A blog post at New Scientist compares the achievement of the Chinese space program, which just successfully placed three astronauts aboard the ISS and the highly mysterious X-37B spaceplane which just completed a 469-day mission:
China’s space agency took the plaudits for successfully docking its crewed Shenzhou-9 spacecraft with its orbiting lab Tiangong-1 today, but the feat was slightly overshadowed by the weekend landing of the US X-37B spaceplane, which after a record-breaking orbital flight of 469 days showed just how far China has to go to catch up with advanced spacefaring nations.
At around noon local time, the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre relayed live pictures of Shenzhou-9’s docking on state broadcaster China Central Television. The space capsule held off at a distance of 62 kilometres from Tiangong-1 before making its docking approach just before 2pm — and once the crew had manually locked on to the latter’s cruciform docking target it took only eight minutes to latch the spacecraft together safely.
[. . .]
This Boeing-built spaceplane, roughly one quarter the size of the space shuttle, is equally mysterious. It flies to orbit on a regular rocket and when there deploys a solar array that gives its sensors the power they need for extended missions. It also has enough propellant to fire thrusters that make small changes to its orbit in a bid to foil surveillance. The vehicle re-enters the atmosphere just like the shuttle but lands entirely autonomously, making it a space drone.
At no point has the USAF revealed the craft’s purpose: in addition to spacecraft surveillance, it could deploy a robot that repairs (or disables) satellites in orbit, say some, while at the darker end of the spectrum of possibilities — it was a DARPA project in its early days — it could carry a warhead, using its drone homing capability to provide surprise precision strike from orbit.
Drone homing capability?! WTF is that?
Radio control, surely—which we’ve had since the late 19th century.
Comment by Chris Taylor — June 18, 2012 @ 18:35
I intentionally left that part of the quote in, just to find out if you were still visiting the blog on occasion. 😉
Comment by Nicholas — June 18, 2012 @ 20:02
I am extremely worried learning about this. The fact the world’s most powerful and warlike country is engaging in secret space missions that no one knows the purpose of is extremely worrisome and should make every country in the world afraid of what the real agenda is. Yesterday, Irak, Tomorrow???
Comment by Chris C. — June 18, 2012 @ 20:28
The way the election campaign is going, I am expecting a “leak” from the White House some time in the next 30-60 days. That’ll provide us with much of the information we’re currently lacking about the X-37B’s mission.
And I hate to break it to you, but secret space missions have been going on since the early 1960s if not earlier. The interesting thing about this one is that we’ve been told it’s happening, if not what the purpose of the missions might be.
Comment by Nicholas — June 18, 2012 @ 20:48