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.
When we built the Space Shuttle, russia saw that we were building it, did some napkin math and decided it made absolutely no sense what we were doing, and that it then must have had some secret military purpose rather than any stated purpose. So they built their own lest their be some kind of space weaponry gap. Turns out that, while there were of course some military plans for the space shuttle, it just actually didn't make sense, and Russian paranoia led to the irrational design being built twice!
They didn't just go out and build some. The KGB was stealing NASA's plans. 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 Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.[1] Then the USSR collapsed. Currently they are sitting in decaying hangars in Baikonur, just rotting away. There's video on youtube of people sneaking in (it's a guarded base), flying drones around them and climbing around in and out of them. It's pretty cool. [2]
That's just plain wrong. Energiya/Buran was a fundamentally different system from STS, and only had a superficially similar look, as the silhouette was the only copied part to conform with party requirements. For one, the orbiter was a separate autonomous spacecraft with its own fuel tanks and the main engines, not an integral part of the launcher. It used LOX/RP1 - in orbit! - for both RCS and main engines, with larger dV budget as a result. The control system was absolutely different. Etc etc etc.
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.
My favorite tidbit about the Buran is that it executes a complicated roll maneuver immediately after lift off. You can see the Shuttle do the exact same thing when it launches from Cape Canaveral. The reason is that the lunch pad at the Cape is orientated particular way because it was an upgraded launch pad from the Saturn V, and they couldn’t just rebuild from scratch to meet Shuttle specs. So it rolls after clearing the launch tower to achieve the correct orientation.
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.
So much wrong here. Seems to be a trend on hn this morning.
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?
Thanks for all the corrections everyone! I trusted the source of this story, but it looks like I should have investigated myself a bit more before repeating. Glad to be corrected!
The Soviets didn't copy most of the design - actually Buran is a completely different design from the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle had a big tank attached to it at the start, but the main engines where part of the Shuttle. Buran was launched by an Energia rocket (which was planned to eventually be reused like Falcon 9) and the main engines were on the rocket, not on the shuttle.
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 did some cool things though. It took off, orbited the earth twice, then landed pretty close to target completely remotely. Apparently it only lost like 8 heat tiles on that flight too. Imagine if the program really got going and they were running automated space shuttle missions while the U.S. was still crudely sending people up. That would have been an even bigger a PR disaster for NASA than the shuttle disasters were already.
All of Shuttle launch and most of reentry was automated; the landing itself was always done manually but a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle).
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).
Actually, the only hardware missing for a fully automated landing was a relay to deploy the landing gear. Later shuttle flights - maybe only one - actually carried a wiring harness that _could_ have been configured to enable remote / automated landing gear deploy.
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.
They had like 300 million people population and for a long time were the country training the largest number of engineers every year. So yeah a small percentage of these engineers did turn out to be brilliant.
Its not only the populations size. Technical people were precised as prestigious and well paid. After soviet collapse, this changed causing exodus of talent to west and overall decline in numbers.
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.
Technical people were never prestigious nor well paid. That was not desired in communism where workers were presented as ruling class. Engineers salary was 110-130 rubles, casual worker ~70 rubles and small caliber boss ~200 rubles. Depending on workplace engineers could steal way less than workers (who had direct access to product) and resourceful bosses.
Edit: a car in comparison was going for 7000 rubles.
I believe (not an expert) that during Stalin times technical people were very well paid. But Khrushchev returned to the policy of leveling (uravnilovka) and tried to make worker and engineer salaries the same.
Fair enough. I'm not saying they were necessarily unique. And they did do a good job of doing horrible things to much of the talent that got to the top.
> The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.
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.
Today the Shuttle is largely regarded as refurbishable, not reusable. Reusability was the goal, but the SRBs actually cost more to recover and refurbish than to just spin a new casing, and the orbiter was so thoroughly disassembled and inspected after each flight - including disassembling each SSME - that no definition of reusable for any other product would apply.
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.
For certain definitions of reusable, yes. Certainly retaining the SSME's for refurbishment was a big accomplishment. I wish Energia+buran could have maintained funding for a few decades - concepts for the flyback boosters were cool and possibly promised to be more quickly/reliably reusable than the space shuttle ended up being.
