Sunday, December 05, 2010

Secret U.S. Space Plane Glides Back to Earth--And, Thankfully, Even the WikiLeaks Crackpots Don't Know What It Was Doing

The mysterious, 220-day mission of the unmanned X-37B space plane came to a quiet end on Friday.

The U.S. Air Force developed this secretive mission with the Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1), better known as the X-37B space plane...

It is a robotic winged craft, with no humans onboard, that looks somewhat similar to the more familiar space shuttles Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery.

The X-37B space plane is about nine meters (29 feet) in length, has a wingspan of about four meters (14 feet), and has a height of approximately three meters (9.5 feet)... [and weighs] about 11,000 pounds...

It landed on a runway at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, at approximately 1:16 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), after its first trip into space...

Its mission is Top Secret, but speculation is rife about its true operational characteristics. Among the use-cases:

• Launch anti-satellite explosives
• MAHEM - send a stream of super-heated molten metal into other space vehicles
• Direct tactical lasers and microwaves
• Launch microsatellite or nanosatellites that attach themselves to enemy satellites to disable or coopt them
• Launch and detonate e-bombs (small, directed EMP explosions) to kill enemy electronics
• Drop tungsten rods on Earth-borne targets from space ("Rods from God")

In the latter case, try imagining a telephone pole hitting Osama Bin Laden at 7,000 MPH.

Faster, please.


Images and Schematic: Space.com.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could the tungsten rods cause earthquakes? Was Hillary target practice? LOL

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/earthquakes-dog-hillary-clinton-overseas

Anonymous said...

Even the WikiLeaks Crackpots Don't Know What It Was Doing

Thats because, unlike the Army The Air Force Actually knows how to keep a Secret

Anonymous said...

The Manned version landed a short time later.

http://tinyurl.com/24zaz3s

Old Fan said...

hehehe...

Classic about Hillary and Earthquakes.

Did you this one?

"Cat and mouse: Iranian foreign minister shakes hands with senior U.S. official... but dodges Hillary Clinton"

Was he worried Hillary Clinton would try to push more Global Warming garbage, which the Clinton State Department has been obsessed with, actually trying to blackmail many US Allies into towing the line?

Hillary Clinton is a joke, and 'smart power' an utter failure.

Those LEAKS only confirmed the disastrous reality.

GM Roper said...

This is the stuff of science fiction, turned to fact. Wow, I read things like this and think of Dale Brown's Dreamland series.