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 them to spy on the rest of the World, they remain mostly shrouded.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
This is overselling it. They were aerodynamically very similar, but the shuttle had the SSME (space shuttle main engines, ~250tonnes thrust each) burning from liftoff to orbit, while Buran had only orbital thrusters (9 tonnes thrust)- all the thrust from liftoff through orbit came from the engines on Energia + boosters.
That said, it does seem that at least one of the X-37Bs actually is reusable, in the sense that that it seems to have no major disassembly occur between flights. But it is so closely guarded that we really have only hints, not facts.
The Buran launch pad, by contrast, is able to rotate 360 degrees. They could have just rotated the pad to be correctly aligned before launch. But no, they execute the same complicated, mission-risk-adding roll maneuver verbatim. Exactly like shuttle.
I guarantee you the Buran was running stolen launch sequence code from the Shuttle.
Here's the Energiya launch site (a sequence of 360° photos, you can look around). What part of it could rotate, in your opinion? Keep in mind the tower is also missing the massive supports and the cosmonaut escape route, a humongous tube slide that couldn't move anywhere.
You might be thinking of the first R-7 launchpads that had to be rotated to a fixed angle before the launch because the control system from 1950's was unable to compute the roll maneuver in flight, aerodynamics being too complex for it.
Wikipedia makes no mention of that reasoning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program
The roll is part of the gravity turn, every craft does that kind of stuff to 'aim'.
Food for thought, even if they did steal code, what would that have looked like in the 70s and 80s? Printing out reams of paper? Wheeling in a giant hard disk?
We "crudely sent people up" with the Shuttle because sending people up with the Shuttle was part of what we wanted to do with the thing. If there had been sufficient demand for fully-unmanned Shuttle missions, it could've been done; the fact that it wasn't means that there were too few such missions that couldn't be better served by other vehicles (that didn't have to worry about carrying around a ton of baggage focused around keeping people alive).
> a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle).
That said, landing the shuttle was a challenge and an achievement. No pilot would give up the opportunity to perform such a prestigious landing. And the shuttle commander was always a pilot.
Apparently noways a lot of industries are loosing institutional knowledge/expertise built and past down by each generation. because there is no one to pass it down to.
Edit: a car in comparison was going for 7000 rubles.
> and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles
In my opinion, STS-1 was far more dangerous - and lucky - than even Vostok 1. Vostok 1 at least was using a rocket that had a flight history. And no shaky solids. And a proven heat shield. And though both flights had ejection seats, only one was able to launch those seats clear of the rocket exhaust.
My wife's dad worked at NASA in the 60s, 70s and 80s - he was appointed to be the manager of one of the Apollo missions that was later cancelled. According to him Congress told NASA they'll partially fund the Shuttle program and NASA can ask the Air Force for any extra money required. Air Force involvement ruined the Shuttle, as the military wanted to have options to use the Shuttle for military operations (such as stealing Soviet satellites out of Soviet radar coverage, dropping nuclear bombs from outside any ground defense range and launching the Shuttle from military fields).
The other thing that ruined the Shuttle was NASA was not able to make any real improvements to it. The initial design had a lot of shortcomings and there was never enough funding to improve it.
The Buran design process is pretty well documented in general, and a lot was written about it. The original starting OS-120 concept was pretty much a verbatim copy of the layout and high-level decisions of the Shuttle (they didn't have the "NASA plans", they only had a layout and open data), but they a) realized they couldn't make the SRBs as they used liquid fuels for ICBMs and didn't have the production capability for such large diameter solid rockets, and b) their own additional requirements crept in. So the design evolved over time into an entirely different one.
>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 heat tiles used a different material, and it didn't burn up, so this makes little sense.
Maybe you should discover some other magazines.
There were a number of classified space shuttle activities.
For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-C
The cargo retrieval potential was also suspect. Nukes are the one thing that could never be de-orbited into the atmosphere. Shuttle looked like something that could enable nuke weaponry in orbit.
Newer ICBMs are actually orbital, so they don't have to go so high and thus be visible over the horizon to radar. But they obviously deorbit after less than half an orbit. It also enables them to get to the target in much, much less time.
1 https://mashable.com/article/nasa-space-shuttle-secret-spy-s...
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
I have read in several places that one of the USAF's requests, re the dimensions of the Shuttle's Cargo Bay, was that it be big enough to hold a Delta upper stage (I think technically called an Altair) and payload.
The idea was that the Shuttle would take the upper stage and payload to LEO, and then the Altair would boost it into GEO (or trans-lunar) orbit. No need to jettison a payload fairing.
Supposedly NASA eventually won and quashed the idea, since it involved putting a non-man-rated upper stage into the cargo bay of a manned craft. And as far as I know, nothing more powerful than some maneuvering rockets was ever carried in in the Cargo Bay.
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.