> and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles
This is not true so far as I know. If you have some source documenting heat damage to the orbiter I'd love to see it. I believe that the Buran lost about half a dozen tiles on reentry, contrast with STS-1 which lost more than a dozen. In fact, the maiden launch of Columbia was actually delayed over a year because when transporting the shuttle something like 2000 tiles were lost on the flight - subsonic on the back of a 747.
The 747 flight? Yeah, in retrospect STS-1 was lucky on so many counts. And so were at least half a dozen other shuttle flights. In one incident a missing tile on descend allowed the hot plasma to interact with the airframe. By sheer 1 in 24,300 chance that tile was covering a steel antenna, which melted. Had that been almost any other tile, it would have melted the aluminum airframe.
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.
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) is more accurate regarding its only and uncrewed flight. Especially interesting is the automatic landing. Oh, and it has something about the tiles, too.
This newer research by Bart Hendrickx sheds a new light on the decision. [1] [2] The actual decision to build it was made by engineers, not the party or the paranoid military, and was based on wrong assumptions, like the US military requirements that were already known to be dropped, not making it into the final Shuttle design.
My understanding is the space shuttle was originally slated to have less cargo space but the airforce demanded more cargo space for reasons they never fully elaborated on. It was speculated they might’ve wanted their own vehicle to capture satellites or launch a space weapon. So the Soviet Union’s paranoia did have some justification. With that said, at least as far as we know, the space shuttle was never used for such things.
It's kind of an open secret that the space shuttle payload bay dimensions were specified to fit the satellites the NRO used[1]. Similarly, the Hubble Space Telescope is widely acknowledged to be based on the KH-11 Kennen, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is unused NRO hardware from the Future Imagery Architecture[2]
The actual weapon issue came from the wings. They were far too big. They were designed for a massive cross-range, such as a single surprise overflight then return to the launch center rather than risk overflying the target twice. That looked very much like a weapons delivery profile.
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.
Actually, intercontinental suborbital trajectories get even higher than the space station. The space station is only 400 km up.
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.
The cross range capability was supposedly also intended for military reconnaissance missions. Back then film cameras were still used. So they wanted to be able to launch from California into a polar orbit, make a single pass over the USSR, and land back at the launch site for immediate film processing. Of course they never actually flew such a mission.
It's almost certain the secret mission was to capture a satellite in a single orbit, that's the only reason for the wings to be so big, in addition to the cargo space. If you're in space for a long time, you can time your deorbit so that you're landing close to KSC, but in a single orbit Earth's rotation gets you about 20 degrees away, so you need good gliding and steering to get back. Scott Manley has a good video about this.
> the airforce demanded more cargo space for reasons they never fully elaborated on
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.
in the 1980s Reagan's defense department executed a series of (still classified) missions using an all-military crew taking the shuttle to the moon known as Project Athena.
Dude, the Space Shuttle totally had enough delta v to get to the moon. If you don't believe me, why don't you ask Louie Armstrong yourself? /s (I know the xkcd I'm ripping of says Lance Armstrong, but I like the idea of a jazz musician on the moon better than the idea of a troubled athlete.)
I think you missed the "/s". There's no way the Space Shuttle Launch System has enough delta v to reach the moon. For one, the need the IUS or another booster on satellites released by the Space Shuttle that need to make it to geosynchronous orbit, which is still significantly less delta v than a translunar orbit.
In fairness to the Soviets, a lot of the design of the Shuttle was constrained by requirements the Air Force put in for military purposes so that they'd contribute to the expense too. Except they backed out after the design was finalized.
That's because the Space Shuttle was supposed to carry out military missions too, and the USAF made lots of design requirements that made the Shuttle not really viable.
I wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, it’s worth the wait
This is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.
To be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.
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.
I mean at this point we’re crossing over into conspiracy theory territory, but I think the most realistic scenarios are where we are doing things that are on the edge of what’s possible.
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.
