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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 28 2019, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the sooper-secret-space-shuttle dept.

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]


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:33PM (#913412)

    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.

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