USAF's Robotic X-37B Orbiter Launched For Test Flight 145
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket that blasted off Thursday from Florida on a mission shrouded in secrecy. ... The unmanned military Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1) — also known as the X-37B — lifted off at 7:52 pm EDT atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a mission that is expected to take months testing new spacecraft technologies. ... Key objectives of the space plane's first flight include demonstration and validation of guidance, navigation, and control systems – including a 'do-it-itself' autonomous re-entry and landing at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base with neighboring Edwards Air Force Base as a backup."
Re:Anywhere on earth in 2 hours (Score:5, Insightful)
The first re-usable nuclear missle :-)
X-37 is, like the shuttle, meant to soft-land and be re-used. Nuclear missles are meant to get somewhere really fast and avoid anti-ballistic missles, and blow themselves up. Not really the X-37 mission.
It's for spy satellites, among other things. Nuclear missles can get anywhere in two hours already.
Re:Space without astronauts (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow.. it's really sad to see the great Bruce Perens spreading "OMG human spaceflight is ending" FUD.
The gap is unfortunate, but its a product of the previous administration, not a choice of the current one. The retirement date for the shuttle? An overdue decision finally made in 2003. The continual redesign of Ares 1 and the Orion capsule? Thank you Mr Griffin. If the simple safe soon replacement vehicle for the shuttle had been funded back in 2003 when it was supposed to be, and not co-opted for Apollo On Foodstamps, then it would be flying by now.. on existing launch vehicles. Instead we got the Constellation train wreck.
So what has this administration decided to do? Close the gap by engaging *multiple* commercial providers. So if one vehicle fails, or retires, NASA can keep flying on another. There will never be a gap again. Basically what they should have done back in 2003 but without the cost plus pork.
In the mean time, NASA astronauts will continue flying to the ISS on the Soyuz.. as nearly every expedition crew member flies to the station now. The only change is that the shuttle won't be taking 6 to 7 people there 3 times a year to do assembly work.. because the station will be complete.
Re:Wasn't the Buran autonomous...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Anywhere on earth in 2 hours (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't the Buran autonomous...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is autonomous tech really that difficult now? At the very least couldn't it fall back to remote control? I could swear the Sovs did some work like this back in the 70s.
Strictly speaking, an artillery shell is autonomous. How impressive the automation is depends on how adaptive it is.
Re:Anywhere on earth in 2 hours (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Space without astronauts (Score:5, Insightful)
Constellation wasn't taking astronauts anywhere. It was never going to be built and even if it arrived gift wrapped it would have cost so much that NASA would have to cancel it immediately. The entire thing was designed for a budget that NASA never had. It really was warmed over Apollo, but without the Apollo sized budget.
Hopefully this time NASA will develop a heavy lift vehicle that is actually affordable, or learn to go beyond LEO without it.
Re:Space without astronauts (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama did public space flight. It will not be missed. Our dear "socialist" leader also dumped a pile of money into private space flight. Obama didn't kill space flight. He killed a state welfare program and at the same time gave a boost to the people doing real innovative R&D in manned and unmanned lift vehicles in the private sector. This was long LONG over due. Having the US government design and fund a fucking spaceship by committee and legislation makes about as much sense as the US government designing by fucking committee and legislation cars. It is a really dumb idea and Obama did us a favor by killing it. NASA can now focus on stuff that the private sector can't do, namely, raw science. I'm not against NASA, I just want to see them fretting over stuff like how to detect life on another planet or the arcane working of some exotic stellar mass. Stuff that I want commercialized and brought to the public at large on the other hand needs to be kicked off to private industry ASAP.
Re:Anywhere on earth in 2 hours (Score:2, Insightful)
The Russians have had FOBS tasked ICBMs for decades, and with the history of how Russia treats arms treaties*, I'm sure they still have them. I believe it was the SS-9 and then SS-18 mod 4 that were devoted to orbiting a nuke into orbit.
The R-36orb (SS-18) carried the 869 fractional-orbit missile.
* Read a book on the Soviet and Russian Federation bio-weapons treaty compliance, a Russian researcher said that they didn't comply because they assumed the US wouldn't comply. The US had thrown out most of the bioweapon program before the treaty was signed as Nixon hated the idea of bioweapons.
Re:Wasn't the Buran autonomous...? (Score:4, Insightful)
While much of the internal and mission design requirements [wikipedia.org] where different, it's clear that they took the external shape of the Shuttle and modeled it very, very closely. Yes, there are only a couple of ways you can make a hypersonic fuselage of a certain size, but the Russians could have used several other design complexes (for example, the 'V' tail configuration of the XB-37) instead of looking exactly like the Shuttle.
The fact that the Russians repurposed the Buran-Mir docking collar to fit the shuttles also indicates a high degree of structural similarity.
Did they steal the data or just used the fact that the US had done extensive tests on 'that' configuration and thus not re inventing the wheel would gain time and save money? Who knows?