X 37B
 

American X-37B space plane lands after secret mission lasting almost two years - Americas - World - The Independent

Just in case you miss this elsewhere.

As ever, US shows its commitment.

Regards
BATCO

Good to see our American cousins deploying Ebola measures :}

http://www.independent.co.uk/incomin...ce-plane-3.jpg

Maybe they forgot it was up there..........................


what would require 2 years of testing???

Presumably if "System X" was functioning properly, it was also achieving "Mission Y", and therefore no requirement to hurry home for tea and medals? ;)


(Please eat your monitor/screen after reading that)

The three flights so far have been progressively longer, seems like a standard systems engineering/reliability verification to me. With a bit of kill two birds with one stone thrown in.

Its mission is to drive Chinese milbloggers into fits, and apparently it does so quite well.

It seems possible it is fulfilling some kind of U2 / Intel mission, and has an undisclosed ability to change orbit thereby addressing some of the predictability of existing satellites.

Classified for obvious reasons though I guess with even rudimentary tracking technology of space capable nations, they know where it is.

I assume there is no public info on its orbit / altitude etc.

2 years is obviously more than just a test, and as above, no point in bringing it down if its working/achieving a mission. Only a few days max would be needed for any reliability / deep soak thermal test objectives I assume. Possibly brought down due to some failure or depleted retasking fuel.

I thought so too but there's tons of detail out there.

LIVE REAL TIME SATELLITE TRACKING AND PREDICTIONS:

That site had it tracked live. Search for OTV and you'll see the 3 missions it's flown so far. I've left the link pointing to the international space station so you can see the kind of detail that was shown.

Most likely, as they do have significant time with other craft in orbit to extrapolate particular information on long term degradation of systems. But that said, there are systems they don't guarantee for long periods. Hence not knowing precisely whats in it, I wouldn't count it out.

anyones quess ... but here's mine
 

Since the 'big' Space Shuttle ended the STS Mission capability the US also lost any ability they may have had to recover and return some of their larger long endurance Reconnaissance Satellites.

Having a similar but obviously smaller system aboard the X-37B would be a neat way around having to de-orbit and burn up the satellite at the end of its fuel cycle.

If that is what they have done ...;)

The interesting question to ask is, what have the USAF sent up recently to cover any capability gap caused by the X-37B's return?

The craft will in all possibility been testing systems and components in readiness for the X-37C which I understand to be a sort of ''crew bus'' capable of carrying 6 bods up to the ISS.

Now that sort of sized craft would be able to carry a very useful recce payload aloft for a long time.

Well, while in 2011 there were noisings about a possible enlarged man-rated X-37C, in current reality Boeing's sole funded man-rated project is the CST-100 (Crew Space Transportation) crew capsule.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...%28crop%29.jpg

...perhaps carrying some advanced minature IMINT or SIGINT package.
Low inclination orbit (43.5 degrees) means the only place of real interest is the Middle East.
IIRC higher Molyna-type polar orbits are reserved for Keyhole or Lacrosse sized birds.
Some of the conspiracy theorists reckon it's keeping an eye on the Chinese Space Station...

Wot Chink SS?

SGC

My random guess......

Linescan radar mapping of all potential ingress routes into potential targets for precision navigation without the use of active sensors.

The level of resolution required requires months of scanning to complete.

But hey what do I know :}

Second 2 year mission finishes in Florida. Whatever it's doing, it appears highly reliable and successful.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/articl...ith-sonic-boom

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — U.S. military officials say an unmanned aircraft orbiting Earth since May 2015 has landed in Florida.

The Air Force posted tweets that the X-37B shuttle landed Sunday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral after 718 days in orbit. Multiple media outlets reported that the 29-foot-long aircraft's return caused a sonic boom that rattled central Florida and could be heard as far away as Tampa and Fort Myers.

It's the shuttle's first landing in Florida. Previous X-37B missions have landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In a statement , officials said the X-37B shuttle is "an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Air Force."

Another mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral later this year.

https://static.dvidshub.net/media/th...86x274_q75.jpg

...they've finished planting the stealth explosive charges on all the Russian and Chinese birds.
Or placing the killer micro-satellites nearby that'll be activated if the balloon goes up.
I suspect there are many, many more things in orbit than we know of, or can see... ;)

Seems to me that being able to bring your system back to Earth, update/reconfigure it quite quickly, and then redeploy it, would be quite a useful capability to have.

Similarly, having a resuable satellite chassis with all the infrastructure you need to operate a system in orbit ready to go, giving you the ability to deploy a completely new system relatively without the overhead of designing/building the whole satellite.