X-37 Flies but Runs Off Runway 128
mknewman writes "The X-37 drop test was completed today with a lift by White Knight. It had a successful flight but it ran off the end of the runway."
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X-37 Flies but Runs Off Runway
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"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
sounds like it passed the test then (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:USA will use this project for war (Score:2, Insightful)
DARPA picked it up in 2004 for its potential military applications. As far back as 2001, NBC News producer Robert Windrem reported that the craft could be adapted to serve as a "space bomber."
Considering they are thinking about adapting it into a space bomber, I think we can safely say that it will be used for "warfare"
Re:X-37 is a DARPA-sponsored project (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Boeing makes high reliability commercial aircraft while Scaled Composites specializes in experimental prototypes and airplane kits for hobbyists. Boeing also picks up a lot more pork (ie, public funding with little risk or strings attached).
Re:X-37 is a DARPA-sponsored project (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow - that's incredibly simplistic.
There's a reason that Dwight Eisenhower was worried about the growth of the military industry - when it reaches (reached?) critical mass, it becomes self-perpetuating.
I once worked for a DoD contractor. It wasn't pretty.
any landing (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, but let's ask about things that matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, and both have vowels in their corporate name, and both are run by men who wear pants to work and not togas. But on what many see as the key point of whether a company is willing to try radically new and different ways of getting into space, ways independent of the heavy hand of NASA bureaucratic design requirements -- and this is the "independent" I suspect the OP meant -- they're as different as chalk and cheese.
Boeing, like all aerospace majors, has tended to be very cautious about space vehicle design, perhaps in part simply because the cost-plus nature of major NASA and DoD contracts has meant there's less incentive to innovate. Why try some weird new design that may fail if the same old boring design, just multiplied by sixty, will work fine? So what if costs $bazillions? Your profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets. And that does not even get into micromanagement by Congress, changing the mission requirements every 9 months at random, and institutional conservatism in NASA/DoD.
What many people hope is that a small company that is independent of this process, in the sense that they don't have any long history with the Feds, or gigantic conventional-warfare contracts to preserve, can be more innovative, and break the apparent barrier to lowering access to space costs that seems to have solidified in the past 20 years. It seems to these people incredible that it costs no less (or at least not much less) to put x pounds in orbit in 2006 than it did in 1969. They suggest it arises from fossilization in the big aerospace industry, fused with too-close a relationship to NASA/DoD, who are themselves paralyzed by the fickleness of Congress' support and the lack of any clear vision from the President.
Whether this is a true diagnosis of the situation remains to be seen, and people like Scaled, SpaceX, X-Cor, Virgin Galactic, et cetera will prove it one way or the other fairly soon.
This quote says it all... (Score:2, Insightful)