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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] An unmanned X-37B space plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, wrapping up a record 780 days in orbit, the US Air Force said Sunday. The mission breaks the mysterious plane's own record by spending more than two years in space.
[...] Altogether, the program, which has at least two of the reusable planes, has spent 2,865 days in space over the course of five missions, the Air Force said. The fifth mission launched on Sept. 7, 2017.
The Boeing-built space planes resemble a smaller version of NASA's old space shuttles and have a similar re-entry trajectory that uses a runway, like the old shuttles. They feature a small payload bay and use a deployable solar array for power.
The 11,000-pound vehicle is about 29 feet long with a wingspan of just under 15 feet and was designed to stay in orbit for 270 days. It was originally a NASA program, with roots in the space agency's lifting-body research, that ran from 1999 to 2004. The X-37B is designed to serve as a platform for experiments and to offer insights on transporting satellite sensors and other equipment to and from space.
[ed: Nuked dead link on "originally a NASA program' —chromas]
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday October 29 2019, @12:18AM (6 children)
Is it really a mystery in the grand scheme of things? They are either testing something or spying on something or most probable a combination of the two as they are testing some kind of spying thing. It's not like they just wanna do laps around the planet for 780 days ... or something something aliens something ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 29 2019, @12:56AM
Just like the Russian capsule dwellers, keeping a reusable spacecraft healthy for 780 days is a learning experience in and of itself. While it's up there it no doubt is doing other things, but maybe the most important aspect of the mission is just learning what glitches in the systems and how to deal with that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:48AM (4 children)
The fact that all governments have various top secret tests going on of course is not a secret. But what exactly is being tested is. In particular I feel that at times we've kind of lost our imagination because technology, revolutionary real technology (as opposed to purely digital advances), seems to have started to stall out. What I mean there is that the difference between 2000 and 1960 is something that would take some degree of sci-fi to imagine. Yet it's looking like the difference between 2000 and 2040 might end up being not a whole heck of a lot to most people. I personally think it will be a far greater change than from 1960 to 2000 because space colonization, but that requires some imagination!
As for this ship, there are lots of quite remarkable things they could be experimenting with. In particular it's kind of interesting how the EM Drive was finally tested by NASA. They affirmed it seemed to be producing thrust. And so they contracted it out to other branches to also build one. And they too confirmed it was producing thrust. They then wrote and released a paper, initially leaked, about the discovery. And then...? A complete blackout. I think that's probably a pretty good indicator that further tests suddenly started becoming classified. And probably understandably. If the EM drive does actually work - it's not just about getting to Mars a bit faster. It would revolutionize every single aspect of our entire species unlike anything ever before.
An EM drive actually working would imply infinite energy (most seem to be based around a linear relationship between energy input and thrust produced, yet the resultant kinetic energy increases exponentially against thrust!), the ability to reach relativistic velocities would enable all sorts of time-fuckery to use the technical term, and of course last but not least - you'd also be able to create weapons of unprecedented capability and power. The kinetic energy of a baseball accelerated to 0.9c is about 20,000 terrajoules. For contrast the energy of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 63 terrajoules. Had to double check my math there - it's correct. Wanna play catch?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 29 2019, @09:17AM
> seems to have started to stall out.
The problem, from my point of view, is
1. people can simulate everything to death, so they don't just "have a go" any more and build things. FEA/simulation is hard and takes years.
2. people are very (technical, financial, safety) risk averse nowadays. There are tonnes and tonnes of books about how to do projects, and they all kill anything with any risk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @02:08PM
EmDrive is fun to think about, but don't count on it working.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @04:17PM (1 child)
I hate to break it to you, but there isn't anything to the EM drive. It doesn't work. Please provide the links where it says all these other groups confirmed it because measuring a signal-to-noise equal or less than unity does not mean "it works".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:33PM
This [aiaa.org] was the final paper from NASA before they went dark in late 2016. NASA Eagleworks initially announced promising results in 2014 and continued to test it under ever more strenuous conditions that culminated in that paper. They spent literally years trying to falsify it, and failed to do so. That paper has been peer reviewed. Doesn't mean it's accurate, but it does mean there are no glaring mistakes especially for a prestigious journal to publish on such a controversial topic.
Anyhow, what happened next is what I find more interesting. EM drives are not heavy nor expensive and NASA obviously has working models. The next step would obviously be to test it in orbit. And NASA has plenty of appropriate vessels for such a test, the least of which not being the X-37B. Does the EM drive work? Well probably not. But it's pretty cheap to test. And the rewards if it works are unimaginably vast. That works out to a pretty good expected value of a test. And that's exactly at the moment that NASA went completely dark regarding the EM Drive. It's hard to even fathom any explanation there other than classification. It's like spending years to find a goldmine, deciding you finally hit the 'X', and then buggering off for years to do something else. Doesn't really make any sense.
As for other nations. The only negative result so far was from a team in Germany that generated thrust based on an electromagnetic interaction with their power cables. Early last year they stated plans to further test the model with more appropriate shielding. So far as I know there were no further updates from them. NASA, in character, remained silent as to whether such an issue could have confounded their tests. China, for their part, claim to have a working model currently in orbit but the generated thrust is insufficient to conclusively say one way or the other.