Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight
reuters.com
reuters.com
According to him, the USSR military developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle. Unlike the ICBMs, the shuttles decoupled the event of the payload launch from event of the payload delivery, i.e. bombing. The early shuttle missions demonstrated the ability to "dive" to an orbit from which they could deliver a nuke directly to Red Square and then return back to the low Earth orbit. Shuttles could also perform attack missions against targets in the Earth's orbit, approaching and destroying USSR's satellites as a prelude to a nuclear war.
Buran was designed to perform both of these missions. Unlike the shuttles, Buran could perform them while 100% unmanned. Until this X-37B flight, US did not have a public demonstration of a technology matching what USSR had with Buran in the late 1980s. Given the "hot peace" nature of the contemporary relationship between US and Russia, it is not surprising that US would want to demonstrate that it went above and beyond what USSR accomplished in space warfare. X-37B does that.
If you are wondering about the 2-year mission for X-37B: when Buran launched in 1980s US immediately started speculating that the "unmanned" capability of Buran was just another lie by USSR. Can't say the same about about X-37B considering that it was in orbit for twice the time of the longest manned mission.
And that was in 1988!
It just happened that it flew real missions with astronauts on board, so it wasn't used.
Some time after the second wreak, NASA added the ability to run a cable for that. The idea was that a rescue mission would be launched, and the cable would be installed in the abandoned shuttle to allow a landing attempt.
BTW, the first mission was flown manually. I don't think the landing software could have been written without data from the first flight.
Not the cheapest way to do it by any means, but I suppose masquerading as a harmless civilian space plane gives you some degree of plausible deniability, since it would be violating a few treaties to have such a system.
While there were some military applications to the space shuttle, it rather emphatically was not some sort of covert space bomber. It's ability to glide and boost itself back into orbit is very limited as it can't store a ton of propellant. While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose? It rather plainly has a thermal protection system on the bottom, and nothing usable as a bomb bay.
The whole idea is just preposterous.
The military applications of the shuttle were the ability to launch and capture satellites, as well as to potentially act as a reconnaissance platform. The X-37B largely continues those same missions.
Are they? They said:
>> developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle
"what they saw" being the important part. Everything that follows is a seemingly legit interpretation of what the Shuttle can do, if you (reasonably) assume the U.S. wasn't fully disclosing all capabilities and purposes.
Even if they were wrong about the capabilities of the shuttle (I'm in no place to say) that doesn't mean that the friend was at all inaccurate in what they reported.
The US military's idea of military capability of the shuttle was to covertly launch a spy satellite from California going south, release it over the pole and land without completing a full orbit. This would, hypothetically, evade Soviet radar. Because the Earth rotates under the shuttle while this happens, the shuttle comes over far away from the launch site (and from the runway), and so it needed the large cross range ability (1100 miles) and this required the wings, etc.
AFAIK, the Soviets said they booby-trapped their military satellites so retrieving them from orbit would be hard.
Shooting at satellites from the shuttle is weird - a first strike requires shooting down many satellites, so you would need your weapons platform in many orbits at once. Just shoot from the ground or use something like the ASM-135 ASAT.
>The IPM studies were conducted under the leadership of Yuriy Sikharulidze and Dmitriy Okhotsimskiy, two of its leading scientists.
>The IPM studies focused on the Shuttle’s possible use as a bomber, more particularly its capability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. Efraim Akin, one of the institute’s scientists, later recalled:
>“When the US Shuttle was announced we started investigating the logic of that approach. Very early our calculations showed that the cost figures being used by NASA were unrealistic. It would be better to use a series of expendable launch vehicles. Then, when we learned of the decision to build a Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg for military purposes, we noted that the trajectories from Vandenberg allowed an overflight of the main centers of the USSR on the first orbit. So our hypothesis was that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicion and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission. When we analysed the trajectories from Vandenberg we saw that it was possible for any military payload to re-enter from orbit in three and a half minutes to the main centers of the USSR, a much shorter time than [a sub-marine-launched ballistic missile] could make possible (ten minutes from off the coast). You might feel that this is ridiculous but you must understand how our leadership, provided with that information, would react. Scientists have a different psychology than the military. The military, very sensitive to the variety of possible means of delivering the first strike, suspecting that a first-strike capability might be the Vandenberg Shuttle’s objective, and knowing that a first strike would be decisive in a war, responded predictably” [14].
