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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

I want to know what this thing is so bad. Also wonder what are the odds that space force has put people into space and brought them back at this point, and what is the timeframe they envision for doing such things if not.

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The X-37B operates in GEO, which is the only hint we need.

Missions objectives will include satellite inspection, signal interception, and (unacknowledged) tampering / destruction.

Payloads will be geared for medium-range surveillance (small telescope for optical/thermal imaging at a couple hundred km), ELINT (radios and antennas for snooping / hacking), and probably a manipulator arm or two to "reach out and touch someone."

They probably have some sort of kinetic and/or electronic pulse weapons, but of course it would be highly classified and deniable.

Missions are 100% unmanned. I'd argue that's the whole point of the X-37B program: to develop technology to perform ~all the classified mission capabilities we could do with Shuttle, except unmanned.

I would think that the Mission objectives are broader than that in you can basically swap out any mission payload that would be too costly to launch and develop a whole satellite for and task it quickly.

So... not the totally innocent "next gen technology testing platform" as often claimed, eh?

> The X-37B operates in GEO

So far it hasn't. Out of the six missions so far [1], the highest one only reached altitude 404 km [2]:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#Operational_histor...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-299

Edit: or maybe 444 km [3]:

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-212#Altitude_and_ground_tr...

Thanks for the correction. I had it confused with the GSSAP birds.[0]

Mission and payload is still basically the same, but targeting LEO spy satellites. Russia has similar aspirations (and probably capabilities).[1,2]

[0] https://breakingdefense.com/2022/01/space-force-plans-multip...

[1] https://time.com/5779315/russian-spacecraft-spy-satellite-sp...

[2] https://npolicy.org/securing-our-military-satellites-against...

The shuttle could take a whole satellite in its payload bay and bring it back. Obviously the X-37B will never be able to do that simply because it's so much smaller.

I don't think it'll have the same capabilities or even the same goals as the shuttle.

Semi tangent, the MKV thing is so rad, I don't understand how it kills ballistic missiles but yeah -- I thought this thing was supposed to operate in space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM

There's some hints about the kind of experiment payloads have flown: not all classified, not all military, some mundane long duration materials and radiation exposure studies it sounds like.

https://spacenews.com/x-37b-spaceplane-to-carry-dod-and-nasa...

Right, and the classified ones are probably more like "what does space radiation do to uranium/plutonium/LiD/etc" and less like "if we take the Mexico Mummified Alien Bodies into the Van Allen belts, do they come to life?"

EDIT: I'd still watch the movie though.

Would definitely watch that movie.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0084796/

Pretty close. Got the MST3000 treatment too, but honestly I kind of liked it. Campy but eerie. Could be remade really well.

Haha! We were just talking about remakes of movies rarely working out so well as far as making the story any better. I guess they make out well in enough in regards to the producers making money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234220

Filmed in an actual university by the look of it. It's funny how low budget films sometimes look more realistic than big budget ones, because they can't afford to build sets, and have to use the real thing. The brief biology lab scene in Primer is the same.

I was going to say that of course a bunch of Space Force people have already been put into space, but I just looked and it appears that none of the active duty military astronauts have actually been transferred to the Space Force; they're all still with their original services.

I don't know if the plan is to keep things that way or not. So far there has only been one round of astronaut selection since the founding of the Space Force. But the older services still have all the aviators, flight engineers / officers, and flight surgeons who have traditionally been competitive for selection.

The Space Force is concerned with space assets, not literally soldiers in space.

Source: Multiple friends who work in Space Force.

But what about hand-to-hand space combat! Are you telling me there's no market for my astronaut ghilli suits?

Sure, but the same is true of the Army. And yet there are several US Army officers (literal Soldiers) who are active astronauts. I'm just surprised that they haven't been transferred into the Space Force yet along with the many other space operations folks from each service that have been transferred to comprise the bulk of the uniformed Space Force "Guardians."

Edit: I found one. (https://www.nasa.gov/people/nick-hague/) "In 2021, Hague voluntarily transferred from the United States Air Force to the United States Space Force."