Wasn't trying to cross in to conspiracy territory at all, really wanted to gauge what others knew about resources determining where we are as a whole I guess. Well, as far as public domain knowledge goes. I don't believe the military / government has anything outside of what "known" physics allows of course. But at the same time we are always learning new things about how things interact and can be used.
No they really didn't. The Soviets, North Vietnamese, and North Koreans all detected and tracked the A-12 / SR-71 planes during operational missions. They didn't know all the details, but the existence wasn't at all a secret to our adversaries.
It doesn't take much guess work. The Delta IV has been used for more military missions than public or commercial ones. That's the space vehicle of choice for military satellites.
Knowing where the other powers' silos and possibly subs are is better than worrying about it. Having them know that you know means it's not worth it for them to press the big red button. Military intelligence supports the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which is what's keeping us all alive.
Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves? Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades (actual war is mostly a numbers game so having a plane that's 2x better is not very useful if the other side has 10x as many). If anything militaries around the world tend to oversell their capabilities.
Big reason why this is advanced also was no one other than the military ever had a need for this kind of tech. Sometimes private sector is more advanced like when it comes to silicon fabrication, but those advancements will usually get incorporated very quickly if they are applicable.
Granted, it's pretty wild that they fixed some film cameras to a rocket and sent it to space. But neither the delivery vehicle (Titan 3) nor the film cameras attached to parachutes was some super secretive ground-breaking tech.
The entire existence of the NRO was a secret until an unredacted congressional budget report accidentally was entered into the record in ~1990. The NRO donated two unlaunched, out-of-date satellites to NASA in 2011 and the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA had, including the Hubble telescope. And these were the satellites that were operational decades previously some estimates saying the model was launched originally in the mid-70s.[1]
Don't underestimate what's up there. It's provably ahead of the civilian world by a long ways.
How is the existence of the NRO a counter to "Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves"? Like why would it matter if it was the Air Force buying satellite or some other agency like the navy or NRO?
> 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?
Or maybe, just maybe, the whole 'donation' thing was a plant, a mockup using then-current tech, to make people believe exactly that: that the NRO somehow was decades ahead in their sensors/mirrors game.
Probably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields.
Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.
F-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade.
It’s not a meme, it’s simply following history and reading declassified materials. The US government has a track record of developing advanced aircraft and weaponry in secret.
Lol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.
> Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades
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).
The article mentions several publicised experiments that were on this mission.
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" :)
It's smart tech, sure, but nothing that hadn't already been done. It's basically a scaled down space shuttle, and the Buran shuttle had autonomous landing capability decades ago.
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.
That doesn't make much sense. It's a single space ship that maybe has the same warhead payload capacity as a couple standard MIRV ballistic missiles. Any target the US is going to nuke in a first strike won't be destroyed enough to effectively prevent a counter strike, or all out nuclear war.
The Space shuttle had a 60 ton payload as I recall. A large nuclear warhead is 1000kg, in theory 3 space shuttles could deliver ~90 large warheads or up to 900 smaller warheads. Space Shuttles would also have the ability to identify hard to find targets such as mobile ICBM launchers.
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.
In practicality, all three shuttle launch facilities could not be used simultaneously. In fact, the two actually ever used could not have been used simultaneously. And space shuttles could not have been kept at standby, their launch sequence even in an emergency could never be reduced below 72 hours, and even that with tremendous difficulty.
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.
Space shuttles overflying the Soviet Union on a polar trajectory had no ability to maneuver, they had to fly a very specific trajectory to make the landing site. And no way an orbital vehicle could identify a target on the ground and alter its inclination to overfly it on that orbit. That would require both enormous Delta-V and high lateral G loads. Then they'd have to readjust the inclination to land.
You can land space shuttles anywhere with a good enough and long enough runway that's at the right angle. I think how many would be usable would depend on the mission, but with good pilots there would almost certainly be at least three.
The only US-allied nations with runways long enough to land a space shuttle are Spain, Canada, France, and India. For a polar mission the Canadian runway is no more useful than the American runways, and the Spanish and French runways are too far from the Pacific Ocean, where the orbiter needs to come down. Perhaps the shuttle could make two orbits and then land in India, using those big heavy wings for crossrange.
