Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? The US military’s top secret X-37B space plane has just pulled off a bunch of fancy flight maneuvers for the first time.
In a rare display of transparency about X-37B, Boeing Space, the makers of the space plane, have recently released a video explaining how the first-of-its-kind demonstration works. Known as aerobraking, the technique uses the friction of the atmosphere to help lower the height of a spacecraft’s orbit while expending minimal fuel.
“When we aerobrake, we utilize atmospheric drag to effectively step down our apogee one pass at a time until we get to the orbital regime that we want to be in,” John Ealy, an engineer at Boeing, explained in the video (below).
“When we do this, we save enormous amounts of propellant, and that’s really why aerobraking is important,” he added.
When announcing the plan last month, the US Space Force explained that X-37B would be performing these novel maneuvers to “safely dispose” of some module components in Earth’s orbit. In other words, they’re dumping some space junk.
The experimental space plane is currently on its seventh reported mission, which kicked off in December 2023 after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the help of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
X-37B is an uncrewed spacecraft that looks like a miniature version of the iconic Space Shuttle used by NASA from 1981 to 2011, with a length of 8.9 meters (29 feet) and a wingspan of 4.55 meters (14.9 feet). It’s capable of cruising in low-earth orbit, between 240 to 800 kilometers (150 to 500 miles) above the Earth, at speeds of around 28,200 kilometers (17,523 miles) per hour.
Another string to its bow is its ability to fly for extended periods. In July 2022, it set a record for the longest time in orbit for a craft of this kind after journeying around Earth for 908 days.
Although Boeing and the US Space Force are apparently becoming more open about the operations of X-37B, certain aspects of its missions are shrouded in mystery.
The US Air Force states that the X-37B performs “risk reduction, experimentation and concept of operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies” – although that blurb doesn’t give away too many clues about its actual job.
“X-37B missions have continuously advanced our nation’s space capabilities by testing new technologies that reduce risk and inform our future space architectures,” Holly Murphy, program director for Boeing’s Experimental Systems Group, said in the new video.
Source Link: US's Mysterious Spaceplane X-37B Pulls Off "First-Of-Its-Kind" Maneuver In Orbit
