I want to know what this thing is so bad. Also wonder what are the odds that space force has put people into space and brought them back at this point, and what is the timeframe they envision for doing such things if not.
The X-37B operates in GEO, which is the only hint we need.
Missions objectives will include satellite inspection, signal interception, and (unacknowledged) tampering / destruction.
Payloads will be geared for medium-range surveillance (small telescope for optical/thermal imaging at a couple hundred km), ELINT (radios and antennas for snooping / hacking), and probably a manipulator arm or two to "reach out and touch someone."
They probably have some sort of kinetic and/or electronic pulse weapons, but of course it would be highly classified and deniable.
Missions are 100% unmanned. I'd argue that's the whole point of the X-37B program: to develop technology to perform ~all the classified mission capabilities we could do with Shuttle, except unmanned.
The shuttle could take a whole satellite in its payload bay and bring it back. Obviously the X-37B will never be able to do that simply because it's so much smaller.
I don't think it'll have the same capabilities or even the same goals as the shuttle.
I would think that the Mission objectives are broader than that in you can basically swap out any mission payload that would be too costly to launch and develop a whole satellite for and task it quickly.
Semi tangent, the MKV thing is so rad, I don't understand how it kills ballistic missiles but yeah -- I thought this thing was supposed to operate in space.
There's some hints about the kind of experiment payloads have flown: not all classified, not all military, some mundane long duration materials and radiation exposure studies it sounds like.
Right, and the classified ones are probably more like "what does space radiation do to uranium/plutonium/LiD/etc" and less like "if we take the Mexico Mummified Alien Bodies into the Van Allen belts, do they come to life?"
Filmed in an actual university by the look of it. It's funny how low budget films sometimes look more realistic than big budget ones, because they can't afford to build sets, and have to use the real thing. The brief biology lab scene in Primer is the same.
Haha! We were just talking about remakes of movies rarely working out so well as far as making the story any better. I guess they make out well in enough in regards to the producers making money.
I was going to say that of course a bunch of Space Force people have already been put into space, but I just looked and it appears that none of the active duty military astronauts have actually been transferred to the Space Force; they're all still with their original services.
I don't know if the plan is to keep things that way or not. So far there has only been one round of astronaut selection since the founding of the Space Force. But the older services still have all the aviators, flight engineers / officers, and flight surgeons who have traditionally been competitive for selection.
Sure, but the same is true of the Army. And yet there are several US Army officers (literal Soldiers) who are active astronauts. I'm just surprised that they haven't been transferred into the Space Force yet along with the many other space operations folks from each service that have been transferred to comprise the bulk of the uniformed Space Force "Guardians."
Edit: I found one. (https://www.nasa.gov/people/nick-hague/) "In 2021, Hague voluntarily transferred from the United States Air Force to the United States Space Force."
There's almost no way, unless I'm missing something. This thing is in orbit for over a year at a time, even the ISS can't support people that long without resupply.
Plus people miss the ship is very small. The payload bay is only 4x7 ft and 225 kg. It looks like a Shuttle and people think it's another Shuttle but it's only 1/4 the size.
I'm not sure how to drop a no-spoilers Seven Eves reference in here, but suffice it to say, I thought it was a pretty good Stephenson sci-fi book & x37b showed up in spectacular fashion.
Yes, moving all of the shuttles into museums was just a to fake out the Russians. I'm pretty sure when JFK retuns to Dallas, he's returning in a shuttle
I thought it was more to actually launch the newer keyholes and to bring them back in case of repair. After all one of those cost as much as an aircraft carrier, you don't want to scrap one for a minor problem.
KH-11 was cheaper than KH-9 by far ($3B vs $16B inflation adjusted, both for 20 satellites), each KH-9 had 4 re-entry vehicles, so you could only really do 4 passes per satellite before needing a new one (or some way to replace the module that housed the RVs).
It's likely that 'we might need to bring them back...' was justification for USAF remaining as a voice in the shuttle program after KH-11 rendered the satellite fleet reusable, though.
Pretty unlikely- you don't actually need to put people in space for most military purposes, at least not anymore. Most human spaceflight missions can be done far cheaper by not using humans, especially when we have computers and AI as good as we have today. If the military needed humans in space to do something they would probably just have it be a classified part of a normal astronaut's mission or something
It's arguably never been necessary to have humans in space (EDIT: for military purposes). The USAF's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was cancelled back in the late sixties because even then, reconnaissance satellites worked well enough that the added complexity and cost of a crewed station wasn't worth it.
I think there are real benefits to having people in space for scientific purposes but not really for military ones. Plus a lot of human space travel is preparing for an eventuality that we will have a moon or mars base which will need people to run it.
