US Airforce Device in Orbit... Around the Sun?

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by BlankSlate
The dummy mass could be used to represent heavy nuclear weapons.

You got it totally backwards. The mass was not dummy. It WAS a heavy nuclear weapon.

I get it now. It swings round the sun slingshotting it back to Earth at high speed.

Originally posted by BlankSlate

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by BlankSlate
The dummy mass could be used to represent heavy nuclear weapons.

You got it totally backwards. The mass was not dummy. It WAS a heavy nuclear weapon.

I get it now. It swings round the sun slingshotting it back to Earth at high speed.

You are right. Scratch the "nuclear", it's irrelevant. Suppose you found a way to navigate a slab of pig iron around Sun and perfected the gravitational slingshot (which is now routinely done by NASA). You can then accelerate the payload to huge speed. And there you are, you have a mass driver weapon, and if it hits the target, you have all plausible deniability in the world - no radiation, no EMP, just a blast and the source is unknown.

Sure send it to the Sun.. that way no one has any chance of retrieving and studying the debris - you know one day it will safely burn up, and you can gather great solar wind, mass coronal ejection data before it burns up.. it's a win win.

I can see ET grabbing it and bringing it back to Earth and dropping it on the White House Lawn with a note saying, " Excuse me Earthling, you dropped this."

Darn Environmentalists. :-)

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

I.E....If it's in our solar system, and it's not in Earth orbit, and it isn't in orbit around a planet, moon, or other small body, and it hasn't crashed, then it's in solar orbit.

I suppose that is correct, and at some point it will either crash into the sun or another planetary body on its way to the sun, so in that respect a solar orbit is not news worthy. It doesn't claim to be a "stable" solar orbit.

Originally posted by buddhasystem
You are right. Scratch the "nuclear", it's irrelevant. Suppose you found a way to navigate a slab of pig iron around Sun and perfected the gravitational slingshot (which is now routinely done by NASA). You can then accelerate the payload to huge speed. And there you are, you have a mass driver weapon, and if it hits the target, you have all plausible deniability in the world - no radiation, no EMP, just a blast and the source is unknown.

Hasn't the world's space powers had this ability for a long time (40+ years)?

As long as Russia and the U.S. (and now even China, India and Japan) had the ability to send a mass outside the Earth's gravity, they also had the ability to make it come back (via gravity and orbital mechanics).

[edit on 5/24/2010 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
Hasn't the world's space powers had this ability for a long time (40+ years)?

They did, but not with precision required in this application. It's one thing to drop a probe over a particular area of Mars, and quite another to score a bulls eye on a North Korean nuclear reactor facility.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
I don't think it takes a lot of extra planning to get it to "any" solar orbit, beyond whatever planning it takes to allow it to become free of the Earth's gravity.

Absolutely right. All you have to do is burn in a prograde direction (along your current velocity vector) while in orbit long enough and you'll automatically find yourself in solar orbit as long as you don't hit the moon on your way out (extremely unlikely of course, and a quick check could avoid it).

[edit on 24-5-2010 by ngchunter]

Originally posted by BlankSlate

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by BlankSlate
The dummy mass could be used to represent heavy nuclear weapons.

You got it totally backwards. The mass was not dummy. It WAS a heavy nuclear weapon.

I get it now. It swings round the sun slingshotting it back to Earth at high speed.

You can't do a gravitational slingshot off the parent body of your orbit (the sun) - there's no way to get "extra speed" from that.

reply to post by buddhasystem

They did, but not with precision required in this application. It's one thing to drop a probe over a particular area of Mars, and quite another to score a bulls eye on a North Korean nuclear reactor facility.

I'd say landing on the moon required more precision that what you propose.


BY A LONG SHOT!

Originally posted by ngchunter
You can't do a gravitational slingshot off the parent body of your orbit (the sun) - there's no way to get "extra speed" from that.

Very true (however think what happens in a binary system with no clear "parent").

For brevity, I skipped the part where the vehicle gets a boost from a planet du jour, or actually a few of those. Ideally, you have a fleet of boosted projectiles in the Solar system, and deorbit them as needed to hit targets (or destroy killer asteroids).

Why does this remind me of Superman The Quest for Peace?

Likely they are testing solar orbiting technology. There are many advantages to a solar orbiting satellite, namely it's difficulty of detectability if in a correct plane. It's good for espionage, and maybe for peeking on others we might think are peeking on us when they are hidden by the shroud of the sun.

Is it possible that because this mission was "top secret" from jump...that by putting the upper stage into solar orbit (which I agree with SGIP here - all you gotta do is break free from earth's gravity and you're there) the USAF helped ensure that if non-military/ gov't astronomers were going to (and did) bust their cover, it would be only because the vehicle itself was discovered? I mean, wouldn't an extra unscheduled flyby or two raise a few eyebrows if the upper stage were in earth orbit AND the vehicle? The more objects, the more likely to be noticed...by more people...and discovered.

also, the US military spends how much $ tracking space debris to protect how much $ worth of satellites? Weren't they POed over a lost tool bag a few missions ago? They surely don't want to add to the traffic, much less have it end up in a decaying earth orbit and end up dumping gallons of hydrazine all over suburbia, Ill.

I think this is the simplest answer...

hey everybody we might need to think about bringing the whole topic about the air force and boeing taking over the x-37b mission from nasa and it possibly be a form of space militarilization. x-37b is launching for the second time tomorrw. with the way things are going in the world with the north africa-middle east crisis and north korea threatening, this could be a real concern. and another odd thing. i heard the x-37b air force comand base is in colorado springs. doesnt the denver airport have those supposedly "underground bases". im just saying.