However, I am looking at the Wikipedia list of runways in service today. I'm not about to embark on looking at historical data.
Compared to the cost of building/certifying/maintaining/launching a shuttle based nuclear capability - the relative cost of building redundant landing sites is trivial. Although I am surprised that the salt-lakes or groom lake runway couldn't be used for a shuttle landing site on a polar orbit.
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.
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.
According to wikipedia Machrihanish was "certified" as an emergency shuttle landing site. Local rumor is that it was used for SR-72/Aurora, black project flights. Lots of conspiracy theories, e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/10/top_secret_us_plane_c...
The responses seem to fall along the lines of 'it can't deliver a lot of warheads', but I think it's more for the scenario of delivering a single nuke clandestinely. Some terrorists in Absurdistan are trying to make a bomb but they accidentally blow themselves up? Too bad so sad.
That’s as even more ridiculous scenario. It’s incredibly high risk, militarily and politically, for no real benefit over other ways of dealing with such targets.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but your reasoning is nonsensical.
You have to put yourself in the mindset of people who think big, are completely amoral and money is no object. A couple examples:
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...*
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.*
Certainly not optical spying, it's not big enough because of diffraction limits. The old NRO telescopes are basically Hubbles that point down, so they have a mirror about 2 metres across and probably a resolution somewhat better than Hubble (30cm on the surface).
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!
It's an incredible waste. The best and brightest slaving lifetimes away for things that will hopefully never be used, and if they are, for death.
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.
Perhaps so, but perhaps not. The weapons that "will hopefully never be used" are the best kind - a war deterrent - and contribute the most towards peace, since the alternative is so unthinkable that nobody would ever go for it. Laws (or in this case international agreements) are only a thing if they're enforced by consequences, otherwise people ignore them the first chance they get... as it's become painfully obvious these past few months.
It's pretty clear that without those brilliant minds that invented nukes we'd be at WW4 or 5 by now.
> as it's become painfully obvious these past few months
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.
To be fair "look what you made me do" is actually often pretty close to the mark when it comes to geopolitical rationales.
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
Nah that would be more like the standard armed forces, This is like owning a trigger to a pile of TNT under every house in town that you'll detonate if anyone decides to break into your house.
You can as I do at the same time think that the war in Ukraine is a scandalous act for which Russia is to blame and that NATO policies since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been poorly thought out and mostly detrimental to security in Europe. It’s not an either or.
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.
.. not to mention, the US is NOT morally right on the issue of illegal wars, invasions, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In fact, it is the worlds most heinous violator of human rights, period.
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.
> ...things that will hopefully never be used, and if they are, for death.
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!
Indeed, which is why it can't happen. But if you didn't need the deterrent, what then? That's the hypothetical (note "on all sides"), not sack in military spending unilaterally and hope for the best.
There's no other way for a civilization made up by independent intelligent entities to shake out. Conflict is an inevitable result of having multiple viewpoints and priorities, which is an inevitable result of having more than one human.
All those brilliant people making deadlier weapons are saving lives by making non-violent conflict cheaper and better than violent conflict.
> It doesn't go up in smoke, it goes back into the economy.
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.
A large proportion of it is just destroyed. Along with human lives. Sure the money seems to come back around, but that's an accounting trick: it's printed by the guys paying anyway. The human labour and lives invested are gone, unless what they did is one of the fraction of the work permitted to spill into civilian life. A million man hours go into a warship's hull alone. What else could those hands and minds have done?
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?
> the money seems to come back around, but that's an accounting trick
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.
If you spent even a fraction of the defense budget of the world on education and civilian research, you can still have those things and more. Without having to snuff out a few million people and rebuild every city in Europe and half of Asia at the same time. You could still pay those scientists, you know!
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.
> It's an incredible waste. The best and brightest slaving lifetimes away for things that will hopefully never be used, and if they are, for death.
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.
