Everything We Know About The US Air Force's Secret Space Plane - The X-37B

oh it's Scott Manley here and the power is still out and I'm literally running these off these lights from whatever I can find but I've even got one of these things here I've been winding up and it doesn't work very well oh yes dark scary Halloween no nevermind so I want to talk about the x-37b which just touched down after a record mission in space since the Space Shuttle stopped flying the x-37b the mysterious x-37b has kept the dream of space planes literally aloft it's also known as the orbit test vehicle and the design has flown five missions in the last ten years and that may not seem a lot but yet this last mission was over two years long that's more than twice the career the entire flight career of the space shuttle left discovery I think right 360 days or something cumulative time over all its missions so these are long-duration missions now the origin of the x37 goes back to the late 1990s they again it was another later reusable space plane concept that nasa worked with Boeing and the Air Force to develop initially the first thing they built was an X 37 while specking this out they realized that they wanted to build a smaller test vehicle for aerodynamics and new technologies so the X 40 was the first vehicle built as part of this program it was a bit 20% smaller it didn't it wasn't obviously orbit capable but it did have to create a neurodynamics it had the new avionics the flight control systems that had the calculated air data system which is their mechanism for actually determining air speed and velocity without needing to have little pressure patrol tubes that stick out into the air stream that's something you don't want to do or when you're reentering from space otherwise it will get destroyed by the reentry heating so the early flights of the x40 took place using a helicopter to lift the vehicle up to 50 thousand feet whereby it would then fall and navigate towards the runway a very first flight was a 1998 and it flew down and it landed basically right in the center of the line runway which was fantastic it would fly a couple more flights now a couple of years later the Air Force dropped out it decided it wasn't interested in space planes again for some reason but NASA then continued on its own and it of course was working towards now the full-scale x-37 and they had a plan to have two vehicles first would be an approach and landing test vehicle and then you would have the proper vehicle which would do all the orbital tests about 2003 though with obviously more drama at NASA and problems with the space program it was reviewed the project was decided to be sort of out of line with NASA's long term exploration goals and they were told to wind up the project and at that point they had began construction so these were gonna see it at least the testing of this vehicle they'd paid for Boeing worked with the Department of Defense and said hey maybe you want to work on this little so NASA began working with the Department of Defense on the x-37 which would do the approach tests so NASA's x-37 would see its first flight in 2005 carried under the white night the carrier aircraft that would take the spaceship one vehicle to its launch altitude where it would perform its prize-winning flights so it did several captive carry tests and in 2006 they finally got to drop it and test it and the thing flew beautifully under a fully autonomous control it aim for the runway put itself down gently in the center of the runway and ran off the end where it sustained some minor damage but not to be too perturbed by this they did repair it went back and did another couple of test flights and these were flawless and so having proved the technology the program won't up but two months after that the Air Force finally having seen the error of their ways announced that they would be building the x-37b a fully capable orbit vehicle and at that point everything went quiet because it was a super classified Department of Defense project so let's look at the design the front offer actually looks a lot like a miniature Space Shuttle with the classic lifting body nose and the Delta wings and the ailerons but then at the rear it extends back whole lot further widens out and instead of a single tail you have this v-shaped tail with a pair of rudder evaders that our rudders that are also elevators so the whole vehicle is about ten meters long where about four and a half meters wide with a total mass of about five tons for maneuvering in space there's a set of reaction control thrusters fore and aft all integrated neatly into the surface and it's a single large engine at the rear now it's unusual for this because the single engine isn't actually square on the rear it's offset to the right a little but it does of course still aim through the center of the mass the original NASA design called for a pair of engines which would be using hydrogen peroxide and jp8 which is another variety of kerosene the Air Force version supposedly uses monomethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide and that's why after it lands the first people that approach it are wearing fully self-contained life support suits because of course hydrazine is scary stuff as far as I know the actual engine hasn't been revealed but it's probably a pressure fed system that gets you know maybe a bit 700 to 900 Newton's of thrust as an autonomous vehicle there's no cockpits or windows or anything like that for people inside but there is a payload bay door that's a couple of meters long and while we've never seen any photos of the bay open we do know that