Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Secretive X-37B space plane ready for next flight
Posted on 01:21 by Maria Scott
It's round three for the mysterious X-37B space plane.
An Atlas V rocket carrying the unmanned craft, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, has gotten clearance for a planned liftoff tomorrow at just after 10 a.m. PT from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
If the previous two trips into space are any indication, don't expect
the X-37B to come home anytime soon -- or for the U.S. Air Force to say
much about what the vessel is up to. Is it spying? Might it eventually
carry weapons? Is there extra cash lying around at the Pentagon for joy
rides? Maybe it's a psychological operations ploy to mess with
government types in Beijing or Tehran or Pyongyang! The speculation has
risen to meet the near silence.
The one detail of any substance that the Air Force and X-37B maker
Boeing have shared is that the previous X-37B trips into space went on
and on and on. The first, which ended in December 2010, lasted 224 days, and the second, which ended last June, endured for 469 days, or a year and four months.
Like the space shuttle, the 29-foot-long X-37B can return to Earth
for reuse, and is designed to do so autonomously. The Air Force does
acknowledge that this return capability allows it to "test new
technologies" with less of a risk -- and at a more reasonable cost, as
aerospace missions go -- than other programs might allow. And this would
account for the spacecraft's other name: the Orbital Test Vehicle.
A blurb on the Web site of the United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture responsible for the Atlas V liftoff, puts it this way:
The Air Force had hoped to get the spacecraft back into orbit in
October, but unrelated problems with the separate ULA launch of a GPS
satellite (aboard a Delta rocket) pushed the schedule back. "All
credible crossover implication from the Delta anomaly for the OTV-3
Atlas vehicle have been thoroughly addressed and mitigated, culminating
in the flight clearance decision for the OTV-3 launch," ULA said in a
press release Friday.
There are two OTV craft in the X-37B fleet. The one scheduled for
launch tomorrow is OTV-1, which carried out the first of the flights to
date. Yes, confusingly the numbers in the the OT-x designations seem to be used loosely both for the spacecraft (-1 and -2) and for the missions (-1, -2, and now -3).
And who knows? Maybe the third time is the charm for getting a little
more information out of the Pentagon about what the little spacecraft
is up to.
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57558309-76/secretive-x-37b-space-plane-ready-for-next-flight/
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