The money spent by the US on defence for the actual utility provided is WAY WAY WAY out of line by an order of magnitude. Most of the money is simply wasted. And in terms of "defence," all a country really needs is nukes and you will never be invaded again. All the extra shit like 100s of overpriced F35, stealth destroyers etc, are all wasted money, better spent on things adding social cohesion or a more education populace.
I wish FAANG paid government and defense industry salaries. Then our best and brightest might be engaged in something other than advertising and social engineering.
I always assumed Google and Facebook are just privatized components of total information awareness program.
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.
I mean they don't pay that bad unless its entry level. Senior & principle engineers can make over 150k and thats a pretty good salary everywhere besides San Francisco and most of them are in LCOL areas.
Well everyone's taking that wayyyyy too seriously.
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.
I get what you're saying, it does seem wasteful, but sadly pacifists are no match for tyrants. It is admirable to want to be left alone in-peace, but as long as there are other human beings willing to use force, it cannot be. The less a society puts towards its war-fighting capabilities the more likely it is to be conquered by some adversary.
Right, I know it's clearly not even close to possible, it's a game theory inevitability. I mean, even biological evolution is basically an arms race. We're doing well to just be where we are in terms of cooperation at all after all these millennia.
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.
Biological evolution is sort of an arms race? Wolves as a species aren't trying to eat every single deer and deer as a species aren't trying to never be eaten by a wolves (of course species don't "try", it is just a convenient manner of speaking). It is more like a balance where wolves eat the unhealthy/old deer and moderate deer population is the ideal for both species. Calling evolution an arms race massively misses the essential nature in most predator-prey relationships.
Wolves have adapted to be good at deer killing: sharp teeth, front-facing stereo vision, pack behaviour, etc. Deer have adapted to be good at not being eaten by wolves: large eyes, peripheral vision, skittish temperament, herd behaviour, etc.
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.
Many groups of people have different definitions of what’s good. Because there are finite resources these groups will fight over them to support what they think is good. Now you’re back to square one.
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.
Humans in neolithic communities occasionally have "wars" like chimpanzees have, but they don't last long and don't waste nearly so many resources as modern militaries waste. Basically they are isolated crime sprees. USA has been at war for over twenty years now, spending trillions of dollars, killing millions of people, and we have accomplished absolutely nothing that benefits the average American.
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.
The best publicly available evidence suggests that X-37B is practically useless, but storing it in orbit looks better than leaving it parked in a hangar on the ground. They can pretend it is on "a mission".
Whatever instruments it is "testing" clearly could as well have been lofted without the X-37B attached, for less money, as for STS payloads. I.e., instead of X-37B, wrap in a fairing and disposable insertion-burn rocket atop rather smaller booster.
Yes, classifying useless programs is a time-honored way to hide them from budget scrutiny. You can always insist that their usefulness is itself classified. But the rest of us can sometimes conclude correctly by what cannot be hidden.
They could ape usefulness by landing and launching it frequently, but at even greater cost.
The best publicly available information just isn’t very good. We can speculate on the purpose of the X-37B programme but we won’t know for sure, perhaps for decades.
You have already read all you need: reusable launch carrier being reused extremely rarely.
An experimental vehicle turning out impractical is absolutely normal. Usefulness is exceptional. (Even the SR-71 / YF-12 was scrapped. The Space Shuttle was scrapped, not soon enough.) But scheming to keep a program running anyway is extremely common. (E.g., again, Space Shuttle. And now STS.) Coolness (e.g. SR-71) is an inadequate substitute.
It takes solid evidence to demonstrate usefulness. In its entire absence, the correct conclusion is obvious.
To be fair the SR-71 was scrapped after being in service for 35 years, a point at which there where already multiple different much cheaper and usable alternatives.
SR-71 was awesome, but its reason for existing evaporated. Once it became easy to hit with a missile it could no longer be sent on the missions it had been uniquely qualified for.
>>The best publicly available evidence suggests that X-37B is practically useless, but storing it in orbit looks better than leaving it
So what if the X37B was MEANT to be 'stored' in orbit, but with the ability to payload swap/mate with a transitioning suppy X37B drone. To update HW, grab Payload, media, swap even entirety of self... and send the earlier version home?