For example we probably don’t have anti-gravity, or anything that’s a huge leap from our understanding of the laws of physics. But the military may have single-stage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft, and are keeping it close to their chest, while putting on a “show” with far less capable demonstrators as a fake out.
?
Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...
Don't underestimate what's up there. It's provably ahead of the civilian world by a long ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
> the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA, including the Hubble telescope.
Hubble was designed in the 70s and launched in the 90s. So what if the NRO can spend more money and get something slightly better, how is that surprising?
The NRO had crazy secret tech up its sleeves. It is a part of the U.S. government. It is far from the only such example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN#/media/File:Janes...
The NRO farms out most of it’s work product now to commercial firms.
That's probably true for weapons tech. It's probably very wrong for surveillance tech. I think the Snowden docs make it quite clear that the NSA does not "tend to oversell their capabilities" (at least not externally).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launc...
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" :)
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.
It's probably something NRO related.
The idea of using shuttles to manage or deliver a nuclear deterrent/first strike capability in space was probably considered at some point during its development. If there was one reason to scratch this idea, it would be that launching a nuclear shuttle would have been highly auspicious - and likely treated as the equivalent of an ICBM launch. It's highly unlikely that permanent orbital munitions would be tolerated either.
> in theory 3 space shuttles could deliver ~90 large warheads or up to 900 smaller warheads.
And even if you could get three shuttles airborne at once, where would you land them? Also, I'm not sure if the Vandenburg launch could land after a single orbit, I think that the Florida launches would land a white sands.
> Space Shuttles would also have the ability to identify hard to find targets such as mobile ICBM launchers.
However, I am looking at the Wikipedia list of runways in service today. I'm not about to embark on looking at historical data.
Yes, most (maybe all) shuttle rollouts were less than the 10000 length of the Machrihanish runway, but that's really cutting it close. SLF Florida is 15000 feet. But I guess if the situation is so bad that the shuttle needs to come down outside the US, it's probably not going to be used again so why not mow the grass at the end of the runway.
The core shuttle design to have rocket engines on the orbiter makes substantially more sense if there was at one point a planned orbital delta-v component. Orbital delta-v really only makes sense for military applications involving satellite capture/servicing or nuclear strike. As all of these can be better done with missiles/robots, there isn't much advantage in a space shuttle except for the case where the payload must be returned from orbit. On a polar trajectory the only use cases where this would make sense are spy satellite returns or weapons missions. Replacing the spy satellite entirely is obviously cheaper than returning and refurbishing it - which leaves a weapons use case which was likely discarded sometime late in the program when it was determined to be logistically infeasible or difficult to pull off.
Regardless, ICBM's would probably be more efficient way to do it.
Also, the brute force of a nuke doesn't really combine well with subtile operations. Unless you want to 'clandestinely' wipe out a whole city.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but your reasoning is nonsensical.
There's encryption in use the NSA can't crack (SSL). So they..record the entire internet because someday they may be able to crack it. Sounds impossible, but they do. I don't know how many racks in how many data centers it takes, but money is no object.
Create an entire war on drugs to..keep a few percent of the black population from voting. Sounds like evil on a scale that's impossible to believe.
I'm sure your a decent person, which is why you discount how evil evil can get.
*Deployment of X-37B space plane For all its features and achievements, the primary objectives of the X-37B have remained largely classified during its existence, which has now been for more than a decade. The secrecy over the purposes of the space plane has even prompted Russia to say that apart from carrying out surveillance, the space plane could be harboring nuclear warheads.
While the mystery over this remains unresolved...*
https://interestingengineering.com/us-military-orbital-recor...
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.
*The secrecy over the purposes of the space plane has even prompted Russia to say that apart from carrying out surveillance, the space plane could be harboring nuclear warheads.*
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_O...
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.
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.
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
But could you imagine if we could spend all those trillions on something good (enabled by the other guys doing the same). I know, impossible. But still, imagine.
Though, before we do it, let's take a moment to consider most people do not look good at all in leather trenchcoats.
I cannot imagine because you haven’t said anything different than history and the current state of the world. Trillions are being spent on what a people think is good for them. But you don’t think it’s good what the trillions are being spent on. And so it goes.
Wolves would eat every deer if they could. They don't not because they think it's a bad idea, but because either they can't because the deer are good at not being eaten, or when they get too close to that goal, they run out of deer and starve into a smaller population that lets the deer recover.
Any creature that "wins" the "arms race" against its prey either finds new prey or goes extinct. And species that loses the arms race better hope their predators have no other prey and starve to extinction before they all get eaten, or go extinct themselves.
The only reason there's a predator-prey balance at all is a kind of survivor bias: anything not in balance is already filtered out.
Not all balanced relationships are predator-prey. Viruses aren't really predators as such, but they still evolve to a balance against immune systems. If they get too good, they burn out their host populations and go extinct (SARS, say, though there have surely been countless natural examples over history). If they don't adapt in time to better immune systems, again, curtains. You could say smallpox as an example, though the last step in the arms race was an Outside Context Problem[1] from the virus's perspective.