USSR military planners had a plan to very intentionally design Alfa and Papa class submarines with very bizarre specs, and uncertain strategic role with an intent to set American strategic planners on a wrong path.
They were intentionally let to sail close to population centres, with a lot of subassemblies given to civilian manufacturers to encourage leaks.
Amazingly, 30 years later we got to know that the plan actually worked for them. From what is known now, news of Alfa's existence truly did set the military, CIA, and the executive branch into a contention in late seventies.
With a little imagination? Shuttle positions rocket in orbit like a satellite and then ignites engine? Shuttle abandons its usual "slightly nose up posture" in preference for a nose-on-target posture; turning into a nuclear armed ICBM toting kamikaze.
Space is surprisingly good at punishing 'imagination'. The nose up posture is related to the aerodynamics of reentry. You can't blow through the atmosphere at Mach 25 dead on and have anything but a scorched hulk left afterwards. Those thermal tiles, and that particular reentry profile are required to allow the atmosphere to safely absorb the kinetic energy of a re-entering craft, while keeping the entire thing safe from becoming part of the exotic and exciting chemistry such a process involves and giving some level of control over the down range trajectory through adjusting the lift vector. That lift vector was engineered to be workable in the hypersonic regime, but once you got to subsonic, it was a bit like flying a brick as I recall.
Could a nuclear payload be lifted by the shuttle? Yes. Would the size of the resulting payload make it as effective as a rocket launched warhead? Not so much.
The Space Shuttle was an interesting effort in engineering extremes that only really got off the ground I think due to the unique situation of the time. The Apollo missions were a success, but Vietnam, and a souring disposition toward manned space programs really put the kebash on what the Shuttle was just meant to be one piece of.
I wish I could remember the exact name of NASA's solar system colonization plan back then, but it was truly a glorious thing to read. Politically impossible. Probably economically ruinous given the wars we'd get entangled in over the next 50 years. But a beautiful dream at least.
Interestingly enough, I think it was really a necessary fumble to make in order to realize that reusable rocketry was the more economic launch paradigm to go for.
Nitpick, but the first flight of the X-37B program already demonstrated this back in 2010.
The thing with a shuttle is it's easier to stealthily violate the treaty than launching a bunch of suspiciously poorly built cylindrical tubes and calling them defunct space telescopes.
It's very cool that the Buran completed a single 3 hour trip unmanned, it went down as the first unmanned space flight that not many people know about. There's nothing much more to say other than that, which is disappointing.
The X-37B and its predecessors have been flying for nearly 10 years. I've been following these programs for apparently a lot longer than I realized. The take away with this program is they are launching these missions without much fan fair and the only brag is the incredible amount of time these missions are active in space. Literally every mission I've seen has the same information being released which is a picture of the vehicle touched down and the time spent in orbit... that's it. As with the last mission, this will be forgotten, another will go up to space and in a couple years we will get another press release.
For more info on this, Mustard's documentary on the Buran: https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175
Considering the huge amount of effort to launch one, the short duration a shuttle can remain on station and the limited number of them we could have ever built and put in orbit, what would be the point? Let's assume for a moment we (well...US leadership) lost our collective minds and decided that we wanted to swoop down and nuke Red Square for the LoLs. Hell, let's assume we had every Space Shuttle up and each one swooped down and toasted a city. It's nowhere near the capability to prevent the next action being the retaliatory strike which would incinerate the US. 10x the number of Space Shuttles wouldn't prevent that. And we'd have to plan months in advance for this 'first strike', and prevent anyone from knowing we were loading nukes in the shuttles.
Maybe your 'Trusted close relative' really believed all that stuff. Crazier crap was taken as truth in the Cold War. But in reality, that's not what the Space Shuttle was for.
