This is the first I've heard of it. Wikipedia says it's just under 10 feet tall. I would never have guess it that small from the images I've looked at. Aside from you know, the man standing at the bottom of the wikipedia photo...
Anyone know if this would be capable of carrying a weapon that could hit targets on earth? I assume all you'd need is a smart aerodynamic projectile and gravity would take care of the rest...
Who said the X-37 has to survive though? That can do a 180 and decelerate using the main AR2-3 at the cost of a decaying orbit then drop the payload at 4km/s.
I'm not an expert but I will state that x-37 in orbit doesn't have 23km/s delta-v. I think wiki for similar vehicles can confirm that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget
Its a hydrazine monopropellent, or so they say, so an Isp of 250 or so would be impressive. Someone with a lot more time on their hands can tell you the mass fraction required to get 23 KM/s outta a 250 second Isp and its going to have about as many 9's as reliability marketing material. So yeah, thats not happening.
That would be about Mach 10 weapon launch. I don't think that's been seriously studied or tried in practice. That would be quite a technological achievement all by itself, aside from everything else the thing can do.
Of course the vehicle is going to be destroyed anyway, so just carry the payload all the way down till it goes boom or whatever, unless you were hoping to launch multiple warheads. The problem is the whole vehicle is very light, so you're not going to fit a B-52 worth of payloads in a vehicle who's launch weight is, I believe, lighter than a GBU-43. My point being that if vehicle plus payload at launch is lighter than a GBU-43, there's not much point in being concerned with how many GBU-43 it can be dropped if it can only carry a fraction of one anyway.
The main problem is its hard to think up a mission profile where a cruise missile wouldn't be cheaper and more effective.
Doesn't have to be an ICBM or some type of rocket - a kinetic energy weapon (giant lawn darts from space) could be effective, but without nasty radioactivity afterwards.
If I remember rightly (it's been a while since I read up on them), they proposed using tungsten rods initially. Not sure if they'd still go down that route, or whether they'd use something a bit more exotic (carbon nanotubes is always the go to answer for exotic-scifi style things).
Tungsten carbide and uranium cement have been postulated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Orbital_bombardme... Interestingly, these are not prohibited by any treaties. The US Air Force estimated a 1-foot (.3 meter) diameter tungsten pole would impact ~Mach 10. It would weight 9 tons and have the same destructive force as 7.5 tons of dynamite, but it would only take 15 minutes to get anywhere in the world and there would be no ICBM launch warning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Th...
28 km/s? It would be more than escape velocity (11.2 km/s), where did you get that? Low earth orbit is around 8 km/s. Still not totally the same as and ICBM, but could be done.
But why would you stuff the rods in an X-37B? You could just launch a light satellite without all this re-entry stuff and you'd get many more rods for the same mass... or then you could use a smaller launcher.
The X-37B is basically a reusable payload fairing, a very heavy one at that. Oh well, it isn't even that because the rocket requires another outer expendable payload fairing.
The Soviets had a system that was based on putting warheads into a fractional orbit, rather than on a ballistic path - Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS).
I can't find any details, but most descriptions seem to imply that they needed to have a rocket engine on the warhead to come out of orbit (which is what I would expect).
Think beyond hitting targets on earth, and even in orbit. Something like the X-37 allows the Air Force to go up and capture another satellite, perform modifications to it, or even bring it back down to Earth for analysis.
No need to blast enemy satellites out of orbit, just rocket up and snatch it.
Yes, but: nuclear weapons in space are prohibited by at least two treaties to which the US is a signatory; any point on the globe worth hitting with conventional weapons would be far easier and cheaper to hit with, say, a cruise missile or a drone-launched Hellfire; last but not least, you'd first have to build a weapon to fit in this thing's cargo bay, which almost certainly has not been done because, given the first two mentioned points, it's not worth anyone's time or money to bother.
To understand the X-37, you need a reasonable knowledge of the origins of the Space Shuttle program. The only reason that program came to even the bastardized fruition it did was because the Air Force signed on, and they did so only because they needed a means of servicing and maintaining their orbital equipment. In theory, and occasionally in practice, this means involved actual human astronauts going up and doing spanner work on satellites in orbit, but this was expensive and fraught with undue difficulty; cheaper and easier was simply to stuff the whole satellite into the Shuttle's payload bay and haul it back down the gravity well for repair, refit, and relaunch, and indeed many Space Shuttle missions involved precisely this evolution. (It's probable, if uncertain due to the Air Force's bent for secrecy with regard to their payloads, that the Shuttle was used to return some or most of these satellites to orbit; on the other hand, a Titan-IV's probably cheaper, and the Air Force has used plenty of those, too. I don't know much about what goes into that sort of decision.)
