Dvice.com
reports about a mysterious Robotic Shuttle that will be launched
April 19th. This is the first time I've even heard of such a shuttle
replacement. I mean, I thought NASA dumped the idea of a shuttle
completely and went for the super Apollo type mission to go to the Moon
or Mars?
So at a time when
mothballing
the old Space Shuttle debate is going ballistic, what happens?
Well, it looks like the Air Force pulled a fast one and went ahead and
had it's own space shuttle secretly built by Boeing Phantom Works. The
new autonomous robotic Space Shuttle is dubbed the
X37B.
Revealing a new Space Shuttle at this time is probably not going to
help the Obama administration with all the
harsh
Space
Agency criticism they've been getting lately. In my opinion it shames
the Obama Administration and NASA because neither came up with this
dreamy vehicle, the Air Force had to. One could argue that NASA has
limited funds or how NASA and the Air Force is sort of two
sides of the same coin, yada yada. It probably shames the Air Force too
for not informing Obama they had a secret space shuttle.
Anyway, the Air Force didn't commission just any space shuttle to be
made, they had made a small, efficient, robotic,
autonomous space shuttle. It can go up, deploy some secret
payload, and come down and land
all on it's own the article says!
OK, well, details are sketchy so it's probably not completely autonomous
but it appears to be just as much autonomously controlled by robotic
equipment as the original shuttle was controlled by humans in the
cockpit. That's very impressive. Awesome. So... now that such a robotic
shuttle is
made public and known to exist, I wonder if the Air Force will let NASA
use it
for non-military missions? Naw, probably not.
Here's an email I received regarding this article below. (I asked and received permission to post it here.)
--------------------------------------------------
Mr. Brown,
I saw your article at Robots.net on the X-37 and I think you are grossly misinterpreting the situation. The X-37 began development in 1999 as a potential crew lifeboat for the International Space Station. However, Congress cut those funds and DARPA picked up the program as a classified initiative. Ever since the Challenger disaster, the Air Force has pursued a policy of independent access to space. Building the X-37 into a viable, operationally-responsive platform has long been seen as part of that policy.
This may be the first time you've heard about it, but I've known about the X-37 since I was an undergrad aerospace engineering student. One of my professors in grad school at Rice was John Muratore, program manager of the X-38 crew lifeboat project, and he spoke at length about the initial problems Boeing had with the X-37A. Its first glide test was four years ago next month and, because it went off the end of the runway like Muratore and his team predicted, was widely reported in aerospace media at the time.
FWIW, I'll note that NASA is also a partner on the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle because of the various advanced technologies for operational reusable vehicles that it demonstrates. NASA hopes to use some of those technologies to foster the development of a next generation of reusable space vehicles, probably owned and operated by commercial service providers.
Best regards,
Justin Kugler
Interesting article, what's even more interesting is that
this is the second autonomous space shuttle. The first one to
my knowledge was in 1988, the Soviet Buran project. It had
autonomous lift off(of Energia booster rocket), orbit and
landing (although no payload deployment). But as many of the
research projects in the soviet times, it was canned, and the
shuttle itself is rusting in a park in Moscow.... sigh
Although some static test models of the Buran exist, the unmanned flight vehicle was destroyed when the roof of the hangar collapsed in 2002...
http://www.buran.ru/images/jpg/bbur89.jpg
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