

History offers clues to what the U.S. Air Force’s secretive spaceplane can do - vinnyglennon
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/wondering-what-the-u-s-air-forces-secretive-spaceplane-can-do-history-offers-clues-9b5a30ea7084

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rrggrr
Satellites offer the same capabilities. What satellites don't offer is the
ability to retreive (capture) objects, and maneuver (evade) at all altitudes.
From the anti satellite efforts by China this decade I infer that evading ASAT
weapons the primary goal, and that retrieval or placement of something are
strong possibilities as well.

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ChuckMcM
Nice collection of the data available on Dynasoar. I'm guessing that now that
folks have more launch capability outside the USA's ability to look at things
before they go up, it provides an ability to look at them after they go up.
But that is just guessing like everyone else.

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Animats
Right, they're just guessing. As the article points out, there are better ways
to do everything the Dyna-Soar could do. The US has a good anti-satellite
weapon system left over from the 1980s, so there's no need to develop
something new for that function.

The XB-37 probably has some other function.

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scottlocklin
If you consider what the military has spent money on using weird submarines
(aka tapping underseas cables, including ones within Soviet waters), I think
it's pretty obvious what the XB-37 is doing, just as the article hinted.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-
creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/)

Other possibility, which I suppose could be ruled out, or partially verified,
if one studied the orbital mechanics of the thing, "rods from god."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)

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aaronbrethorst
Kinetic bombardment is, by far, the weirdest proposed scenario I've heard for
the X-37B program. Surveillance, on the other hand, certainly aligns much
better with Occam's Razor[1] than the alternatives.

[1] Or Gardan's Steelyard, assuming that all of the talk of kinetic
bombardment made you think of Anathem, like it did for me.

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serf
I always felt the X37B was likely a platform to test/perform 'strike-back'
comms capabilities after the initial orbital bombardment of comms satelites
during WW3.

It's all a guess, like any of this.

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7952
I think they discount reconnaissance too quickly as a use. Whilst radio can be
used to return data the bandwidth available is limited. A space plane has
almost unlimited bandwidth even if there is a delay in getting the data.

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gaius
It's amazing how stuff from the 60s seems like sci-fi 50 years later.

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coin
-1 for <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1" user-scalable="no"> (disabling zoom)

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qnaal
MEDIUM

-or-

how to take a written article with associated images (pretty much the only
thing that html/css does well), and make it less accessible for the web