The X-37, then, far from being some kind of conspiracy-theory FOBS, is just a Space-Shuttle-style "space truck". The major difference is that technology has now reached a point where it's possible for such a vehicle to satisfy the Air Force's mission parameters without having to involve all the complex, costly, and potentially disastrous encumbrances required to carry living humans into space.
Edit! I've finally just recalled the name of the book from which I gained my understanding of the politicking which took the Space Shuttle program from initial conception to final operational "Space Transportation System". That book is The Space Shuttle Decision, published by NASA as part of the NASA History Series, and you can read it online at http://www.nss.org/resources/library/shuttledecision/ and, oh, probably lots of other places as well. A bit dry, but marvelously detailed and surprisingly objective given its origins; I recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the history of its subject matter.
Could they potentially use it to grab other countries satellites in a time of war? Such as taking down GLONASS or something else.
Why would the Air force need a "space truck" and not NASA?
Its easy to point the conspiracy theory finger when the military is involved. Especially when they are staying silent about what the plane's purpose is.
Satellites in LEO, probably, albeit at enormously wasteful expense compared to, say, an SM-3, or some other sort of anti-satellite missile. (Ships with the Aegis guided missile system mount SM-3s, and they've been successfully tested against satellites in low orbit.)
I haven't time at the moment to check, but I'd assume GPS and GLONASS birds are in geostationary orbit (or whatever they call that now), which would complicate matters significantly. I imagine the Air Force probably has some sort of weapon in mind for such cases, but I wouldn't begin to know how to guess what that is, except presumably a big rocket, whose payload is a small rocket, whose payload in turn is a tiny warhead with some very precise attitude jets.
NASA never wanted a "space truck". Ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey? NASA wanted something along the lines of the spaceplane/station/moonbase system depicted in the first act; the Space Shuttle program was all they could sell to Congress, largely thanks to the efforts of now-deceased then-Senator William Proxmire. (If you've ever heard a science-fiction fan curse that name and wondered why, now you know; if you want the full story, read the book whose URL I just edited into my prior comment.)
And, yes, "its [sic] easy to point the conspiracy theory finger when the military is involved." It's easy to do a lot of things, which is not the same as saying those things are sensible or worth doing; ignorance, especially of the trivially addressable sort, is no excuse for foolishness.
GPS sats aren't geosynchronous. That would be an orbital period of one (sidereal) day which matches the Earth's rotation. GPS has an orbital period which is half that. So after 11 hours and 58 minutes, you'll have the same satellites over you in the same positions, but they will have gone around the planet twice in the meantime. Cool animation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Space...
Anti-satellite weapons significantly expand the amount of space debris that we have to deal with, and threaten a global impact cascade we term 'Kessler Syndrome'.
The Space Shuttle was designed to do several things that had nothing to do with NASA's purview: To launch anti-USSR spy satellites into polar orbit from Vandenberg, to reboost and repair those satellites, and to steal/recover USSR-owned spy satellites, taking them into the cargo bay and landing at a US runway in order to recover their technology in the event that the USSR got ahead of us again. This also applies to US-owned satellites at risk of reentering over the USSR to prevent their tech from catching up.
In order to do this, they made the whole thing incredibly expensive, and sacrificed a lot of capabilities NASA would have rather had.
That's what this is for. It serves as a functional military Shuttle analog against small payloads, and as a beta for a manned X-37C or X-37D against larger payloads.
If you fired a missile to destroy a satellite, it would be way to obvious, especially with all the debris that it would produce. If you fired up a space vehicle then have it grab a satellite a couple months later, nobody would be the wiser.
I would figure that in a few years or possibly now but top secret that a ground based laser system exists that can effectively disable satellites. The Chinese have supposedly demonstrated such
Thanks for the link to the book. I've been looking for something that would substantiate my previous source of such politicking information, this colorful but unfootnoted comment over on MetaFilter by eriko: http://www.metafilter.com/48654/Jan-28-1986#1189388
A payload of slightly smaller than described tungsten rods would fit on a craft of this size, and according to the article this type of weapon is not prohibited by any current treaty. It could hit anywhere with practically no warning and no need to enter airspace. It's almost impossible to defend against.