I'm also alarmed by this. I wouldn't want Star Wars (neither Lucas's nor Reagan's) to become our future.
So it makes me wonder why they chose to announce it rather than keeping it vague and spooky, which is a different kind of international posturing.
If that's the case, and it's just replacing existing satellites, they're still tracked accurately under that convention. Not that the USAF would say either way unless pressed by national powers, as the ambiguity helps their mission. It also helps internet blow-hards that like to take relatively small amounts of information and construct narratives they can lambast. It's entirely possible the USAF deployed new satellites, or replaced some satellites, or did nothing like that and the messaging is posturing or disinformation.
If it was doing stuff with satellites, I'm actually more interested in how it got inventory to do so over a two year time span. Did it drop to lower altitudes to refuel and get more satellites to deploy/replace/upgrade?
1) CubeSats can be very tiny, and perhaps it was only releasing babysats for part of the mission, or at long intervals
2) surely we'd have noticed if there was a space fuel depot,
2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
> 2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
Well, it's a space plane, so I was thinking of a more exotic variation of conventional air refueling, but upon further thought that seems very unlikely as if it was that easy to get from land to the refueling point and from the refueling point to space, we'd see that as the usual way to get to orbit instead of rockets (or rocket attached ships). I don't spend a lot of time thinking about rocketry and orbit unless in a discussion about it, so this wasn't immediately obvious to me initially.
That said, it's possible that some satellites actually contained extra fuel for future use when deployed, either in them or as a separate attached payload. In that case, there wouldn't be one large space fuel depot, but possibly many small ones.
It's definitely a bad thing to have satellites up there that no one knows are there (because of collision risks, etc.), and the US not registering theirs opens the door for other nations/entities to see what we're doing and choose to do the same, which would be bad for everyone.
Is it perhaps just some kind of announcement of a capability to foreign countries?
How do you define "good" at war? By the time you've reached "war" as a solution, "good" really isn't on the table.
Pretty much the only way to be "good" at war is to be willing to kill every single person in the theatre--civilians included. You are "good" at war and "win" in that case--there is no enemy left.
We also have a word for that--genocide. And we view that very negatively for good reason.
the same article linked in the wiki article that mentions motorcycle use.
Obviously the swarm of small things that are effectively man-piloted missiles are going to be able to take out the slow 200 million pound behemoth that requires 3-5 miles to turn around.
Change generic speedboat to fastboat and you have something that can do 30-90mph (50-80 knots) depending on wave conditions while the previously m entioned cyclone-class tops out at 40mph (35 knots).
Carrier groups aren't exactly in a tight circle around an aircraft carrier either and then you have to consider friendly fire (with deck guns/artillery) so enough much smaller craft can come zooming in and easily overwhelm any defensive capabilities.
Depending on distances and angle you might be firing a 62 caliber projectile directly at your own ships with a craft randomly adjusting course, in choppy waters. Software is only going to do so much to increase the odds of hitting your target and something like a deck gun is going to be used long before anti-ship missiles that cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars well into million dollar plus range a pop. Especially if you have a half dozen, a dozen, two dozen cheaply acquired speedboats/fast boats coming at you.
Naval warfare isn't much different now than it was hundreds of years ago for proper ships. Sure the projectiles can be laser guided and carry way more destructive potential while the ships can move under their own power but you're still talking about incredibly heavy ships that move slow and are bobbing up and down in the water.
Similarly put a dozen guys on performance dirt bikes and give them explosive backpacks and throw them at an M1 Abrams and unless you have one hell of a lucky gunner, one of those dozen people is going to get right up on that tank and at a minimum will render it immobile.
Naval ships are meant to fight other ships and in the case of the aircraft carrier itself, simply support a small fleet of aircraft. They are not designed, or intended to, fight multiple much smaller craft. Speedboats have very limited ranges, rarely leave coastal waters and can't carry any weapon system that poses a risk to naval vessels EXCEPT for shoulder-fired rockets and by acting as suicide man-piloted missiles laden with explosives.