There's almost no way, unless I'm missing something. This thing is in orbit for over a year at a time, even the ISS can't support people that long without resupply.

Sadly, there will be people that wholeheartedly believe that humans have been aboard in direct conflict with this kind of evidence.

Plus people miss the ship is very small. The payload bay is only 4x7 ft and 225 kg. It looks like a Shuttle and people think it's another Shuttle but it's only 1/4 the size.

It's all the Shuttle the military needs

Air force participation increased the design size of the space shuttle.

Only because they thought they were going to be deploying pre-KH11 satellites that needed film/equipment retrieval/renewal.

I thought it was more to actually launch the newer keyholes and to bring them back in case of repair. After all one of those cost as much as an aircraft carrier, you don't want to scrap one for a minor problem.

KH-11 was cheaper than KH-9 by far ($3B vs $16B inflation adjusted, both for 20 satellites), each KH-9 had 4 re-entry vehicles, so you could only really do 4 passes per satellite before needing a new one (or some way to replace the module that housed the RVs).

It's likely that 'we might need to bring them back...' was justification for USAF remaining as a voice in the shuttle program after KH-11 rendered the satellite fleet reusable, though.

The shuttle was made big enough to retrieve X-37b.

Ignore the dates, they have time travel, too.

Yes, moving all of the shuttles into museums was just a to fake out the Russians. I'm pretty sure when JFK retuns to Dallas, he's returning in a shuttle

Big enough to deliver one super-soldier anywhere on Earth at a moment's notice.

I'm not sure how to drop a no-spoilers Seven Eves reference in here, but suffice it to say, I thought it was a pretty good Stephenson sci-fi book & x37b showed up in spectacular fashion.

Perhaps its only purpose is to keep adversaries guessing?

Pretty unlikely- you don't actually need to put people in space for most military purposes, at least not anymore. Most human spaceflight missions can be done far cheaper by not using humans, especially when we have computers and AI as good as we have today. If the military needed humans in space to do something they would probably just have it be a classified part of a normal astronaut's mission or something

Yeah you don’t need astronauts in space, but wouldn’t you want to be prepared to have them way before you needed to

Sure, we already have that, it’s NASA. Most NASA astronauts are former test pilots who would have no concerns doing military missions

It's arguably never been necessary to have humans in space (EDIT: for military purposes). The USAF's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was cancelled back in the late sixties because even then, reconnaissance satellites worked well enough that the added complexity and cost of a crewed station wasn't worth it.

I think there are real benefits to having people in space for scientific purposes but not really for military ones. Plus a lot of human space travel is preparing for an eventuality that we will have a moon or mars base which will need people to run it.

Forgot to specify that I meant military purposes specifically, just edited it. I think the necessity of humans for scientific purposes is arguable, but it's definitely not as clear-cut.

If you assume humans will never live on a non earth planet then it has literally 0 value lol but if we set up a moon or mars base in the future it will hold a lot of value

It's collecting Astrophage.

great book

Movie in production now.

> I want to know what this thing is so bad.

Its a small space plane used for materials and operations testing..

> Also wonder what are the odds that space force has put people into space and brought them back at this point,

Literally zero.

> and what is the timeframe they envision for doing such things if not.

Not sure why Space Force would be interested in that. Not anytime soon.

It's not even big enough to carry people.

It looks like a space shuttle but it's tiny compared to it :)

What do you think these people would be doing?

Probably nothing, testing out systems that can support them

It’s an anti-proton collector

It’s really not that special in my eyes. It’s a miniature space shuttle, minus humans. The purpose is 100% classified but you can guess the usual suspects (advanced sensor testing, experimental payloads, testing space warfare / asset manipulation, etc).

I really doubt they have put humans inside of it, given that they have kept it up there for year-long plus periods over its lifetime.

What makes it not special? As far as I know, this is the only spacecraft ever created with these capabilities....

Yeah it's way too small to be human rated especially because it just doesn't have the space for consumables for more than a day or so.

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