Orbital based weapons aren't really an advantage, as it turns out. A weapon in orbit has to wait until it's over the target before it can attack, which could be a long wait. It also has all of the problems of putting anything in orbit, maintenance, station keeping, longevity, etc. In contrast, a weapon designed to fly through space on a ballistic trajectory can be much simpler and cheaper. Moreover, because they start on the Earth ICBMs can always hit their targets within a single sub-orbital hop, they don't have to wait for attack windows to line up.
Interesting concept, but I wonder about the economics.
A telephone pole has a volume of about 3 million cubic centimetres. Tungsten's density is ~20 g/cm^3, so we're talking about 60 000 kilograms of tungsten. At around $40/kg, that's ~2.5 million dollars per rod just in raw materials.
But that's ignoring the cost of bringing a 60 metric ton rod into orbit, of course. You'd need a Falcon Heavy launch per rod, ignoring the problematic dimensions (let's assume you can cold weld a few pieces together in space). That's at least another $60 million per rod for the launch costs.
Just toss some "small" asteroids down then. (More an issue once we get to the point of interplanetary war, but still cheaper than manufacturing pure tungsten rods).
60t of lead, on the other hand, will go for a mere 120k USD, at about double the volume. Not sure if the effect will be the same (it certainly sounds like a good way to poison vast swathes of land).
Some people say the "rods from god" idea is really deployed on satellites. The USAF could make tungsten metal spears fall out of space and hit precise targets with the force of a small nuclear blast.
Funny how the article doesn't mention the X-37 at all, artist renders of which are still available at the Dryden photo gallery and it's listed as "1999 - present" (Although this gallery hasn't been maintained since 2005, so read that as 1999-2005+).
"If they wanted to make it a weapon, the first thing would be to give it a serious main engine"
I don't think asking a robotic arms control activist about orbital mechanics and aerodynamics is going to result in anything insightful.
Plane changes are very expensive if you don't have the aerodynamics to get cross range. So if you have a traditional triangular capsule, yes, you do in fact need a honkin' big engine (and more importantly, a big fuel tank...) to expand your "landing zone". But if you have wings, even if the L/D ratio is not exactly a high performance glider, you still have an immensely larger "landing zone" so you don't need a honkin' big engine. Thats why they invest mass and volume in those wings instead of engines, tanks, and a parachute.
Another way to phrase it, is without wings you pretty much land somewhere along the ground track you would have passed over plus or minus like ten miles. But with wings, you can get hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of cross range glide. Your orbit can be over Chicago but you can decide to land in Florida.
We've had the strategic nuclear triad for decades, this thing's certainly big enough to make a strategic quadrilateral or maybe one leg of the triad is getting too expensive and needs retirement.
If you have patience, perhaps for a doomsday weapon or strategic deterrent, you don't need wings, giant engines, or much of a parachute. Its obviously a sensor platform not a weapon.
So what kind of sensor platform exists where its cheaper to launch 1000 one terabyte hard drives in a NAS than to downlink all that stuff. Well, "strategic" photographic imaging, maybe some kind of wide bandwidth SDR... The kind of thing were you press the record button and a year later gather demographic strategic intel, rather than a handful of snapshots of one semi-tactical target. Like how many total radar units does Iran have, well, you listen to the entire surveillance radar band over the country for an entire year, then do a lot of analysis once it lands. Not for "gimmie a pic of that one target today" type questions.
>>If you have patience, perhaps for a doomsday weapon or strategic deterrent, you don't need wings, giant engines, or much of a parachute. Its obviously a sensor platform not a weapon.
Thank you. The other thing is; everything that goes up must come down. With the X-37 you have control of WHERE it comes down, and less exclusively, when. So much less risk of your tech falling into enemy hands.
"Major Tracy Bunko — then posted at the Pentagon's Air Force press desk"
Now who can we get to really blow some smoke on these classified projects? Well, there's Major Bunko, sir. They say he can really sling some major... uh... bunko.
Good question, perhaps giving it an actual name would reveal too much. General consensus seems to think its a 'deploy on demand' reconnaissance transport (basically a bunch of signal or optical gear in the payload that it can point at various places and then return). That would make it something like an MQ-37 or RQ-37.
The return ability also lets you collect data and store it on board for recovery later. Any sensor that can see through clouds could generate a colossal amount of data and there is never enough bandwidth!
Prefixes are mostly political in purpose and don't strictly describe the aircraft mission. The F-22 was the F/A-22 for a while, the F-117 was a bomber, the X-35 was a prototype for the F-35 and thus should have been the YF-35, and the SR-71 was designated RS-71 until a flubbed presidential announcement. Everyone knows what these aircraft really do though.
