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posted by n1 on Friday April 11 2014, @01:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the public-relations-tools-for-secret-missions dept.

The Air Force has had a robotic spacecraft in orbit for a year and a half, speculation predicts a testbed for spying apparatus.

Rumors abound. One of the most popular is the X-37B can sneak up and eavesdrop on other satellites. The idea does have appeal, but skeptics point out the U.S. already has other smaller, harder to track satellites to do just that.

Can anyone think of better ideas for what they could be using this technology for, or is it just a reusable satellite?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday April 11 2014, @06:58AM

    by TheLink (332) on Friday April 11 2014, @06:58AM (#29895) Journal

    The link at one part says one of those rods weighs more than 9 tons at another part it mentions a 6.1 m × 0.3 m tungsten cylinder which would be about 7 tons.

    The civilian space shuttle can only carry about 2 or 3 of those. The X37B does not look capable of carrying even one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#X-37B_2 [wikipedia.org]

    And if the X37B could do it and was merely carrying these up, it wouldn't be spending so much time in orbit - that would be a waste of resources.

    The 1.5 years is the strange thing. If it was just a month in orbit I'd say it might be solving a bandwidth and secrecy problem by carrying TBs of storage to space, filling them up either from own sensors or from other satellites and bringing the data back down.

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