Also, if we are familiar with the orbitals of it, do we have any idea at what its orbital levels and trajectories are? Has anyone ever captured one on telescope-cam?
Longevity is the least interesting quality of a re-usable spacecraft. We have six decades' experience keeping spacecraft on long orbital, and even trans-planetary, flights working. If testing longevity is any significant use of X-37B, that is another way of saying it is useless.
If you wanted satellites hidden at orbits nobody knew, then having this as a delivery platform seems ideal. Who knows at what point in its orbit payloads get detached?
Its orbit payloads are seen to have been detached at the point where two satellites are found where one was. The only short-term uncertainty will be which was the X-37B, but that will quickly become evident.
Long endurance flight is a purpose unto itself, alike Ingenuity copter's purpose to prove flight a feasible technology on other planets. Another commenter cracked wise about this being an alternative to just storing the mini-spaceplane in a hanger. Well yes, but with less terrestrial degredagtion (atmosphere & what all), and having some creative/scientific functions (growing seeds. sidenote, i had some like 3rd generation space tomato plants my 5th grade teacher gave us all. great year!)
i view this plane, in macro, somewhat like a right-sized shuttle. the shuttle was big & heavy & had vastly cumbersome resposnsibilities to shepard all in all pretty useless humans along for the ride. as a cargo delivery system it made little sense. but an orbital vessel with some orbital control, that can come down & get reused, that has great roboticized automation... it's a drone, for space. it's an automated spaceplane.
I actually wonder what the big fuss is - other objects (satellites, the ISS, etc.) have been orbiting the Earth for decades and nobody gets that excited about it. Is there anything about this record that sets it apart from those set by other artificial satellites? I mean, you can't just decide to call it "flight" because it's a spaceplane, it's in orbit same as zillions of other things. Or is it a record for a craft designed to reenter the atmosphere and land in one piece? Then they should probably wait until the successful landing before declaring a record...
It is a deterrence capability that can quickly reposition to protect other satellites in space. As to the actual payload of what it does in these situations, that is the closely guarded secret.
Other countries have deployed counter-satellite capabilities (the most interesting is the Chinese one that grabs and flings other objects out of orbit), so this is our counter-counter-satellite capability.
Does someone know approximately how many times per day this plane would orbit the planet? I was wondering to try and figure out how far it has "flown" to date. You could say the plane has an incredible range!
Orbital tracking of the earlier missions was interesting, as the vehicle can change orbits easily. There was a bit of a cat and mouse game between hobbyists and the operators IIRC.
This is the vehicle's 6th flight, so summing up all 6 missions so far gets you roughly 751 million miles traveled, or 1.12 light hours / 8 AU.
If we knew the altitude, wouldn't we have a pretty good estimate? And vice verca? I think amateurs have probably observed this already. Here's a claim[1]:
> The spaceplane is orbiting at an altitude of about 320 kilometers (a little under 200 miles)
Satellites like this can be observed from Earth, so those details aren't really as secret as the government may wish. But yes, about 90 minutes; it's generally around 300-400 km up.
I guess it’s impressive because I can relate to the time it takes to run 100m.
When the airplane flies 580 days where it previously flew 570, I do not assume the 10 extra days are due to some marginal improvement, just to the fact they kept the mission going longer. The 5th airplane could presumably have made it to 580 days too if the mission team had wanted that.
Bolt is amazing because he does something every time that you are certain he couldn’t do before (unless he was deliberately slowing down, which doesn’t seem like a winning strategy).
Hydraulic systems can have issues with long term operations in a vacuum, so going all-electrical offers reliability and simplicity benefits for long operations in space. It's also considerably easier to make electrical systems with redundant power supply than it is to make redundant hydraulic systems, especially given the tight volume and mass limits of space travel.
Kind of Apples and Oranges, for now. The X-37B is a spaceplane, and nothing SpaceX currently has operational is sort of capable of matching it's capabilities.
When they get Starship properly working (past the initial risky flights and into the period where landing the vehicle can be expected to work), it should be able to do everything the X-37B does and more. But that's still years off if not more.