Forgot to specify that I meant military purposes specifically, just edited it. I think the necessity of humans for scientific purposes is arguable, but it's definitely not as clear-cut.
If you assume humans will never live on a non earth planet then it has literally 0 value lol but if we set up a moon or mars base in the future it will hold a lot of value
It’s really not that special in my eyes. It’s a miniature space shuttle, minus humans. The purpose is 100% classified but you can guess the usual suspects (advanced sensor testing, experimental payloads, testing space warfare / asset manipulation, etc).
I really doubt they have put humans inside of it, given that they have kept it up there for year-long plus periods over its lifetime.
The boring answer would be that it's just sharing the ride with a bunch of other satellites, as it did on the last three occasions.
The fun answer would be that it's going way further than ever before. A Falcon Heavy can take 25 metric tons to GEO, and the X-37B is roughly 1/5 of that, so think a lot higher. What is there of interest to the US Space Force beyond GEO? Well...
Thanks, fixed. I meant Falcon Heavy. And it's actually a little more than that to GTO, but then the thing has to get itself into GEO, so it's not all payload:
Falcon Heavy has the second highest lift capability of any operational rocket, with a payload of 63,800 kg (140,700 lb) to low Earth orbit, 26,700 kg (58,900 lb) to Geostationary Transfer Orbit, and 16,800 kg (37,000 lb) to trans-Mars injection.
Falcon heavy can't even take that much to GEO, only to GTO. But still, while it could have the fuel to send the X-37B into TLI it would not be possible to hide this. So they wouldn't lie about it.
Who says they are lying about it? From the article:
So far, Space Force has only stated that the mission will "expand the United States Space Force's knowledge of the space environment by experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies," according to the statement.
Yeah as others have pointed out, it probably wouldn't be possible to hide a TLI mission, so they'd probably be upfront about the mission instead, but this is fun enough science-fiction to think about that it is my headcanon now.
It actually make some sense if their official explanation for the purpose of the vehicle is true. If the main reason for the X-37b is to bring material to orbit and study the long term effect of being in space, then going higher make sense.
In an elliptical orbit, you can cross the Van Hallen belt and magnetic fields over and over again. Then after a couple years return those samples to earth for study. This gives you valuable data to build better satellites in the future.
For examples, the gyros flywheel on the Hubble and it's sibling spy telescope failed over and over until they realized the radiations caused some arcing in the bearings which degraded them much faster than predicted. When you spend billions on individual satellites, this isn't the kind of thing you want to discover in orbit.
We already have a way of delivering nuclear warheads from space - they're called ICBMs. What would a space plane add that existing launch platforms don't already provide?
Subs have the weakness of being run by humans and shorter amount of time staying on station. A sub commander can always ignore the "Lock Out Changes" command where this thing might not.
Edit: also, how is it half the time? I would assume that the majority of the time is getting to altitude during launch. Once they are on return trajectories, they're moving mighty quick. Descent should be much less of the time involved, right?
We also have SLBMs that can be launched directly off coast of a target. And, tossing nukes at enemies isn't going to go unnoticed and that thing doesn't have nearly the capacity to make for a sufficiently large first strike to prevent retaliation.
I guess it's possible, but (imo) it doesn't really make much sense.
That thing is essentially in beta/prototype. What happens when there's multiples of that thing? Is the time from a weapon being released to impact enough time to verify and take action?
I've played Missle Command, and once they separate, it's a nightmare!
If there was a space based defense system, where would these items orbit? If it's a kinetic weapon, can something launched from geosync reach the target to cover the distance in time? Since most of the ICBMs would be coming over the pole, where else could you park your satellites that would be in position to defend against incoming missiles? Polar orbits are not stationary, so would you need a constant fleet of them over head like a Starlink constellation? Lost of questions that I've just never really slowed down to think about the logistics instead of just the old school "lasers are cool! pew pew pew!" that I thought about as kid when Ronnie Raygun was in office.
Yeah exactly! Separation and dummy decoy warheads become an exponential problem and shooting through atmosphere is hard at hyper super mega sonic speeds.
So interception in space but where, as you say.
The only real 'near peer' nuclear threats are Russia and China so other than their 'boomers' (does China have that?) we should know which way they'll be coming from and their ballistic arc roughly.
So we don't need global coverage 'just' GEO coverage of the parts we have intelligence on with pew pew laser line of sight which is of course lightspeed travel time and should be rapid aiming if there's enough of 'em.
These might even be one shot weapons themselves perhaps even fission devices for the laser to have enough energy instantly available.
Orbital kinetic impactor weapons - a quiver of giant heavy rocks - would be an extremely valid reason for a extra spectacularly big launch.