Why is this 'secret'? We're not exactly in a cold war anymore and the terrorists don't care if we're in space? Why not just tell us what the plane is up front?
What makes you think we're not in a Cold War? There are plenty of countries that are each other's adversaries and are actively trying to undermine one another. Perhaps we aren't in a bilateral Cold War, but it's not like we suddenly have world peace.
There's lots of talk about nuclear platforms. I don't believe that's the case with the X-37B for a few reasons. We have better options elsewhere, the X-37B designs I've seen don't seem to fit this picture, and NASA/Boeing Space & Intelligence would not typically deal with nuclear weapon platforms.
I think it's clearly a reconnaissance (ISR) platform. Think Gorgon Stare [1] but for an even wider area. As an aside, Dryden has a long history of testing recon platforms.
Source: I used to work on this stuff (although not the X-37 program)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadHeight: 9 ft 6 in (2.9 m)
They don't look especially broad, either. Yay, lifting bodies!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#X-37B_2
Of course the vehicle is going to be destroyed anyway, so just carry the payload all the way down till it goes boom or whatever, unless you were hoping to launch multiple warheads. The problem is the whole vehicle is very light, so you're not going to fit a B-52 worth of payloads in a vehicle who's launch weight is, I believe, lighter than a GBU-43. My point being that if vehicle plus payload at launch is lighter than a GBU-43, there's not much point in being concerned with how many GBU-43 it can be dropped if it can only carry a fraction of one anyway.
The main problem is its hard to think up a mission profile where a cruise missile wouldn't be cheaper and more effective.
Nasa should really drop this winged approach. They can't because they have experience and scientists on that field, and change is hard.
But why would you stuff the rods in an X-37B? You could just launch a light satellite without all this re-entry stuff and you'd get many more rods for the same mass... or then you could use a smaller launcher.
The X-37B is basically a reusable payload fairing, a very heavy one at that. Oh well, it isn't even that because the rocket requires another outer expendable payload fairing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_...
I can't find any details, but most descriptions seem to imply that they needed to have a rocket engine on the warhead to come out of orbit (which is what I would expect).
No need to blast enemy satellites out of orbit, just rocket up and snatch it.
To understand the X-37, you need a reasonable knowledge of the origins of the Space Shuttle program. The only reason that program came to even the bastardized fruition it did was because the Air Force signed on, and they did so only because they needed a means of servicing and maintaining their orbital equipment. In theory, and occasionally in practice, this means involved actual human astronauts going up and doing spanner work on satellites in orbit, but this was expensive and fraught with undue difficulty; cheaper and easier was simply to stuff the whole satellite into the Shuttle's payload bay and haul it back down the gravity well for repair, refit, and relaunch, and indeed many Space Shuttle missions involved precisely this evolution. (It's probable, if uncertain due to the Air Force's bent for secrecy with regard to their payloads, that the Shuttle was used to return some or most of these satellites to orbit; on the other hand, a Titan-IV's probably cheaper, and the Air Force has used plenty of those, too. I don't know much about what goes into that sort of decision.)
The X-37, then, far from being some kind of conspiracy-theory FOBS, is just a Space-Shuttle-style "space truck". The major difference is that technology has now reached a point where it's possible for such a vehicle to satisfy the Air Force's mission parameters without having to involve all the complex, costly, and potentially disastrous encumbrances required to carry living humans into space.
Edit! I've finally just recalled the name of the book from which I gained my understanding of the politicking which took the Space Shuttle program from initial conception to final operational "Space Transportation System". That book is The Space Shuttle Decision, published by NASA as part of the NASA History Series, and you can read it online at http://www.nss.org/resources/library/shuttledecision/ and, oh, probably lots of other places as well. A bit dry, but marvelously detailed and surprisingly objective given its origins; I recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the history of its subject matter.
Why would the Air force need a "space truck" and not NASA?
Its easy to point the conspiracy theory finger when the military is involved. Especially when they are staying silent about what the plane's purpose is.
I haven't time at the moment to check, but I'd assume GPS and GLONASS birds are in geostationary orbit (or whatever they call that now), which would complicate matters significantly. I imagine the Air Force probably has some sort of weapon in mind for such cases, but I wouldn't begin to know how to guess what that is, except presumably a big rocket, whose payload is a small rocket, whose payload in turn is a tiny warhead with some very precise attitude jets.
