Second X-37B Mission Ends
Boeing X-37B Completes 469 Day Orbital Mission (With Video)
“Boeing today announced the successful de-orbit and landing of the second X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) for the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The X-37B landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:48 a.m. Pacific time today, concluding a 469-day experimental test mission. It was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on March 5, 2011.”
Congratulations to Boeing and the USAF on this great accomplishment!
While this is undoubtedly a great achievement, Boeing spokesman Paul Rusnock strays from the truth in announcing
The Buran did exactly that on 15 November 1988 about 20 years earlier, but with nowhere near the 469 day mission endurance.
Congratulations anyways. We need more reusable vehicles.
Yes, but could the Buran make an almost 20 degree orbital inclination flight path change once in space?
Can the X-37? It’s demonstrated a 0.8 degree inclination change…
While it’s hard to congratulate them for most of the mission, since we don’t really understand at all what they did in it, the runway return of this unmanned vehicle was an important feat.
Hopefully they have a scaled up version for people.
X-37-C
I don’t understand the logic of an x 37 C
I wish some one would scale it up. To air liner size and put it on a falcon heavy and start taking people to space. Soon
The entire point is that you don’t have to scale it up and can launch on a smaller vehicle.
What would an airliner full of people in space do there. Exactly?
There’s no need for something new the size of a Space Shuttle. Something a little bigger than the X-37 B with the capacity to get a full ISS crew up or down, on the other hand, has potential to be useful to both NASA and Bigelow.
Once there is a need for an airliner full of people in space, then it will be time for the airliner to get them there.
Add
Mr. Paul Roberts
I don’t suggest something the size or the expense of shuttle. Just bigger than 6 people carriers.
A long time back tinker spoke of ways to stuff more people on a dragon. Well isn’t there economics of scale here. If you make your system just a little bigger then you can reduce the cost person dramatically with a system of similar cost!!!
Shuttle was an attempt at cheaper flight. Lessen learned was dragging your booster engines around in Leo wasn’t a great idea nor was side mount.
Instead of the SLS and Orion program what if that money was used to build son of shuttles like X-37 30 people size that could be sold to anyone to put on their booster.
Wouldn’t such a vehicle kick of the commercial race to space???
I just don’t see 6 person vehicles as being enough.Say
Yeah Dennis. X-37C or similar variant. I love the X-37 concept and vehicle. I’d buy one, buy several.
X-37 series was always intended as a subscale test model for an eventual larger crewed version. It’s just that the program changed hands from NASA to DARPA and finally the Air Force, but did not change manufacturer.
Personally , I wish Lockheed et al would restart the X-33 Venture Star now. It was only one composite LH2 fuel tank short of operational when it was mysteriously cancelled .X33 VS used a truely revolutionary SSTO propulsion system among other innovations. ( I always wondered if the darn VS bird just went ” dark” on us… it was s-o-o-o-o close to flying. They were building a secret base in northeast Utah near the Wyoming border to launch and land X33’s, and another landing base in northeast Montana at the Glasgow Air Force base )
X-33 was “three strikes” and out:
Strike 1 – micropiping in composite LH tanks – now solved
Strike 2 – linear aerospike engine performance insufficient – not fixed
Strike 3 – linear aerospike hot structures too heavy
If you do a SSTO, you’ve got incredibly tight margins. Basically you need something so “fluffy” and so high performance that if you can’t meet the requirements, there’s no point.
And after their might be a point, we’ve got economics to meet as well – cost/time of refurbishment, payload, …
Folks:
Scaled up a bit, say, with a fuselage the diameter of a business jet…
tinker
Or diameter of a falcon heavy
IMO Dream Chaser meets the specs of the supposed X-37C but is closer to reality.
Doc:
Oh yes, Dream Chaser is way ahead in development and the lifting body design is advantageous because it gives them the room they need beside the fuselage for their hybrid motors (loathe to call them ‘engines’, being so marvelously simple).
