Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane passes 400 days in orbit

What makes you think we're not in a Cold War? There are plenty of countries that are each other's adversaries and are actively trying to undermine one another. Perhaps we aren't in a bilateral Cold War, but it's not like we suddenly have world peace.

The new Cold War; government vs citizens.

> We're not exactly in a cold war anymore

你好!

>>If you have patience, perhaps for a doomsday weapon or strategic deterrent, you don't need wings, giant engines, or much of a parachute. Its obviously a sensor platform not a weapon.

Thank you. The other thing is; everything that goes up must come down. With the X-37 you have control of WHERE it comes down, and less exclusively, when. So much less risk of your tech falling into enemy hands.

Prefixes are mostly political in purpose and don't strictly describe the aircraft mission. The F-22 was the F/A-22 for a while, the F-117 was a bomber, the X-35 was a prototype for the F-35 and thus should have been the YF-35, and the SR-71 was designated RS-71 until a flubbed presidential announcement. Everyone knows what these aircraft really do though.

Good question, perhaps giving it an actual name would reveal too much. General consensus seems to think its a 'deploy on demand' reconnaissance transport (basically a bunch of signal or optical gear in the payload that it can point at various places and then return). That would make it something like an MQ-37 or RQ-37.

For the lazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

that wikipedia photo is it standing on it's tail, so it's 30', hence the scale with the human.

Yes, but: nuclear weapons in space are prohibited by at least two treaties to which the US is a signatory; any point on the globe worth hitting with conventional weapons would be far easier and cheaper to hit with, say, a cruise missile or a drone-launched Hellfire; last but not least, you'd first have to build a weapon to fit in this thing's cargo bay, which almost certainly has not been done because, given the first two mentioned points, it's not worth anyone's time or money to bother.

To understand the X-37, you need a reasonable knowledge of the origins of the Space Shuttle program. The only reason that program came to even the bastardized fruition it did was because the Air Force signed on, and they did so only because they needed a means of servicing and maintaining their orbital equipment. In theory, and occasionally in practice, this means involved actual human astronauts going up and doing spanner work on satellites in orbit, but this was expensive and fraught with undue difficulty; cheaper and easier was simply to stuff the whole satellite into the Shuttle's payload bay and haul it back down the gravity well for repair, refit, and relaunch, and indeed many Space Shuttle missions involved precisely this evolution. (It's probable, if uncertain due to the Air Force's bent for secrecy with regard to their payloads, that the Shuttle was used to return some or most of these satellites to orbit; on the other hand, a Titan-IV's probably cheaper, and the Air Force has used plenty of those, too. I don't know much about what goes into that sort of decision.)

The X-37, then, far from being some kind of conspiracy-theory FOBS, is just a Space-Shuttle-style "space truck". The major difference is that technology has now reached a point where it's possible for such a vehicle to satisfy the Air Force's mission parameters without having to involve all the complex, costly, and potentially disastrous encumbrances required to carry living humans into space.

Edit! I've finally just recalled the name of the book from which I gained my understanding of the politicking which took the Space Shuttle program from initial conception to final operational "Space Transportation System". That book is The Space Shuttle Decision, published by NASA as part of the NASA History Series, and you can read it online at http://www.nss.org/resources/library/shuttledecision/ and, oh, probably lots of other places as well. A bit dry, but marvelously detailed and surprisingly objective given its origins; I recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the history of its subject matter.

Yes. Read about Project Thor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Tho...

A payload of slightly smaller than described tungsten rods would fit on a craft of this size, and according to the article this type of weapon is not prohibited by any current treaty. It could hit anywhere with practically no warning and no need to enter airspace. It's almost impossible to defend against.

Scary shit.

Orbital based weapons aren't really an advantage, as it turns out. A weapon in orbit has to wait until it's over the target before it can attack, which could be a long wait. It also has all of the problems of putting anything in orbit, maintenance, station keeping, longevity, etc. In contrast, a weapon designed to fly through space on a ballistic trajectory can be much simpler and cheaper. Moreover, because they start on the Earth ICBMs can always hit their targets within a single sub-orbital hop, they don't have to wait for attack windows to line up.

The concept isn't new -- it's called kinetic bombardment[1].

Generally speaking, the amount of damage for a tungsten rod the size of a telephone pole would match low-yield atomic detonations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

Think beyond hitting targets on earth, and even in orbit. Something like the X-37 allows the Air Force to go up and capture another satellite, perform modifications to it, or even bring it back down to Earth for analysis.

No need to blast enemy satellites out of orbit, just rocket up and snatch it.

The Soviets had a system that was based on putting warheads into a fractional orbit, rather than on a ballistic path - Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_...

I can't find any details, but most descriptions seem to imply that they needed to have a rocket engine on the warhead to come out of orbit (which is what I would expect).

You'd also need some retrograde thrust on the payload, and for your orbit to be inclined over the target.

Yes it is capable. There's a 2.1m x 1.2m payload bay[1]. Various nefarious things that go boom on a large scale will fit in that hole.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#X-37B_2

Some people say the "rods from god" idea is really deployed on satellites. The USAF could make tungsten metal spears fall out of space and hit precise targets with the force of a small nuclear blast.

It's not just the payload - the entire airframe comes back and lands...