Yep, I’m also torn. I am glad we didn’t go on doing stuff like they did in the fifties, but an H-bomb test must have been awesome to watch. What is actually killing the planet now is too many people burning rocks, and eating meat, but the fifties could have done us in many times over.
Nobody really ever got close to doing Project Orion, but here’s my favourite something that almost got built…
If you have read “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”, I think the engine is the invention he got paid ‘one dollar’ for patenting, and then kicked up a fuss because he didn’t get the dollar; though it is quite possible other people were doing the same in secret.
I suspect that the idea behind it is to be able to dip down into the atmosphere unobserved on the far side of the Earth, and use the wings to change the plane of the orbit, and then overfly an observation target at an unexpected time. This might allow you to see things that people were trying to keep hidden when they knew that a satellite would be overhead. Being able to use the atmosphere rather than just thrusters to change the orbit would save big time on the amount of propellant needed.
If the ship was in low enough orbit to use the wings a lot of drag is also being generated and would require a lot of propellant to get back up.
Likewise, fuel lost during orbit changes wouldn’t be a problem, when low gas warning light comes on just land the thing, refuel it, and toss it back up there.
… just an air and space fan guessing, I have zero technical knowledge.
Well I wasn’t clear. You would have to fire rockets to lower your orbit enough use aerodynamic forces and then fire them to raise your orbit above all that drag producing atmosphere. The thing is that large changes in the plane of the orbit can require a LOT of Δv, and therefore propellant. Just as it can save weight to use the atmosphere rather than propellant to slow down enough to land, it may be possible to save weight by using atmospheric forces to change your plane the plane of your orbit. This is negated somewhat because it takes more Δv, to change the plane of a lower orbit that a higher one.
This cigar shaped object reminded me of a cigar shaped object which was semi-recently discovered in space with a strange trajectory in our solar system.
Makes me wonder, if some space trash they can’t acknowledge got the attention of the cientific community of another country, would they let them spend millions trying to get to it?
Kind of like the ‘skipping around half the world on the upper layers of the atmosphere like a pebble on a lake’ concept from the hypersonic bomber projects in the pre-ICBM age? Interesting. There certainly is a lot of research data on that.
My pet theory on the X-37B is that it mostly flies shuttle missions to extend the service lives of the surveillance and communication satellites - top up the fuel tanks, maybe minor repairs, that sort of thing.
And maybe take a closer look at other nation’s interesting hardware up there.
I had a bit to do with satellite photos once. The thinking behind the space plane is probably something like this…
When you launch an ‘ordinary’ spy satellite, it is obvious that something is ‘up’. From the rocket used, and the satellite launched, anyone can have a reasonable guess at what the satellite can see. From its orbit they can guess what it has been asked to look at.
This ‘space plane’ is not permanently ‘up there’: it goes up, does something, changes its orbit, does something else, and after a few hundred days it returns to Earth. When it comes down, it is refurbished, or another one may be sent up to take its place. Even if you know its orbit, it is hard to know what it is looking at, as anything in a low orbit will circle the earth in hours. Given a off-equatorial orbit, it will pass over most places other than the poles close enough for a photo.
So, what do we have? We have this enigmatic gadget. It is a tiny space shuttle, so only a few people may know what the real payload is. We don’t know where it is without tracking it because it changes its orbit. If we track it, we still don’t know what it is looking at because it passes over so much of the earth.
Yep, we don’t know a lot about it, do we? It’s rather good at keeping secrets.
