Air Force's Secret X-37B Space Plane Lands in California

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

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The US space program is still open for business under the guidance of the US Air Force. If you don’t remember that far back, the Air Force put the X-37B space plane into orbit 469 days ago and it has been there since then conducting secret testing. The craft is capable of transporting cargo and crew into space and returning safely.

The X-37B looks a bit like NASA's recently retired space shuttle, but it's far smaller. The X-37B is about 29 feet (8.8 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 m) wide, with a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed.
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Secret eh?

Well lets hope this actually works out, unlike the X-33 which NASA pumped a billion bucks into and got nothing out of it from Lockheed.
 
Super-duper-seekrit! Anyway, congrats to the people who made gave our new robot overlords the capacity to operate in space.
 
So secret its in the news..

What's the point of keeping these projects secret? No one else in the world can possibly afford to copy us anymore. We spend nearly a Trillion dollars per year on defense which just about dwarfs the entire economies of most of the countries on this planet.

Mind as well do all this shit out in the open.
 
Godmachine said:
So secret its in the news..

What's the point of keeping these projects secret? No one else in the world can possibly afford to copy us anymore. We spend nearly a Trillion dollars per year on defense which just about dwarfs the entire economies of most of the countries on this planet.

Mind as well do all this shit out in the open.
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Don't you bring your serious stuff into this thread too!
 
Bling said:
no crew capability.
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Godmachine said:
So secret its in the news..

What's the point of keeping these projects secret? No one else in the world can possibly afford to copy us anymore. We spend nearly a Trillion dollars per year on defense which just about dwarfs the entire economies of most of the countries on this planet.

Mind as well do all this shit out in the open.
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any thing you put in orbit will be found
whats secret is what ever its mission and payload was
the Shuttle had a number of DoD classified missions every one know it was launching and landing just not what it was doing on orbit
 
I would think the main point of the whole thing is to be an easily upgradeable spy satellite. just think, the government spends all this money building and launching a satellite and one year later its outdated. with this they can put a new sensor and stuff on it for every mission so the optics/etc are only as old as the last mission.
 
Bling said:
I would think the main point of the whole thing is to be an easily upgradeable spy satellite. just think, the government spends all this money building and launching a satellite and one year later its outdated. with this they can put a new sensor and stuff on it for every mission so the optics/etc are only as old as the last mission.
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bingo
also they can put it in orbit they want
once a spy bird is up there its in a fixed orbital plane

think of this is a replacement for things like the U-2 and SR-71
 
oh also the bad guys can learn when the bird comes over head
with this they can mix it up and keep them guessing
 
The next one will be 60-80% bigger to carry passengers? Are they saying they're rebuilding the shuttle program? Sure sounds like it!
 
Azhar said:
The next one will be 60-80% bigger to carry passengers? Are they saying they're rebuilding the shuttle program? Sure sounds like it!
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I wonder if the bigger one will be awesomely robot-y controlled or if they're gonna let one of the sardines crammed inside drive it around.
 
Godmachine said:
So secret its in the news..

What's the point of keeping these projects secret? No one else in the world can possibly afford to copy us anymore. We spend nearly a Trillion dollars per year on defense which just about dwarfs the entire economies of most of the countries on this planet.

Mind as well do all this shit out in the open.
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Alright now, show us THE REAL secret plane, and not a decoy. :D
 
x-37b test vehicle doesnt take crew. it doesnt take cargo. exactly what did take is classified, but there is not room for anything other than sensors, meaning a camera. if they decide to build an operational vehicle out of this design, it cant be anything other than a spy satellite.

that said, it is a test vehicle in a long line of test vehicles that were built to be as small as possible for testing. it can be scaled up if they choose to. a scaled up version could take anything from people to tungsten rods, there you can use your imagination. if the air force wants to deliver a handful of men to an airfield somewhere right away, a scaled up version of this would work. go figure. go fish
 
Elios said:
any thing you put in orbit will be found
whats secret is what ever its mission and payload was
the Shuttle had a number of DoD classified missions every one know it was launching and landing just not what it was doing on orbit
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In this case, not so much. Apparently, the satellite watchers were in fits over this one, as it didn't keep a consistent orbit. It seems apparently able to change orbit 3 or 4 times once up there, indicating quite an excessive delta-v budget.

If we start using these in place of traditional spy satellites, it will really confuse enemy planning...as there won't be a consistent time of when a satellite is passing overhead to know when to hide the stuff you are doing.
 
I understand the intelligence usage of these as enhanced spy planes so to speak but our military technology is so a head of everyone else in the entire world that It just seems a bit weird to announce the existence of this kind of craft and then pretend like it doesn't exist when directly questioned on it.

During the Cold War , I could understand since Russia was really sometimes a head of us in area's that we took time to catch up. But in this day and age .. we are a head of everyone , by a factor of 10 it seems. We can out spend every other country in the world many times over and apparently still remain afloat.

I think when it comes to these bloated , unnecessary military black projects we're going hugely overboard. The current war we're in the enemy doesn't have access to anything even remotely as advanced as what we've had in the last 30 years. There is no Cold War anymore. We still have thousands of Nukes pointed at Russia and they still have thousands more pointed at us.

It just seems like utter waste and more like dick size contest. At least when we use this kind of technology for NASA we're furthering the knowledge of man kind and pioneering a new path in science and discovery.
 
If you stop pushing forward, you tend to fall behind. China was the most advanced nation on the planet, became isolationist, and hid behind a giant wall for centuries and look where that got them now. If you're not struggling to stay ahead, you're losing ground and if you're not super-dee-duper far ahead then you lose more people than necessary when you do have to fight.

Beyond that, the US isn't -that- far beyond other first world nations and one never knows when an allied force will suddenly get upset. I think they're doing a good job with the so-called dick size thing and totally encourage developing even bigger, better penis pumps.
 
It's called that because it cost $37b (which was unfortunately NASAs budget for the next 700 years :()
 
DeathPrincess said:
It's called that because it cost $37b (which was unfortunately NASAs budget for the next 700 years :()
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NASA's budget is 1 half of 1 percent actually which is less than $16 Billion a year. It's actually been shrinking since the Nixon Administration.

Wouldn't surprise me if it actually cost that much either. The fucking 30+ year V-22 Osprey project has cost almost $35 Billion and there are barely that many in the fleet at all. We have $14.8 Billion in our Raptors and the fleet is likely to be grounded AGAIN...

Fail.
 
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