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A secretive space plane is set to launch and test quantum navigation technology:
On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.
It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.
Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.
However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.
The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies."
"OTV-8's laser communications demonstration will mark an important step in the US Space Force's ability to leverage commercial space networks as part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant space architectures," said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman in a statement. "In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability, and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architectures."
The space plane will also advance the development of a new navigation technology based on electromagnetic wave interference. The Space Force news release characterizes this as the "highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever tested in space."
Boeing has previously tested a quantum inertial measurement unit, which detects rotation and acceleration using atom interferometry, on conventional aircraft. Now, an advanced version of the technology is being taken to space to demonstrate its viability. The goal of the in-space test is to demonstrate precise positioning, navigation, and timing in an environment where GPS services are not available.
"Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied," Saltzman said in a social media post Monday, describing the flight.
Quantum inertial sensors could also be used near the Moon, where there is no comparable GPS capability, or for exploration further into the Solar System.
Notably, the small X-37B is back to launching on a medium-lift rocket with this new mission. During its most recent flight that ended in March, the space plane launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This allowed the X-37B to fly beyond low-Earth orbit and reach an elliptical high-Earth orbit.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Friday August 01 2025, @01:05PM (3 children)
Yeah maybe.
I've read about those things. They're just interferometers but do their interfering thing using quantum superposition instead of light interference.
The difference between COTS interferometer IMUs and quantum ones is the quantum ones are 100x slower, about as fast as consumer GPS, and the accuracy is in theory about 1000x higher, maybe more, maybe much more. They work like a PLL they make a correction signal and to match the current acceleration then booop it quite often with yet another test cycle to null out and create a rather accurate correction signal as the sensor output. So they're kind of shit for navigation, at engine cut-off they're almost certain to lose PLL lock, I wonder if one could handle buffeting and vibration of re-entry while staying locked. Well, maybe if they dynamically tuned the PLL to correct faster but less accurately based on recent measurements... but this all sounds like a control system headache, imagine making that oscillate while you're trying to fly your airplane/spaceship/ICBM warhead. I'm surprised based on what I've read that they ever got one to work in an airplane. I suppose there's a difference between straight and level in a 787 vs a F-22 trying to show off.
My guess based on the specs above is not for autopilot but for direct gravitational sensing of "things" in space. Maybe they're interested in mines in space or detecting spy sats that are cold and silent until woken up.
MAYBE they have accurate pico-G level maps of the earth's gravity field such that you could in theory pattern match where you think you are to an immense atlas of gravity data resulting in a more finely tuned position fix. But how would you get that data? Maybe thats the entire purpose of flying a spaceship for years at a time in orbit, grind terabytes of data into a really accurate gravity atlas of the planet, at least within the bounds of the orbital inclination of the spaceship. AFAIK they're doing their usual thing where they refuse to report the orbital inclination before launch despite the fact amateurs (and pros, LOL) are going to figure it out in hours/days anyway LOL.
Lets say hypothetically you have a magic box that can somewhat reliably squirt out a pico-G accurate measurement around 1Hz in orbit. How far away could you detect another satellite and what would be a reasonable response from your own nav thrusters to either avoid the incoming, or ... become the incoming to the other guy? Maybe you need an atlas of earth gravity to cancel it out? Or a cloud/cluster of drones working together using lasers to figure out of a perturbance in the G field is "far away aka its earth" or if your vectors all aim at a point source of mass a couple kilometers away.
My guess based on what I've read about quantum interferometer accelerometers and the fine article is they want to have a 3-d drone cloud that detects the gravity fields of cold enemy satellites. You can, in theory, hide from IR at least from some directions and hiding from radar is old stuff and hiding from optical amounts to really good black paint but you can't hide from gravity. I bet thats the real goal of the project. Well if I hear black helicopters in the distance and this post disappears you'll know I was correct LOL.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday August 01 2025, @01:12PM
How I got into these things might influence my ideas.
I watched "Time Team" on BBC back when archeological sensing data reduction was done on Apple II.
Also right now you can use gravitational field sensors for oil and mineral prospecting.
Now when I read about quantum accelerometers I think thats sensitive enough you could, in theory, "image" buried bricks and stuff like that just off the density variations, which is pretty cool.
Someday, pro archeologists (and oil field prospectors) will go down to "Quantum accelerometers 'R Us" and return cool 3-d images of buried buildings and things. Maybe 1, 2 human generations from now. Obviously the aerospace secret people have their own ideas to go with their infinite deep pocket budgets.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Friday August 01 2025, @08:03PM (1 child)
I seem to remember not that long ago (5 years) seeing a TV documentary about British defence technology and some boffin at IIRC Warton reckoning that you could use gravity to detect stealth aircraft. "Yes, but, good luck making a sensor," I thought. Is this the sensor we've been waiting for? The sensor that they didn't tell us about?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday August 01 2025, @08:33PM
It's a solid maybe.
I ran the numbers, possibly incorrectly as I woke up early and labored in the sun on my yardwork all day. Which looks nice but now I'm dehydrated and tired.
I figure if working deployed COTS public unclassified machines can "easily" do 50 pico g about half a decade ago and there was no theoretical reason it couldn't be cranked up to 1 pico g by the classified aerospace boys in 2025 so lets call it 1 pico G resolution because its a cool looking number.
I figure a F-22 is 43500 lb empty and 65500 max takeoff so F it we'll call it 55000 pounds
I screwed around with some online gravitational acceleration calculators which gave plausible looking results, and I figure you could semi-reliably gravitationally detect a F-22 around 1500 feet or closer.
The good news is flying closer to the ground means you'll get a stronger signal and above 1500 feet you'll get a stronger radar signal so no more stealth.
The bad news is now you need a matrix of sensors ideally around every 1000 feet. A nice wide 2-d mesh would give you good speed data as something streaks across.
There are problems. Mostly revolving around squared-r law of gravity.
A 400 pound "medium size" human Walmart shopper will emit about 2 pico G of acceleration 100 feet away. So you need sensors every 1000 feet but no fatties allowed within 100 feet. Ugh.
If a fat turkey at the food store ready to cook is 20 pounds, figure the whole thing might be 30 pounds? And that 30 pound turkey will emit a 1 to 2 pico g gravitational field out to 30 feet. So you need scarecrows or something to keep fat birds more than 30 feet away.
Now the magic of a large 2-d mesh and smart DSP would show a 55000 pound F22 might be triangulated up at 700 feet AGL and moving at 800 knots whereas the 400 pound human would be at ground level peaking at 2 mph or whatever the walmart electric wheelchair thing tops out at, or the turkey might triangulate up to at most a couple dozen feet unless there's a tornado and they don't fly fast.
There's an interesting drone attack idea where if you know the exact GPS coordinates of each sensor you could F with them using multiple lightweight nearby drones to generate a velocity vector making it look like the F22 is flying some other direction or something.
A COTS "roughneck-proof" graviometer thats "affordable" (well, not to me, not new, but I could get a broken one and fix it, perhaps) runs 4 uGal which is some bullshite geology unit that means essentially 4 nano-G or about 4000 times worse than my probable aerospace "pico-g" quantum accelerometer. 4000 times sharper than oil field gear is ... pretty amazing.
Oil field work is expensive per hour but as a hobbyist I DGAF so I would love to get a broken graviometer that only works half the time or the battery only last 5 minutes or it gives bad results half the time, I don't care I'll just take three times as much data and do more stat analysis. Oil field can't afford to pay a surveying crew 3 to 4 times as much given how much they already charge per hour, so I've been hoping to find my dream gravity sensor online at ebay or something, but, alas...