NASA never wanted a "space truck". Ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey? NASA wanted something along the lines of the spaceplane/station/moonbase system depicted in the first act; the Space Shuttle program was all they could sell to Congress, largely thanks to the efforts of now-deceased then-Senator William Proxmire. (If you've ever heard a science-fiction fan curse that name and wondered why, now you know; if you want the full story, read the book whose URL I just edited into my prior comment.)
And, yes, "its [sic] easy to point the conspiracy theory finger when the military is involved." It's easy to do a lot of things, which is not the same as saying those things are sensible or worth doing; ignorance, especially of the trivially addressable sort, is no excuse for foolishness.
The Space Shuttle was designed to do several things that had nothing to do with NASA's purview: To launch anti-USSR spy satellites into polar orbit from Vandenberg, to reboost and repair those satellites, and to steal/recover USSR-owned spy satellites, taking them into the cargo bay and landing at a US runway in order to recover their technology in the event that the USSR got ahead of us again. This also applies to US-owned satellites at risk of reentering over the USSR to prevent their tech from catching up.
In order to do this, they made the whole thing incredibly expensive, and sacrificed a lot of capabilities NASA would have rather had.
That's what this is for. It serves as a functional military Shuttle analog against small payloads, and as a beta for a manned X-37C or X-37D against larger payloads.
A payload of slightly smaller than described tungsten rods would fit on a craft of this size, and according to the article this type of weapon is not prohibited by any current treaty. It could hit anywhere with practically no warning and no need to enter airspace. It's almost impossible to defend against.
Scary shit.
Generally speaking, the amount of damage for a tungsten rod the size of a telephone pole would match low-yield atomic detonations.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
A telephone pole has a volume of about 3 million cubic centimetres. Tungsten's density is ~20 g/cm^3, so we're talking about 60 000 kilograms of tungsten. At around $40/kg, that's ~2.5 million dollars per rod just in raw materials.
But that's ignoring the cost of bringing a 60 metric ton rod into orbit, of course. You'd need a Falcon Heavy launch per rod, ignoring the problematic dimensions (let's assume you can cold weld a few pieces together in space). That's at least another $60 million per rod for the launch costs.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/X-37/index.html
So it looks like it was initially being planned to be run as a NASA project out of Dryden.
Edit: Which I could have found out just by reading wikipedia rather than maintaining a encylopaedic knowledge of the old dryden photo gallery.
I don't think asking a robotic arms control activist about orbital mechanics and aerodynamics is going to result in anything insightful.
Plane changes are very expensive if you don't have the aerodynamics to get cross range. So if you have a traditional triangular capsule, yes, you do in fact need a honkin' big engine (and more importantly, a big fuel tank...) to expand your "landing zone". But if you have wings, even if the L/D ratio is not exactly a high performance glider, you still have an immensely larger "landing zone" so you don't need a honkin' big engine. Thats why they invest mass and volume in those wings instead of engines, tanks, and a parachute.
Another way to phrase it, is without wings you pretty much land somewhere along the ground track you would have passed over plus or minus like ten miles. But with wings, you can get hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of cross range glide. Your orbit can be over Chicago but you can decide to land in Florida.
We've had the strategic nuclear triad for decades, this thing's certainly big enough to make a strategic quadrilateral or maybe one leg of the triad is getting too expensive and needs retirement.
If you have patience, perhaps for a doomsday weapon or strategic deterrent, you don't need wings, giant engines, or much of a parachute. Its obviously a sensor platform not a weapon.
So what kind of sensor platform exists where its cheaper to launch 1000 one terabyte hard drives in a NAS than to downlink all that stuff. Well, "strategic" photographic imaging, maybe some kind of wide bandwidth SDR... The kind of thing were you press the record button and a year later gather demographic strategic intel, rather than a handful of snapshots of one semi-tactical target. Like how many total radar units does Iran have, well, you listen to the entire surveillance radar band over the country for an entire year, then do a lot of analysis once it lands. Not for "gimmie a pic of that one target today" type questions.
Thank you. The other thing is; everything that goes up must come down. With the X-37 you have control of WHERE it comes down, and less exclusively, when. So much less risk of your tech falling into enemy hands.
Now who can we get to really blow some smoke on these classified projects? Well, there's Major Bunko, sir. They say he can really sling some major... uh... bunko.
你好!
I think it's clearly a reconnaissance (ISR) platform. Think Gorgon Stare [1] but for an even wider area. As an aside, Dryden has a long history of testing recon platforms.
Source: I used to work on this stuff (although not the X-37 program)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare