{"id":15553,"date":"2012-06-18T12:24:38","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T17:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15553"},"modified":"2012-06-18T12:25:24","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T17:25:24","slug":"speculation-on-the-intended-mission-of-the-x-37b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/18\/speculation-on-the-intended-mission-of-the-x-37b\/","title":{"rendered":"Speculation on the intended mission of the X-37B"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A blog post at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/blogs\/shortsharpscience\/2012\/06\/chinas-orbital-rendezvous-best.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>New Scientist<\/em><\/a> 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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>China&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>At around noon local time, the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre relayed live pictures of Shenzhou-9&#8217;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 &mdash; and once the crew had manually locked on to the latter&#8217;s cruciform docking target it took only eight minutes to latch the spacecraft together safely.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>At no point has the USAF revealed the craft&#8217;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 &mdash; it was a DARPA project in its early days &mdash; it could carry a warhead, using its drone homing capability to provide surprise precision strike from orbit. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s space agency took the plaudits for successfully docking its crewed Shenzhou-9 spacecraft with its orbiting lab Tiangong-1 today, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,44,15,13],"tags":[145,582,825,722,716],"class_list":["post-15553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-space-science","category-technology","category-usa","tag-airforce","tag-darpa","tag-iss","tag-lowearthorbit","tag-spacecraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-42R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15553"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15555,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15553\/revisions\/15555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}