Midget Space Shuttle Drops Back To Earth

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29669205

Space plane: Mysterious US military plane returns to Earth

An unmanned US plane on a top-secret, two-year mission to space has returned to Earth and landed in California.

The aircraft, resembling a miniature space shuttle and known as the Orbital Test Vehicle or X-37B, spent 674 days in orbit around the planet.

It touched down at Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday morning.

The purpose of the plane remains unclear - a theory that it was taking a look at China's space lab has recently been downplayed by experts.

(continued, gotta laugh at this - spy satellite with wings you'd think it was the bleeding Enterprise the way they've worded it....no people around to let the dumb public see how tiny it is....)

[mistermack]

Completely off the top of my head, I would say that this is a spy satellite.
They can spy on China and Russia, as well as France and Germany and UK, without having to transmit the data over the airwaves. So there is no chance of somebody cracking their codes and seeing their spy data.
They just save it to a hard disk, and read it when it lands.
What else is the point of leaving it going round and round for two years, otherwise?

[JimC]

Completely off the top of my head, I would say that this is a spy satellite.
They can spy on China and Russia, as well as France and Germany and UK, without having to transmit the data over the airwaves. So there is no chance of somebody cracking their codes and seeing their spy data.
They just save it to a hard disk, and read it when it lands.
What else is the point of leaving it going round and round for two years, otherwise?

But the information would be very out of date...

[cronus]

It contains a nuke. Right size to carry one. Got some manoeuvrability. Can drop its load anywhere. Mostly Tehran to keep Bibi from going in with that reactor caper. Special deal behind the scenes. Probably going for the reactor now, why the price of oil is being pushed down...stop the price spike in the aftermath going too high.

[mistermack]

Completely off the top of my head, I would say that this is a spy satellite.
They can spy on China and Russia, as well as France and Germany and UK, without having to transmit the data over the airwaves. So there is no chance of somebody cracking their codes and seeing their spy data.
They just save it to a hard disk, and read it when it lands.
What else is the point of leaving it going round and round for two years, otherwise?

But the information would be very out of date...

True, but not all of it. Some projects take a lot of time to build anyway.
And it could be much more detailed, because a bunch of hard disks could store a huge amount of data, which maybe would be difficult to transmit securely encrypted. If there is such a thing as encryption that can't be cracked by a government.
Maybe the Chinese are cracking their codes, and just using the US spy satellites data, instead of paying for their own.

[pErvinalia]

That's the most crap "theory" I've heard this side of Galaxian.

[mistermack]

That's the most crap "theory" I've heard this side of Galaxian.

Still infinitely better than yours though.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

You're all talking bollox. It's obviously a prototype Amazon drone.
I predict this vehicle will be landing in people's back yards delivering slightly scorched books by 2015.

[cronus]

Spraying Ebola. Subsidised by the 1% who are all vaccinated along with 100 of the most beautiful women on Earth...ready for re-population duties.

[klr]

The X-37B? Old news, that.

I suspect that the real goal was a lot more mundane, as in a long-term test of the vehicle's ability and the basic technologies.

[mistermack]

The X-37B? Old news, that.

I suspect that the real goal was a lot more mundane, as in a long-term test of the vehicle's ability and the basic technologies.

Well, yes, it could well be that. But floating around in space for two years doesn't really test anything. It might as well be lying in a deep freeze.
Certainly nothing that they can't test in the space station, anyway.

Launching it and landing it are things to test. But floating round and round doesn't really tell you anything. If they were just testing the vehicle, you would think that they would bring it back down after a few laps.

[cronus]

The X-37B? Old news, that.

I suspect that the real goal was a lot more mundane, as in a long-term test of the vehicle's ability and the basic technologies.

Well, yes, it could well be that. But floating around in space for two years doesn't really test anything. It might as well be lying in a deep freeze.
Certainly nothing that they can't test in the space station, anyway.

Launching it and landing it are things to test. But floating round and round doesn't really tell you anything. If they were just testing the vehicle, you would think that they would bring it back down after a few laps.

Maybe they were testing how long a midget could survive inside a space dustbin?

[pErvinalia]

The X-37B? Old news, that.

I suspect that the real goal was a lot more mundane, as in a long-term test of the vehicle's ability and the basic technologies.

Well, yes, it could well be that. But floating around in space for two years doesn't really test anything. It might as well be lying in a deep freeze.
Certainly nothing that they can't test in the space station, anyway.

Launching it and landing it are things to test. But floating round and round doesn't really tell you anything. If they were just testing the vehicle, you would think that they would bring it back down after a few laps.

Is there anything you aren't an expert at? Your theories are, umm, spectacular.

[Calilasseia]

A more mundane explanation, is that they wanted to test if the protective re-entry tiles could survive long periods of exposure to high UV and cosmic ray flux. Only if this craft is intended to perform any extended missions in space, the survivability of the re-entry tiles is going to be very important. After all, one of the major maintenance costs for the original Shuttle fleet centred upon those tiles. Which, in the Shuttle incarnation, were brittle and rather more easily damaged than was prudent to deploy on a manned spacecraft. As the crew of Columbia found to their cost.

Far better to lose an unmanned spacecraft if the solution to the tile problem didn't work, than lose another manned mission.

Plus, two years of orbiting the Earth would expose those tiles to rapid changes in thermal stress, that would also provide a severe test of survivability. On the daytime side of an Earth orbit, those tiles would heat up to over 100°C, whilst on the night time side of an earth orbit, the temperature of those tiles would drop to something like -100°C.

If the Americans are ever planning to build a manned version of this latest craft, and do the sensible thing that they should have done with the original Shuttle, namely maintain cargo hauling as a separate mission from launching humans into space, then they'll be looking at, say, a 2× scaling up for a manned version with a crew of 3, and passenger space for 3 to 5 more in "lifeboat" mode if, for example, the ISS needs evacuation in a hurry. A separate unmanned cargo version would possibly carry 3 to 5 ton payloads. for both missions, the developers of this craft will want a secure, robust re-entry system. For testing, a half-sized, but fully operational in all other respects, mock up, would be an ideal test bed. Big enough to replicate faults that would appear on the full sized system if any faults are going to appear, small enough to be a relatively cheap write-off if a catastrophic failure of the re-entry system means it burns up instead of coming back to land.

[mistermack]

Yeh, that's all perfectly feasible.

You would think though, that you could do all those tests on the space station and in the lab back on Earth. You can expose the tiles outside the space station for a couple of years, and then bring them home for testing under more controlled conditions.
But someone might argue that it's more realistic in a real re-entry.

I've often wondered why re-entry has to be so violent. Why can't they make a much more gradual descent, at much lower temperatures and drag forces?
I'm sure that there ARE good reasons, or else they would do it that way.
But I can't picture what the problems would be.