I'm not sure why x37b would be the ship for it, other than that it's proven technology with good manuverability. Feels like most any old satellite full of rocks could do though.
damn, i mean, you're not wrong, but i'd hate to be the executive assistant to the execs when they read that. by hate, i mean it'd totally be awesome to see their reactions
> The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8.
Doesnt the space industry average include mostly office work? Hardly seems fair to compare actual physical construction and ops work at a developmental test site to desk jobs.
Space industry average is an utterly useless and idiotic thing used for comparison.
Most of those companies make tiny sats, or things like small thrusters. Or even small sub-components. And even those that build larger things, build them at far smaller rates.
SpaceX in Brownsville should be compared to things like manufacturing oil platforms or maybe wind power plants.
The magic of unions, when it comes to safety, is that they let employees feel safe not just reporting safety issues, but outright rejecting unsafe requests. Even in union shops, unsafe directives are issued, against policy and law alike, but unlike non-union shops, workers in union shops know someone’s got their back if they call it out and/or say “no”.
Well Boeing is unable to launch anything nor deliver on their end of Commercial Crew, so maybe they need a good excuse to not have to do anything for a while.
> The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8. Its rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas, where LeBlanc died, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average. The rate at its Hawthorne, California, manufacturing facility was more than double the average at 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.
You are comparing people that work on small sats to people who work on the largest rocket in human history.
McGregor is the most active rocket engine test facility in the world.
How are their insure rates compared 'per rocket engine test' with other places that test large rocket engines. But again, most of those are tiny rocket engines being test, so how about we look at insure per unit of thrust tested.
> The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.
And what is the rate per sat produced compared to others?
> Along the lines of "we produce more stuff, so cutting corners on worker safety is ok".
Well but that really isn't it.
Its more like doing X has some inherent danger and if you do more of X then its likely more people are gone be insured. So comparing to some 'industry avg' in an industry that also includes people building cube-sats compared to the most powerful rocket engine isn't really fair.
And I wasn't suggesting this to say what SpaceX is doing is inherently ok (I don't know enough) but to establish better comparative baselines.
Then we can actually figure out if SpaceX is more unsafe or simply does more dangerous activity.
Actually it does. If you assume that doing some a difficult dangerous task like, testing a rocket engine, building a building sized rocket or launching a rocket is inherently dangerous, and no amount of safety will get the injury rate to 0.
So if a company only does 5 engine test and 1 launch a year and has 10 injuries, then that is inherently worse then a company that does 1000 engine tests and 100 launches but has 20 injuries.
If it was truly this kind of naive progression, things sound pretty simple.
However, we both know reality tends to be more complex than that.
For example, a company with vastly more experience doing engine tests (etc) should also have vastly more experience designing safe testing processes and procedures. To the point where they may eliminate injuries completely. ;)
So saying worker injuries are acceptable due to the output quantity of stuff still seems like an excuse for poor workplace practises.
If they double their output of stuff, are you ok with them increasing the number of worker injuries rather than figuring out how to reduce or eliminate the injuries?
My point is this, how do you know their practices are worse if you don't compare.
If SpaceX does 100x as many rocket engine test but has only a 2x worse insure rates then what you suggest:
> should also have vastly more experience designing safe testing processes and procedures
Is already true.
So articles that just say 'SpaceX bad because more insury then avg' just don't actually provide any information.
> To the point where they may eliminate injuries completely. ;)
> So saying worker injuries are acceptable due to the output quantity of stuff still seems like an excuse for poor workplace practises.
Sure if we lived in a perfect world that would be nice. But no other type of building anything has perfect safety.
And the way you are phrasing your statement still just assumes SpaceX has 'poor workplace practices'. But we in my opinion have not actually been presented sufficient evidence that this is actually true.
So yes its no excuse for 'poor practices' but I have yet to be convinced that their practices actually poor. There is a difference between saying their practice isn't perfect and its actually poor.
It seems to me these articles just want to say something bad about SpaceX because they know this will create clicks rather then do the actual real work of analyzing safety in rocket testing and manufacturing.
> If they double their output of stuff, are you ok with them increasing the number of worker injuries rather than figuring out how to reduce or eliminate the injuries?
You are simply framing the question in a way where there can never be right answer. Of course continuously improving safety is important. At the same time evaluating safety by comparing companies that do 100x more of something and then screaming 'see they are unsafe, is clearly not fair either'.
If they double their output and injury rates go up by 1.1x times, then that is pretty successful.
So before being negative, please actually show me real actual data in how much their output went up compare do their injury rate. Then maybe we can figure out something relevant about their safety practices. Until then this is just headlines.