The X-37 has it’s own advantages. Even slightly scaled up, it might be able to carry a crew of up to four in an in-line configuration and still be small enough to launch on a medium lift launcher. A good candidate for a reusable launch vehicle’s payload.
Rapid response human access to space is the prize here. The X-37 could be a player.
How smooth both X-37b flights went bodes well for the Dream Chaser program.
I just love space planes!
tinker
Tinker
I don’t understand the logic of an x-37-C
I wish some one would scale it up. To airliner size and put it on a falcon heavy and start taking people to space. Soon!
Wouldn’t such a spaceship be the key to opening up markets in Space??
Wouldn’t the 1first generation fly on a falcon heavy??
Then a falcon heavy recoverable?
Wouldn’t your scaled up x-37 D or E have two versions?
Cargo and manned
Cargo version has doors like the shuttle.
Manned version has an LAS like they are building for dragon now.
Couldn’t Spacex sell Boeing it’s LAS system?
Couldn’t boeing start building this now?
How could NASA help to make this happen Soon?
After vertical lift on falcon Heavies couldn’t horizontal booster companies take over?
If you had a robot strato launch system that had the wings jets and throttle-able rockets that flew from a runway to several 1000 miles per hour, keeping the jets in the altitude velocity pressure sweet spot, as long as possible before rocketing faster and higher, before releasing a X-37-D plus recoverable second stage booster then flipping over and decelerating to get to a slow enough speed to use jet engines to fly back to the launch site.
Just seems to me that this X-37-? Has such potential yet we do little to put such potential to work.
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.
Anyone have some thoughts on a horizontal launch second or third generation similar to what I describe above I would appreciate it. No one here has ever let me know if wings jets and throttle-able rocket engines could work together to make vertical launch a thing of the past?????
More and more I have no idea why NASA is still in the launch vehicle business. Just a massive hole into which NASA is pouring money for political reasons. Yes, that would be SLS. A rocket that will never fly. Get rid of the ISS white elephant and NASA could do real high risk cutting edge R&D, launch lots of cool science missions, have an actual aero program, etc.
Now we just need Falcon Heavy to be a success to put the nail in the coffin for SLS. Yes, SLS would have more lift capability but will it matter or is it needed???
Double the capacity, at ten times the cost. So much for economies of scale…
This vehicle is probably the reason why the NRO is giving the two telescopes to NASA: NRO no longer needs the scopes.
Those scope optics were from a cancelled NRO program.
Well, whatever they are doing, DO NOT tell the Whitehouse…
Why not? Obama loves drones.
Lolol
Whoa! Anyone wanna see this baby come in for a fassst landing?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id…
I’d be interested in seeing what happens if Boeing doesn’t get picked as one of the 2 1/2 for CCiCap… Does Boeing shelve the CST 100 and try to upgrade this craft to a larger X-37c (human rated) as has been proposed by some Boeing staffers previously?
http://www.spacesafetymagaz…
If no CCiCap win, then is there any reason for Boeing to have a human rated vehicle of any sort?
I suppose this is all moot. It’s probably going to be 1 for newbie Space X, 1 for Big boy Boeing, and 1/2 to keep Sierra Nevada on life support just so they can justify giving away that Langly HL-20 work
Oh, and if anyone didn’t know that NASA was pretty much planning for a 2 1/2 award result/ CCiCap “downselect” take a look at the link below this chart – from February 7th- was published long before the recent “compromise” letters with Congressman Wolf-
http://www.parabolicarc.com…
I would love to see boeing build a X-37-D or E as I said about. Get this commercial race to space racing. Boeing should raise the bar above 6 or 7 people to space. To thirty or forty with a lighter cargo version like a small Shuttle.
@DTARS
30 or 40 people to where? That’s one BIG Bigelow you must be thinking of.
Anyhow- as much as we all want cool rockets and capabilities- on this policy oriented blog in particular we should be thinking of the why… as in Why would Boeing or anyone design (I mean real designs- not paintings or models) or build something with no specific mission, and without any means to pay for it?
