US military's X-37B space plane lands, ending record-breaking mystery mission
space.com
space.com
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.
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
The first generation of space power delivery is probably going to be passive as well, maybe a low power echo signal for target acquisition, but not complicated protocols to negotiate power or data flows.
And that doesn't include the cost (both money and carbon) of launching all the collection and transmission equipment into space in the first place.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2019/10/11/....
Beaming solar energy from space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438372 - Nov 2022 (60 comments)
and sundry others:
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrazine#section=...
(But seriously that stuff is awful)
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.
Do you offer even a single shred of evidence whatsoever? No.
Not only would it fail to increase American nuclear strike/retaliation capabilities by any meaningful margin, but if discovered it would set off a massive nuclear arms race in space which would be massively destabilizing and benefits no-one which is exactly why all the major players signed that "no nukes in space" treaty in the first place.
> 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.
No to all points. Nukes don't just unintentionally go off and hypothetically if the did people on the ground wouldn't normally expect the very noticeable trail of a reentry vehicle screaming in from space immediately beforehand. That kind of thing is very noticeable, go look at ICBM test footage. If you want to nuke someone without warning you use stealthy cruise missiles because those don't tend to get noticed until they detonate. Any nuke carried by the X-37 also lacks the delta V to ever get to any dangerous asteroid you might want to try to intercept.
"Look Ma! No Nukez!"
> If terrorists are building a nuke you can drop it on them and make it look like they blew themselves up.
Not even going to get into what a ridiculous fantasy scenario that is. And anyway, has the US demonstrated any reluctance in dropping conventional warheads on terrorists?
> Last ditch asteroid defense.
This comes across as an idea one would develop from watching tv shows and movies, as it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
<satire> Every time I see someone mention that Biden won the US presidential election 2020, I like to remind people that the election was stolen. Do i have proof? No. I just believe in an informed citizenry.</satire>
"Claims that are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
-Hitchens' Razor