Similarly, any overly-large step in weaponry can be just as deadly as not enough: working Star Wars missile defense could easily have resulted in the end of the world, as would not keeping up with the Soviets. That shaky balance is partly deliberate, and, if you're into the anthropic principle, partly also survivorship bias.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Pr...
It would be fabulous if we could be more like chimps than we have been recently, but of course we have the potential to be much better than chimps. Actually most humans are much better than chimps. It is we Americans (and Russians, and Ethiopians, and whoever else is currently fighting wars voluntarily) who should be better.
I'm not disputing that things come out of war, it's just not an especially great ROI.
ARPANET was military in origin, but "the Internet" happened at CERN, a civilian project.
The ROI on CERN then, is astronomical, as it only cost a few billion. Less than a month of a war in a desert that achieved...what?
And if ARPANET hadn't happened (because the US wasn't worried about having a chunk of comms destroyed in a nuclear war), the NPL in the UK was also working on packet switching networking in the 60s, and that was a civilian-industrial thing. So something roughly Internet-shaped would probably have happened anyway.
While on the subject of the NPL, they also developed the first atomic clock. So then GPS also has a non-military underpinning.
The web happened at CERN, not the internet.
The medical advances of military spending alone are breathtaking.
You can fund medical research without spending a million dollars sending a man to a desert, having his legs blown off, and flying him home. Hell, the US especially could actually use that research on civilians without bankrupting them!
And what about rebuilding bombed out cities? Is there so little else to improve?
It’s also a sociological trick. Societies support massive military R&D in ways that are impossible for public projects. We could wish upon a star that humans weren’t as we are. Or we can work with reality.
Military innovation is also historically a jobs program.
Check out how many states & companies are part of R&D/Manufacturing for the F-35.
There is still a gigantic opportunity cost of bringing together resources to produce an explosion rather then something more useful.
The old 'its going back into the economy' is some sneaky Keynsian language that only applies in certain macro economic situation and even that was mostly wrong and a misunderstanding of economic theory in the late 30s.
It's pretty clear that without those brilliant minds that invented nukes we'd be at WW4 or 5 by now.
Then again it might have been less obvious if the USA didn’t push its military alliance towards the east contrary to the opinions of its own diplomats for the past thirty years at the expense of its stated goal of furthering peace and been consistently working on disturbing the balance with projects like the BMD.
So actually it’s not pretty clear at all.
In the same way, I believe that Russia should bear the long term consequences of the war but that the constant delivery of advanced weapons without pushing Ukraine and Russia to negotiate ending the conflict is mostly a cynical geopolitical play allowing the USA to weaken one of his opponent at the expense of foreign lives.
The world is not black and white and standing on the side which seems morally right doesn’t mean you are not exposed yourself to propaganda.
You don't have to be a Russian to understand that. You just have to be willing to look for yourself and see America's war victims, the endless streams of refugees it has created around the world, the piles of human waste that were created for the sake of America's warmonger industries.
For a start, it was an excuse for WWII ("we don't want to invade Czechoslovakia but we've been pushed to it by the iniquity of Versailles"). And then the nuclear arms race on both sides ("we're only building missiles because you are"). And Afghanistan/Iraq ("you left us no choice/this is for your own benefit").
When you're getting into a war it's usually a good idea for a leader to blame the other guy for the cost and damage.
It doesn't make it right, it's just that along with "nuh uh not touching you", "they started it" and "stop hitting yourself", it's a common pattern to see.
- NATO countries have nukes, therefore they don't get invaded
- Russia has nukes, therefore they don't get invaded
- Ukraine does not have nukes, therefore despite the non-proliferation and Russian friendship treaties which guarantee not being invaded, they got invaded anyway because they have no deterrent and nobody gives a fuck
It's really as simple as that.
Bonus points if his manager is someone like Boris Johnson.
So to answer your question, Google makes making spookie systems cool and profitable. Without them, the spookie systems would need to be built and deployed by 3 letter 'alphabet' type agencies and your local area geek may not be able to handle that much cognitive dissonance.
This is a deep and important misunderstanding of weapons.
According to this argument, the uncountable trillions spent of the US nuclear arsenal was wasted, since it was never used.
In reality the main use for most weapons is deterrent!! If you have enough weapons standing around, you can avoid war, and the weapons have produced life!
Ukraine wishes they had our defenses. As do many states.
Our military expenditures keep not only ourselves safe, but also our allies and trade partners.
The default for all evolved life on this planet is to harness the energy of other systems. Humans are no different. Pretending the world was ever or will ever be at peace is a self-delusion.
Strength keeps aggressors at bay. Nature naturally evolves along these lines.
All those brilliant people making deadlier weapons are saving lives by making non-violent conflict cheaper and better than violent conflict.