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发帖数: 29576 | 1 X-37B在轨道呆了几百天，不知在干啥，据说偷偷搞别国卫星。
Secret Spaceplane, Mystery Mission
The Air Force’s secret space plane has been up in orbit for nearly 500 days
—a space endurance record. But nearly a year and a half into the mission,
the Pentagon still won’t say what the X-37B is doing up there, or when it
might come back.
The U.S. Air Force boosted the robotic X-37B atop the nose of an Atlas-5
rocket in December 2012. Since then it’s orbited the Earth thousands of
times, overflying such interesting places as North Korea and Iran.
Similar to the Space Shuttle in appearance, the diminutive X-37B is about a
quarter the size of the old shuttles. But there are major differences.
Lacking a crew, the spacecraft has no cockpit windows. The X-37B has a
payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed.
And while the original Space Shuttle could stay in orbit for up to 17 days—
a limitation largely due to the needs of the crew—the first X-37B mission,
OTV-1, spent 225 days in space under the guidance of Air Force space flight
controllers at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. The second mission, OTV-2
, handily doubled that number, clocking 469 days in orbit. OTV-3 is
currently at 482 days and counting.
Eventually—nobody knows when—the pudgy space plane will glide back down to
Earth like the Space Shuttle it resembles, rolling to a stop on an Air
Force runway in California.
The X-37B began as a NASA project to build a small, unmanned space plane.
NASA handed the project over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency in 2004, but after budgetary problems the program was transferred to
the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which continues to manage the
X-37B program. Boeing’s Phantom Works division built two of the X-37B
spacecraft.
The U.S. Air Force will not comment on what kind of missions the X-37B does
in space. The service, which doesn’t mind talking about the space drone as
a technological achievement, clams up when discussing actual missions.
Rumors abound. One of the most popular is the X-37B can sneak up and
eavesdrop on other satellites. The idea does have appeal, but skeptics point
out the U.S. already has other smaller, harder to track satellites to do
just that.
http://news.yahoo.com/secret-spaceplane-mystery-mission-0945006 | j*****p
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