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A sleuthing Finnish satellite tracking hobbyist says he found the US military’s X-37B spaceplane (arstechnica.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago

I mean, it's orbit isn't exactly a secret from anyone who actually looks at the space for a living, or tracks things in orbit for a living.

Anything new will be visible, it still is going to reflect light and all the stealth tech in the world can't (yet) make something invisible to the eye.

That little dot that keeps zooming above every 90 minutes or so that wasn't there a week ago is a good candidate...

Having said that this is not someone who did this for a job. It was a hobbyist. I've seen some impressive hobby shops but it's still a very impressive feat.

Besides I'm sure if it were launched with spacex, even NK probably already has a full briefing provided by certain a certain rat on everything they knew about the Initial launch.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be clear, it's probably not a spy vehicle. It is probably testing technologies for use in spy vehicles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Or launching mini spy vehicles lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Lol... But why would it? There's only 3 of these things and they've only launched 7 missions. They're also only 29 feet long. And are payload hogs on their launch vehicles.

It's about 500 times easier to just piggy back 20 micro-sats on the next atlas or falcon.

The whole "x37 is a spy program" was literally started by speculation in an opinion piece with zero evidence. It being a visible and public program mean it's absolutely almost certainly not an active spy program. Especially combined with it's mission profiles.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Friday, Simola reported on social media and on SeeSat-L, a long-running online forum of satellite tracking enthusiasts, that he detected an unidentified object using a sky-watching camera.

"Congrats to Tomi Simola for locating the secret X-37B spaceplane," posted Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and widely respected expert in spaceflight activity.

At that time, enthusiasts used information about the Falcon Heavy's launch trajectory and drop zones for the rocket's core booster and upper stage to estimate the orbit it would reach with the X-37B spaceplane.

It resembles a miniature version of NASA's retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry.

There is also a service module mounted to the back end of the spaceplane to accommodate additional experiments, payloads, and small satellites that can deploy in orbit to perform their own missions.

The secrecy surrounding the X-37B has sparked much speculation about its purpose, some of which centers on ideas that the spaceplane is part of a classified weapons platform in orbit.

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