Like, your whole argument is equally applicable to torpedoes, except those are even harder to hit.
Torpedos can cost a million bucks each, a stolen/commandeered/seized speedboat is free.
Torpedos are covered under ITAR and require quite a bit of sophistication to manufacture and are effectively limited to nations. Anyone can obtain a speedboat, or a dozen speedboats, and deploy them. Kinda like when the USS Cole was successfully attacked, leaving a 40x60 foot hole in the side, by a small fiberglass boat carrying several hundred pounds of explosives and modern day pirates usually use small fishing boats.
But the whole point of how carrier defenses work is to not wait until they're literally on top of you (like on your example of shooting your own ships). Speed boats are stupid loud on SONAR, so you should detect and destroy them before they can even see the carrier group.
You win a war when the outcome lets you plausibly declare victory.
EDIT: looked it up a bit: both the start of this and previous missions had media coverage, and amateurs temporarily tracked the plane, so no point in secrecy.
Not counting foreign intelligence, obviously.
Indeed, I follow a guy on twitter that has photographed it.
Quickest link I could find to one of the photos https://www.space.com/x-37b-space-plane-skywatcher-photo.htm...
And here is his account where he also has photos of stuff like the ISS https://twitter.com/ralfvandebergh
It's in the news every time they decide to put it in the news. Many other things could happen in secret.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...
and mentions briefly that hydrazine is produced at los alamos for national security purposes.
The article does mention tetrafluorohydrazine being added to FOOF which is the actual subject of the article and a comment mentions tetrafluorohydrazine being used as an oxidizer for rocket fuels.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2690378
(used to intern, and subsequently work there, although not as a chemist, of course. i'm not that smart)
and if you want to pedant that the patent wasn't issued to los alamos nat'l laboratory... well, in '54 things were different :)
When used as a bi-propellant, hydrazine is usually combined with N2O4, which is also super toxic.
It is not just the military that uses these things. Everyone uses it because it is the best performing high thrust (not ion engine) non-cryogenic (storable) propellant. It being hypergolic (self igniting) is a bonus for reliability.
The military actually switched to solids for ICBMs and SLBMs.
The F-16 has a hydrazine APU, and I would not be surprised if the F-35 does the same thing.
The F-16 has an EPU not an APU, i.e. an Emergency Power Unit vs an Axillary Power Unit. Lacking an APU is an exception when it comes to jet aircraft and necessitates a few changes. Relevant here is that an APU can provide power in an emergency, so the role is played by the hydrazine powered EPU for the F-16.
This makes hydrazine somewhat more of a rational choice for something you expect to use rarely. If it were expected to be frequently used then it would have to be frequently refilled and that would necessitate all ground crew wearing the full body hazmat suits you see in the photo for the X-37b here as well as many other complex safety precautions.
The F-35 has a conventionally jet fuelled APU[0] so it has no need for an EPU or hydrazine.
Interestingly Concord didn't have space for an APU (due to the shape of the empennage and placement of a rear fuel tank). I have seen pictures of a hydrazine powered EPU on one of the prototypes, but this was never going to make it into service as certifying carrying something as toxic as hydrazine - even back then - would be nigh on impossible. This is the question that starts the most epic thread about Concord[1] (warning - you may get sucked into reading all 103 pages!)
[0] http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=12192
[1] https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...
Redundant systems are normal on aircraft and the F-16 has a particular need for hydraulic and electrical power as its inherently unstable airframe needs various onboard systems to keep it stable and flyable.
If the main generator disconnects from the bus or the hydraulic pressure drops[0] the EPU will automatically operate to provide electrical and hydraulic power. It can run from engine bleed air, but if the (single) engine has failed then pressure will be provided from the hydrazine system.
It achieves this using a 70% solution of hydrazine in water as a monopropellant, which is decomposed over an iridium catalyst. The water helps keep it stable, and cools the catalyst when it boils, keeping it around 850C and the high pressure gasses are fed into the EPU.
This has the advantage of being light (25L of hydrazine and simple as only a single liquid), reliable and fast acting (~2s to max power).
