971 evolution of 1996 KH8 Gambit that could drop multiple buckets of film over time. Thats a lot of lag before a reveal. Optical survelliance is probably not the mission here, but it's still wild that we know about this thing but have no idea what it does. It's both very reasonable to call it a "tesr vehicle", but given it's flight time, it has so many orders of magnitude more time being tested than other test flight systems that the name OTV, orbital test vehicle, feels somewhat silly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mateo1 4y agoYou wouldn't steal a satellite
- justahuman74 4y agoHonestly that sounds really fun to go up into space on a secret mission like that
- lizardactivist 4y agoNo more Boeing passenger jets that buzz around in circles or nose-dive into the ground for the time being then.