the doors have radiators integrated them into them just like the Space Shuttle however unlike the space shuttle when the door opens there's also a solar panel array that deploys out of this and is visible in orbit in fact Ralph Vanderburgh did nice to take a photo of this thing in orbit with the solar panel deployed so the v-shaped tail with the rudder of a truss was taught chosen over a standard vertical tail design because they wanted to be small enough to fit inside the space shuttle payload would be that was the original plan of course by 2003 this was looking like a bad idea and they wanted to switch it over to an expandable launch vehicle initially I think the plan was to use a Delta 2 with the aircraft of the vehicle not inside any fearing but there was a lot of concerns about how the control surfaces and the wings would affect the stability of the rocket so they decided to instead stick it and say the payload fairing that probably meant that they shifted it to the Delta 4 but ultimately it launched on the cheaper Atlas 5 and of course later and more recently it launched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 those rudder vapors were pretty innovative - they were made of reinforced carbon-carbon and unlike the space shuttle where they had carbon carbon at the front of the wings there's no airframe inside of these these entirely carry their own structural loads the control surfaces are all electrum mechanically activated that means the rudders that the elephant's body flaps the air brake there's no hydraulics or anything in there and so that makes this the first orbital vehicle to use entirely electrically actively actuated control surfaces so so far there have been five flights with this vehicle and we know that there's two separate vehicles that have been identified due to subtle differences in their hardware on landing and recovery and as for those mysterious payloads there are a lot of speculations about it being a highly maneuverable reconnaissance platform or something it can carry weapons I think these are silly I mean if as a reconnaissance platform it doesn't really make sense because it's too small but there is likely that they are testing sensor hardware on it equally it certainly doesn't make sense as a weapon system at least as far as I can tell no I think what they're doing is they are just testing hardware for future satellites it provides a platform for them to put stuff in space for a long time so they can test a electronics sensors and propulsion thermal control systems anything and they can then return it to earth so they can really assess how it performs in space and how it degraded over time NASA does this all the time on the space station but of course the space station is an international project with people from all over the world and the Department of Defense no doubt would prefer to keep their new special high-tech toys away from any prying eyes that are not classified US citizens so there have been a few experiments which have been clearly identified on itv4 they had a material science experiment where they were essentially exposing new experimental materials to space to see how they performed you know just to see how they degrade over time on the same mission they were also testing a new Hall effect thruster an ion thruster which is going to be flown or is being flown on the new AE HF communication satellites and in some of the recovery photos you can actually see this ion engine on the back remember how I said what the engine was offset to the right well this is on the left side so it kind of makes sense as to or might explain why the engine is offset like that because it gives you a place to test another engine on this flight it's confirmed that they were testing an oscillating heat pipe a new mechanism for pumping heat around a spacecraft which is of course critically important in spacecraft management which is presumably you know this oscillating heat pipe is supposedly way better than the garden-variety heat pipes that we use in to cooler computers all the time they did also say that they launched a number of small satellites and this is sort of controversial because there's been no official notification to the UN as to these satellites being launched which is what the US is supposed to do granted there are many countries that launch satellites and then notify the UN but the u.s. is kind of supposed to you know be the one that respects these things and sets the standard for everyone else so you can see why that's a little controversial and the spacecraft have also tested new thermal air protection systems you could test thermal protection systems on the space shuttle but they generally didn't like you fooling around with anything that was mission-critical like that so it was very hard to get anything tested in this one yeah they tested a new system called tough rock which is more or less a new high-tech way of attaching the outer thermal tiles to the inner material and making them hold on more securely so yeah there's been apparently a few variations on that being tested so annually for now this x-37b is returning to the space shuttle processing facility that now calls home and we expect another flight of one of these vehicles next year on an Atlas 5 and I will be surprised if I hear anything else about this thing because of course everything is super-secret I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 981,516

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Keywords: x37, x40, x37b, top secret, usaf, spaceplane, nasa, experiment, boeing

Id: EQN4hId5psg

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019