[0] https://www.slideshare.net/matheusgaldino355/usaf-flight-man... (section 1-101)
The link you're responding to is about tetrafluorohydrazine, which is some kind of hydrazine and fluoride. I think it's mentioned in Ignition! but I can't remember. I just remember John Clark (the author of Ignition!) being very very hesitant and even frightened of working with fluoride based fuels.
I'm not really sure how how it's tetrafluorohydrazine is relevant to the X37-B though.
"On 24 July 1975, NTO [dinitrogen tetroxide] poisoning affected three U.S. astronauts on the final descent to Earth after the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight. This was due to a switch accidentally left in the wrong position, which allowed the attitude control thrusters to fire after the cabin fresh air intake was opened, allowing NTO fumes to enter the cabin. One crew member lost consciousness during descent. Upon landing, the crew was hospitalized for five days for chemical-induced pneumonia and edema."
I remember reading that article it was interesting. But it's funny that hydrofluoric acid (HF) was not mentioned since it seems to be incredibly dangerous.
Periodic Videos on Youtube has a new video about hydrofluoric acid. Professor Martyn Poliakoff mentions HF is feared by people working in chemistry. He also said that even a small drop of HF on skin will cause a heart attack (and eat through your skin).
Concentration matters.
Now - hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid - both those (and some other relatively nasty chemicals) can be easily purchased at many hardware (and other) stores; the first is commonly known as "muriatic acid" (pool acid), while the second is sold (usually at auto parts stores, but there are some hardware stores that sell it too) for lead-acid battery "replenishment" (if the acid in them becomes too diluted from "topping up" with distilled water over time).
But HF? No - I certainly can't see where that would be allowed to be sold in any concentration to the ordinary public...
I really wish people in the know wouldn't spread stuff like this.
HF isn't untreatably deadly like dimethylmercury.
HF is a strong acid and should be treated as such. Most effects of HF are quite treatable as long as you haven't managed to somehow convert it into elemental fluorine gas.
They key is that you have to know that you've had an HF incident.
What IS nasty is that an HF burn probably doesn't hurt until far too late. HF reacts with calcium and can inactivate pain neurons. And, while a small droplet won't do it, a large HF burn can cause a heart attack because it soaks up a lot of the free calcium in your bloodstream.
So, when you go in for treatment for an HF burn the doctor needs to start giving you calcium gluconate in order to resupply your calcium.
HF is nasty, but not so nasty that semiconductor fabs work terribly hard to get rid of it. Piranha etch (HF and HNO3 at 70C) is bog standard and people work with it every day.
Constrast this to Arsine gas (AsH3--flammable and toxic--oh, the joy!) which everybody works to get rid of.
Or store it in a glass container.
My brother works in a oil refinery lab and had a HF acid escape.
Procedure for escape is jump in the lab shower, strip off and lather yourself with calcium based cream
Turning on the shower activates the lab alarm, and the medical and emergency crews turn up shortly after.
When things have settled there's a health and safety investigation / review of the incident.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...
Can’t Stop the Nitro Groups :"... this new paper’s introduction includes the phrase “In our continuing efforts to introduce as many nitro groups associated with a tetrazole ring as possible. . .” and to most organic chemists that’s roughly equivalent to saying something like “In our continuing efforts to spray as much graffiti on the snouts of salt-water crocodiles as possible. . .”[0]
Sand Won't Save You This Time: "It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively."[1]
Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane: "Hexanitro? Say what? I’d call for all the chemists who’ve ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio." [2]
Dioxygen Difluoride (aka FOOF, aka "Satan's Kimchi")[3]
[0]https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/08/15/ca...
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sa...
[2] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/11/11/th...
[3] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxylammonium_nitrate
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199600...
Some info on the payload at 6:30 mark
Edit: it seems that the orbiter was upgraded to use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide[1] from the somewhat less toxic hydrogen peroxide/JP-8 combination originally specced for its AR2-3 engine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine
[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/space/spaceplane-x-37-180957777/
"The hydrazine antidepressants...were discovered and initially marketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Most have been withdrawn due to toxicity..."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine#Occupational_hazards
I imagine they fly one and perform refurbishment and re-equip the second one while the first is flying.
