Unknown Budget, Unknown Purpose: U.S. Air Force Plans to Launch X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle
April 4th, 2010And then there was Dan Vanderhorst, who “has been the lead pilot on seven classified aircraft to date.” In fact, according to his biography, “Vanderhorst has made his career in the cockpit of so many classified aircraft, there is not much that we can say about him, on the record,” and “his work has been outstanding and will probably never be recognized by the general public.” Although Vanderhorst was honored that evening, he wasn’t able to make it to his own party: He was “working at Edawrds AFB on a classified program.”
The silences, absences, and unsaid implications in these men’s biographies were like blank spots on maps. They were guides to the places where the public record ran out. The carefully constructed blank spots in Vanderhorst’s biography alone had remarkable implications. To build a single aircraft is a tremendous financial, industrial, and intellectual undertaking. Building an airplane means spending millions or billions of dollars with dedicated factories, test facilities, and countless workers from janitors to managers, pilots to machinists. Vanderhorst, one pilot, had flown seven. In the first instance, his biography spoke to the scale of the classified flight test industry. It pointed to a hidden geography of finance, research, development, engineering, manufacturing, and testing projects as complicated and industrialized as modern airplanes. Second, his biography spoke to the black world’s ability to keep a secret, about not only the physical but the social engineering that goes into building classified aircraft.
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Given the number of personnel and the amount of money invested in developing an aircraft, the fact that there aren’t more credible leaks, more inadvertently declassified histories or photos, or more disgruntled ex-officers willing to spill the secrets out into the open means that the secrecy enveloping Vanderhorst’s biography is a remarkable feat of social engineering. Finally, this pilot’s biography says something about the dynamics of secrecy: If Vanderhorst alone piloted seven classified, manned aircraft, and if the three previously classified aircraft at the Gathering of Eagles represent the sum of the black aircraft that have made their way “into the blue” since the 1970s, then the declassified record represents an exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. HAVE BLUE, TACIT BLUE, and Bird of Prey are not unusual in that they were secret. They’re unusual because they are not secret anymore. Long after their retirement, most black airplanes stay black.
Via: AP:
After a decade of development, the Air Force this month plans to launch a robotic spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle to conduct technology tests in orbit and then glide home to a California runway.
The ultimate purpose of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle and details about the craft, which has been passed between several government agencies, however, remain a mystery as it is prepared for launch April 19 from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“As long as you’re confused you’re in good shape,” said defense analyst John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. “I looked into this a couple of years ago — the entire sort of hypersonic, suborbital, scramjet nest of programs — of which there are upwards of a dozen. The more I studied it the less I understood it.”
The quietly scheduled launch culminates the project’s long and expensive journey from NASA to the Pentagon’s research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the X-37 program, but the current total has not been released.
The launch date, landing sites and a fact sheet were released by Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Angie I. Blair. She said more information would be released soon, but questions on cost and other matters submitted by e-mail weren’t answered by Friday.
While the massive space shuttles have been likened to cargo-hauling trucks, the X-37B is more like a sports car, with the equivalent trunk capacity.
Built by Boeing Co.’s Phantom Works, the 11,000-pound craft is 9 1/2 feet tall and just over 29 feet long, with a wingspan of less than 15 feet. It has two angled tail fins rather than a single vertical stabilizer.
Unlike the shuttle, it will be launched like a satellite, housed in a fairing atop an expendable Atlas V rocket, and deploy solar panels to provide electrical power in orbit.
The Air Force released only a general description of the mission objectives: testing of guidance, navigation, control, thermal protection and autonomous operation in orbit, re-entry and landing.
The mission’s length was not released but the Air Force said the X-37B can stay in orbit for 270 days. The primary landing site will be northwest of Los Angeles at coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base.
The significance of the X-37B is unclear because the program has been around for so long, said Peter A. Wilson, a senior defense research analyst for the RAND Corp. who several years ago served as executive director of a congressional panel that evaluated national security space launch requirements.
“From my perspective it’s a little puzzling as to whether this is the beginning of a program or the end of one,” Wilson said Friday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
As NASA anticipated the end of the shuttle, the X-37B was viewed as a working prototype of the next-generation design of a fully reusable spacecraft, but the space agency lost interest and the Air Force picked it up, Wilson said.
“It’s viewed as a prototype of a vehicle that could carry small payloads into orbit, carry out a variety of military missions and then return to Earth,” he said.
The Air Force statement said the X-37 program is being used “to continue full-scale development” and orbital testing of a long-duration, reusable space vehicle.
Wilson sees the upcoming launch as “a one-shot deal.”
He acknowledged that he does not know if there is a classified portion of the program but said there is no evidence of a second vehicle being built to follow the prototype. In aerospace, a prototype typically remains a test vehicle used to prove and improve designs for successive operational vehicles.
To fully function as a completely reusable launch system there would also have to be development of a booster rocket that is capable of landing itself back on Earth to be reassembled with the spacecraft, according to Wilson, who does not see any support for such an initiative.
Wilson also said the usefulness of payloads such as small military satellites is in question, which would undercut the need for the launch system.
The X-37B is now under the direction of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office. Its mission is to speed up development of combat-support systems and weapons systems.
Operating since 2003, the office has worked on several things, including upgrading the air defenses around the nation’s capital as an anti-terrorism measure and assessing threats to U.S. combat operations, according to an Air Force fact sheet.
NASA began the X-37 program in 1999 in a cooperative deal with Boeing to roughly split the $173 million cost of developing an experimental space plane. The Air Force put in a small share.
The X-37, initially intended to be carried into space by shuttles in 2003, was a larger version of the Air Force X-40A, a concept for a “Space Maneuver Vehicle” to put small military satellites in orbit. The X-40A was dropped from a helicopter in glide and landing tests but was never capable of actual space flight.
In 2002, NASA awarded Boeing a $301 million contract to complete a version of the X-37 to be used in approach and landing tests and begin designing an orbital version that would fly in 2006.
But in 2004 NASA turned the project over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s research and development arm. In 2006, the X-37 was put through captive-carry and drop tests using Mojave-based Scaled Composite LLC’s White Knight, the jet that launched SpaceShipOne on the first private suborbital manned space flights.
The Air Force then began work on the X-37B, projecting it would fly in 2008. An Air Force News story at the time reported that the first one or two flights would check out the performance of the vehicle itself and then it would become a space test platform with unspecified components flown in its experiment bay.
The X-37B isn’t all that secret. There’s a picture of it on Wikipedia, and folks have been writing about it since 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
It appears to be a simplified version of the STS.
This is really f-ing strange. I met a guy at BJ’s restaurant in Palmdale CA, and had a few of their delightful beers and met this guy who said his name was Dan (I’m pretty sure about his name) and he flew developmental aircraft or ?? at Edwards and plant 42, and did a host of other things. Me and a couple friends thought he was just telling a story. He was really entertaining and funny.
I’m blown away at the moment, that is, that this is true and he’s in a book… Maybe it was a different Dan.
I imagine loading one or several of these automated orbital craft up with multiple remotely programmable warheads or kinetic energy missiles and leaving them in orbit until required could result in big savings in time, money and US military casualties if used in future ‘shock and awe’-style offensives.
If the projectiles were large and designed to take out infrastructure or strategic targets rather than people (unlike the following design monstrosity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Dog_(bomb) ) it might even reduce enemy civilian and military casualties.
On a side note, imagine using artificial meteorites to conduct black military ops: plausible deniability and the psychological warfare component of the suggestion of divine judgement.
Happy Easter.
Dennis,
It does kind of have the look of a cruise missile. I’m sure that was … umm … coincidental. 🙂