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I wonder if we'll get any reports on the purpose of these vehicles in our/my lifetimes. It was only a decade ago we heard about Key Hole 9 - Hexagon, a 1971 evolution of 1996 KH8 Gambit that could drop multiple buckets of film over time. Thats a lot of lag before a reveal.
Optical survelliance is probably not the mission here, but it's still wild that we know about this thing but have no idea what it does. It's both very reasonable to call it a "tesr vehicle", but given it's flight time, it has so many orders of magnitude more time being tested than other test flight systems that the name OTV, orbital test vehicle, feels somewhat silly.
TIL space-based solar power beamed to earth is in the experimental phase. For some reason I thought it was still just speculative.
Recent thread on that:
Beaming solar energy from space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438372 - Nov 2022 (60 comments)
and sundry others:
Why would anyone do this when solar farms produce electricity at too cheap to meter rates?
The military are extremely interested in being able to power expeditionary bases without having to truck in diesel. It would be a game changer to logistics.
You could reflect light from the sun to places on Earth that are experiencing night.
Exactly, it's always sunny in space.
Also, a big part of the inefficiency in conventional power collection (in the case of solar) is transmission losses in the power lines. This converts light directly into microwave energy that can then be transmitted without power lines. That's a game hanger, just like wifi is to ethernet
High voltage power lines have losses of 0.5% to 1% per 100 miles. Beaming power from space microwaves would have a total loss of 40-60%.
And that doesn't include the cost (both money and carbon) of launching all the collection and transmission equipment into space in the first place.
High voltage power lines also cost $800k-$2mil per mile just to construct.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2019/10/11/....
Is efficiency that important? It's not like were delivering the photons to the solar panels like we use trains to deliver coal to power stations.
Given how stodgy and variable WiFi tends to be, I'll stick with the Neanderthal way of copper lines.
because it's also a weapon, like a giant sized version of a kid with a magnifying glass.
Couldn't you just reflect it back?
not really, you can strike nearly half the planet in half a second (or however fast your mirror actuators are) so unless you put up reflectors everywhere...
You wouldn't steal a satellite
Honestly that sounds really fun to go up into space on a secret mission like that
Can someone please explain the picture in the article: Why are the technicians dressed like astronauts? They're not going to space in the vehicle.
Hydrazine (used for maneuvering thrusters) is not your friend. Tanks will not be fully empty — draining them safely requires safety gear.
Does it evaporate if little drops on the ground (I know it's bad to breathe it)
Read it and weep:
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hydrazine#section=...
"Why are these people wearing SCAPE Suits near the X37-B?" at https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/39544/why-are-thes... adds slightly more context beyond what the other HN'ers have already said here.
protection against possible hypergolic fuel
The stuff of nightmares. You might say... nightmare fuel.
Now you're just being hypergolic.
(But seriously that stuff is awful)
John Clark's "Ignition!" is back in print, as it happens. It's a personal history of liquid rocket fuel research in which there's a lot of chemistry of which I understood none, but the stories made it worth reading anyway.
Toxic fuel vented?
suspiciously after the classified Space Force launch of falcon heavy on Nov 1
No more Boeing passenger jets that buzz around in circles or nose-dive into the ground for the time being then.
Whenever I see an X-37B post, I like to remind people its real purpose is to keep one or more nukes on-orbit at all times.
Do I have proof? No.
Why not a satellite? Satellites run out of fuel, eventually break and need to be de-orbited before they do.
It's against treaty to keep nukes in space. X-B37 has plausible deniability, and the nukes don't take up the whole cargo bay so you can still have room for experiments.
Why? It's a great first strike weapon without a detectable missile launch. If terrorists are building a nuke you can drop it on them and make it look like they blew themselves up. Last ditch asteroid defense.
Am I against it? Not really. But I do believe in an informed citizenry. YMMV.
No, it almost definitely isn't. The cost-benefit analysis of doing that completely fails at almost every imaginable level.
Not only would it fail to increase American nuclear strike/retaliation capabilities by any meaningful margin, but if discovered it would set off a massive nuclear arms race in space which would be massively destabilizing and benefits no-one which is exactly why all the major players signed that "no nukes in space" treaty in the first place.
> It's a great first strike weapon without a detectable missile launch. If terrorists are building a nuke you can drop it on them and make it look like they blew themselves up. Last ditch asteroid defense.
No to all points. Nukes don't just unintentionally go off and hypothetically if the did people on the ground wouldn't normally expect the very noticeable trail of a reentry vehicle screaming in from space immediately beforehand. That kind of thing is very noticeable, go look at ICBM test footage. If you want to nuke someone without warning you use stealthy cruise missiles because those don't tend to get noticed until they detonate. Any nuke carried by the X-37 also lacks the delta V to ever get to any dangerous asteroid you might want to try to intercept.
Maybe for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment instead?
"Look Ma! No Nukez!"
With all the junk we have orbiting over our heads, it would probably be a lot cheaper to just reach and deorbit some of the larger debris in a controlled way, rather than bring all that weight up there, or even do that with some of the enemy satellites if they have them: two birds with one stone.
Most satellites are intended to break up on reentry, or would whether intended to or not because of how they'd end up hitting the atmosphere and their relatively large surface areas and shape (they're very far from aerodynamic). Kinetic weapons would need a different physical composition (denser material and different shape) and more deliberate manner of launching (or dropping?) than you'd be able to pull off from existing satellites.
So you think it would be useful to deploy one or two nuclear first strike weapon in space on the x37, versus let's say the Navy's 18 Ohio class submarines already actively deployed, each of which has the capacity to take out a small country? This makes no sense at all.
The United States military industrial complex would shrug and ask “why not both?” At this question.
Isn’t the main point of a deterrent to deter people? If no one knows about it, it wouldn’t really deter them.
"It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday."
In this case, this changes the power dynamic, it’s something that other countries have no defense against. If it’s known, those countries will have no choice but to strike first.
Maybe Space Force knows that China is doing the same with their space station, and they can’t use the ISS for the same given the Russians onboard.
> Do I have proof? No.
"Claims that are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
-Hitchens' Razor
What advantages would this have over the submarines that are already in use today?
> If terrorists are building a nuke you can drop it on them and make it look like they blew themselves up.
Not even going to get into what a ridiculous fantasy scenario that is. And anyway, has the US demonstrated any reluctance in dropping conventional warheads on terrorists?
> Last ditch asteroid defense.
This comes across as an idea one would develop from watching tv shows and movies, as it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Why bother with nukes when the US very likely has rods of god up there. Technically they’re not a weapon, just a bunch of tungsten rods that dropped from space can obliterate pretty much anything.
> Do I have proof? No.
Do you offer even a single shred of evidence whatsoever? No.
I really don't think you can drop a nuke from space unnoticed.
> Whenever I see an X-37B post, I like to remind people its real purpose is to keep one or more nukes on-orbit at all times.
> Do I have proof? No. ... I do believe in an informed citizenry. YMMV.
<satire> Every time I see someone mention that Biden won the US presidential election 2020, I like to remind people that the election was stolen. Do i have proof? No. I just believe in an informed citizenry.</satire>