Boeing can do this for the Military (and it is, in the case of high capability experimental drones) because the potential payoff is so much greater, and the mission more clear cut.
Look how quickly the X-33/Venture star was stopped in ’01 Lockheed without US funding- despite the fact that the fuel tank issue was being worked. (BTW- I still think Lockheed has SSTO tech somewhere)
The results of the down-select next month should surprise no one. Although an X-37 bases entrant would be cool- Sigh- I’m sure it will be the Boeing’s conventional CST-100 that is one of the winners.
Mr. Miles
Thanks for your response
After Mr. Robert made his point
I was thinking what if we had a cheap space-liner to space as I described
Would it be used???
Cheap access to space
Or a railroad across the country
Not a fair comparison.
We built expensive ISS to have some place to go when we should have been building a cheaper way to space first.
Just for fun let’s say that Boeing could build a fleet of these 30 passenger recoverable space liners for 2 or 3 times the cost of a 787
And they be floated on falcons as I said then horizontal launch
Wouldn’t business find uses right away.
Build the highway first like we did with the Internet and people will come.
Making a place to go like ISS to fly you over priced shuttle was ass backwards. And it seems to me people are still thinking ass backwards.
Anyway I pose that question to you if there was a cheap way to space could you come up with a way to use it. Because if the answer is no then we are all wasting our time here.
Mr. Chicken or egg lol
While I too love the thought of a manned lifting body, launched in-line atop a medium or heavy launcher, as far as I know, no one has figured out the abort logistics requried to safely abort during ascent. IOW, how are these vehicles (Dreamchaser, Boeing, etc) controlling the CG of a lifting body? i.e. it’s too far aft during an abort scenario and too far forward during a nominal re-entry. And what about the lift generated during ascent? How is this negated so as to not impact the LV’s trajectory or induce excess loads?
X-37 [BC] is not a lifting body, but a winged reentry vehicle. Think of it as a mini shuttle (in the B case unmanned).
The backup plan for the Shuttle was HL20, a lifting body launched on an expendable LV. Like DreamChaser, you put abort motors below it that accelerate it away from a shut down booster.
The CG of a lifting body only matters in horizontal flight, and the abort motors are to gain altitude away from aborting booster to escape the shock wave of detonation that might rupture the craft, then it glides down.
Likely launch abort system for an X-37C would be to repurpose orbital manoeuvring engine for the purpose as well, which would likely be hypergolic fueled AJ-10 derivative.
The bigger issue is how to launch without a shroud given the bending moments/torques on the LV.
add:
“Lifting body” means the fusalage is the airfoil – a compromised one, usually dynamically unstable at certain speed regimes. Winged vehicles don’t have this. Often lifing bodies have small rockets to accelerate them briefly on landing to stabilize the velocity vector, for safety.
Stability for pusher LAS just means keeping the acceleration vector through/above the CG. Dragon will do this with redundant SuperDraco systems. HL20 had four solids in aft booster adapter, and DreamChaser uses two gimballed hybrids.
Delta Clipper had an even higher CG, that was no problem for software to maintain control. Ares I “the stick”, and Liberty have such long, thin profiles that they require active roll control (Ix took it from AF Peacekeeper missles).
“X-37 [BC] is not a lifting body, but a winged reentry vehicle.” The X-37 wings still produce lift, No? Also, Re: “The CG of a lifting body only matters in horizontal flight” That’s not necessarily true. Depends on the Abort system. If it’s an externally mounted, AFT in-line “pusher” style Abort system (as opposed to a tractor/pull style abort system i.e. Apollo/Orion) it was my understanding the CG is too far Aft to maintain any sort of control. Then, once the abort system is jettisoned, the CG moves too far fwd [for the manned vehicle] to maintain control. Personally speaking, and this was my point, a pusher style Abort system with ANY manned vehicle (lifting body or otherwise) is scarey as all get out IMO and would make me hesitate to want to ride on it, had I ever the opportunity.
How long can this bird stay in space and return home. Is 5 or 10 years possible??