There are 2 known X37Bs, but I don't think they've been up at the same time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161130130303/http://history.ms...
Hubble's mirror is probably the same [size] as a KH-11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen#Size_and_mass
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!
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.
why? the x37b has a shuttle bay at-least big enough for a solar array, i've seen pretty small waldos before.
On the other hand, sometimes the government is willing to go to extreme lengths for intel purposes. The Glomar Explorer was outrageously ambitious, although ultimately only partially successful.
Nah I think it's far more likely it really was just a research vessel for more classified experiments they didn't want on the ISS.
I used to be worried that the current trendiness of Space in the media would be a fad, gone by 10 or even 2 years from now. Such statements make me hope that —finally— people who matter have recognized both the value and inevitability of space. After that, it's all just a matter of time... wink@sagan
> it is in no way some sort of novel realization that space is important for the military.
I know, and didn't mean to imply that it was; I said "used to" because my fear is long gone, and such statements now pile up, like +1's I guess. (Upvotes are currently winning by a fair margin!)
I would however suggest that having a centralized Space command is a great leap towards building presence, solving big problems. Speaking as an EU citizen; but I'd vote for that, and with my wallet too.
It's fairly generic though. If I needed a more specific term for space planes like this, I'd probably go with orbital drone", based on terminology used in various sci-fi franchises.
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/100509...
Presuming "uncrewed" gets added to the dictionary I would expect that to prevail as the antonym for "crewless" might reasonably be "crewful", which also sounds weirder than "uncrewed"/"crewed".
I mean, you put it up there, and if the orbit is high enough, it simply stays there, no action required.
This doesn't seem to be much more impressive than a satellite that stays operational for 10+ years in orbit (and there are quite many of those).
The newsworthy portion seems to have been that it's been longer in orbit than before, and then returned.
Is it really all that impressive that it stayed 2 years in orbit before returning, instead of 1.5 years?
I'm sorry, I just don't see what the story is here.
That's OK. I still found it interesting even if it wasn't some kind of superlative.
The implication is that the US military has a vehicle that can stay on orbit for as long as they want and move around to do anything from deploying secret satellites to spying to disabling enemy spacecraft without anyone else necessarily knowing what happened.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
> The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, is an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Air Force
Nothing a Kerbal couldn't handle.
-- FTA
https://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=39025
Edit: obviously I read it wrong. Still a strange coincidence though.
I kind-of get it, that for a sufficiently timed orbit, it sees all places.. eventually. Being able to relocate means you can be where you want to be, without predictable periodicity.
Your orbital period is determined by size of your orbit, and the difference between that and the earth's rotation causes your land track to precess. For most this means your land track will eventually be over every possible point. Raising or lowering your orbit will let you find a 'flyover' intercept in fewer orbits, but it will still take time to get there. Hard to do accurately and you normally want to keep that fuel around for boosting your orbit when it degrades due to atmospheric drag.
Other kinds of orbital manoeuvres could be used, but they are even more expensive and less likely to get you were you want to be (as long as you are in an inclination that passes over your desired target).
The main reason for this is that orbits are characterised (pretty much exactly) by your position/velocity pair. Every orbit your position and velocity will repeat, absent any external forces. Modelling any acceleration as instantaneous (which is pretty close) you can see that you can only ever directly change your velocity. Accelerate prograde and your orbit will be raised on the other side of your orbit; when you complete one of your new orbits you will be back in the exact same location, but with your new speed.
I mean make a change of plane in unpredictable ways. You can't just scoot sideways for no apparent reason, clearly orbit means what it says. But the point would be to make changes of orbit at cost, to get somewhere faster than waiting for the orbit you are in, to get there.
(height and speed over a point on the ground being assumed to be less important than actually being over it, when you want it to be over it)
Here's a TLE from Oct 17: https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=42932