And lets compare with relevant industries. How does their rocket engine test facility compare with other rocket engine test facilities. The South Texas manufacturing sight should be compared with a shipyard or building an oil platforms, and not with companies building small rocket.
> If they double their output and injury rates go up by 1.1x times, then that is pretty successful.
Again, I don't buy that increasing output by default means increasing injury rates at all is acceptable. :(
There's just not enough info in these theoretical examples, and neither of us are experts in the domain.
For example, are they doubling the output with the same # of staff (eg increased automation path), or by ~doubling the number of workers?
If it's by doubling the number of workers, then you might be right. But if they're using increased automation without increasing worker count, then an increased # of injuries would by pretty shitty.
Previously Musk declined to enable Starlink over Crimea to prevent SpaceX hardware from being used to wage war (the Ukrainians asked him to enable it for a drone strike).
Now, I am told DoD is in charge of where Starlink is geofenced (and the Ukrainians in the military are happy, which suggests he was overruled), and SpaceX is launching a full/heavy X37B in the middle of a proxy war with Russia (who has recently tested antisatellite weapons).
I worry this will subject future SpaceX/Starlink hardware to retaliation should certain geopolitical conflicts escalate.
I also wonder what the odds of FAA approval of Starship tests being gated on SpaceX doing whatever the military wants are. It’s not like the Americans with a monopoly on orbital weapons are gonna let someone just walk up and usurp them because they built the hardware.
Unfortunately stories like this won’t ever get told in my lifetime, if ever.
Every sale is, literally speaking, a conspiracy between buyer and seller to do a deal. A conspiracy doesn't need to be nefarious to be a conspiracy.
I think there is a lot more on the bargaining table between SpaceX and the US military than dollars, given the geopolitical implications of the level of easy access to orbit that SpaceX currently exclusively possesses. No other organization on Earth could cost effectively build something like Starlink today, due to F9 reusability.
Euphemising the X37B as a "national security asset" doesn't change the fact that SpaceX has historically only launched reconnaissance for the US military and not weapons (and that Musk had explicitly avoided getting involved in supporting weaponry, at least until it seems he no longer could).
This being a change to the status quo, of course, presumes that the need for FH indicates an X37B payload that is heavy (or an orbital insertion that requires more energy). Both of these suggest (but do not guarantee) weapons systems, either from payload weight requirement or orbital insertion requirement (or both).
This is, of course, an assumption, and it's possible that SpaceX still hasn't committed to launch any weapons, and that the X37B is just heavier because of its research payload(s) (or it's also reconnaissance and they just want to put it in a specific big-delta-v-requiring-orbit for better surveillance).
It's also possible it's chock full of munitions and SpaceX doesn't get to keep trying to research how to get to Mars if they don't help the US military continue to do what they do on Earth.
Are you maybe mixing up Starshield, the defense oriented Starlink service in which the DoD controls cells and has the rights to do whatever they want with since it was sold to them with that intention, with Starlink, the civilian internet service being provided to Ukraine?
Haven't heard anything about the DoD overruling the controls on Starlink in Ukraine.
Advocating for unilateral disarmament is fine (it's a nash equilibrium). The only other stable solution to UD (unilateral disarmament) is MAD (mutually assured destruction).
Advocating for your own country to be handicapped while china/russia and others does the same thing is stupid.
Thankfully my freedom doesn't depend on people like you.
If large geopolitics escalates, no one will care who used what earlier, only what someone could do. It’s all politics. Another obvious target is GPS satellites.
Not really. Taking out the US Navstar/GPS satellites wouldn't be very effective unless you coordinated to take out a lot of them at once because there's a fair amount of redundancy in them. Also, they're in MEO at ~20k km, not where there's a lot of other stuff (including antisatellite weapons). I don't know enough about orbital mechanics to know if antisatellite weapons in geosynchronous orbits can easily attack things in MEO but I know that you can't do it very quickly from LEO unless you have significant (ie visible from the ground) fuel/engines already in LEO.
Also, there are QZSS, Beidou, Galileo, and GLONASS now too. You'd have to take out multiple systems (or convince their operators to geofence) to actually deny all useful location signals to an area. This is rapidly becoming a project that is beyond the capabilities of most single countries, given the number of different systems, number of different satellites, number of different frequencies, and number of different orbits.
The X-37B is a military vessel, and the US already has a civilian space-exploration agency in NASA, suggesting that the payload is indeed of a military nature.
It is absolutely abhorrent to see that the nation-states of planet Sol III are resuming the misguided attempts to take their petty intra-planetary conflicts into space. I feel like in one of those Star Trek episodes where one alien group is trying to get a leg up on the other by petitioning the Federation ship in orbit to help them against their quite-similar enemies.
