It's Baaack! XB-37B Finally Lands 123
ColdWetDog writes "The US Air Force / DARPA 'baby shuttle,' the Boeing-built XB-37B has just landed after 469 days in orbit. No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days other than 'because we could.' I, for one, welcome our long duration, unmanned orbital overlords."
Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese launch (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese space launch. It would provide a good evaluation of what Chinese missiles can do.
Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, they brought it down because the Chinese thought they might swing by to look at the XB-37B while they were up there.
man in space? (Score:4, Insightful)
uhh, you do realize that unmanned generally means that it doesn't havel ife support systems. We can get shit to the space station; we demonstrated that with the dragon capsule. However, we still don't have a way to get a man in space.
The future of spaceflight is robotic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau (Score:5, Insightful)
We should start a kickstarter to bribe the chinese to plant a chinese flag where ours was, just so congress will get all fired up and get our space program going again.
Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic (Score:3, Insightful)
It *does* really cost that much. Both in energy (sustaining human life is much more costly, energy-wise, than simply keeping circuits working), and in weight - when you ship people off into space, you have to feed them, water them, house them, carry oxygen for them, dispose of their waste, give them room to live, work, exercise... all of that material you have to ship off into space takes up space, adds additional weight to haul out of Earth's gravity well, and fundamentally limits the distance and duration of any mission you have planned.
We have space probes launched *decades* ago that are still traveling through space and sending back data. What's the useful life of the ISS again?
And frankly, I get more enjoyment and benefit out of my pet than I do out of manned space travel, so fuck your manned space dreams. You can use my tax money to send robotic probes and like it, or you can have nothing. How about that?
Re:Possibly they wanted to observe the Chinese lau (Score:5, Insightful)
No quite, it actually moves the earth with special space warping technology. If that's not true, why hasn't the Air Force denied it?
Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic (Score:5, Insightful)
We've always boldly gone where no one has gone before, for drugs, for food, for fun, for profit. We're not likely to stop. We'll try not to warp on your lawn, though.
Re:The future of spaceflight is robotic (Score:4, Insightful)