US military's top secret X-37B shuttle 'disappears' for two weeks, changes orbit

You think a missing craft is scary...remember what happened when someone disclosed pictures from an Asteroid Fly By?

Never gets scarier then when you start realizing we might be living in something similar to The Truman Show....

Have yer been watching Stargate again ?

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Jesus, no I mean Jesus what a wank reply

Agreed.

What does FTL stand for?

Faster Than Light

Its a spy satellite ...with a twist.


Spy satellites rapidly become useless after the first few weeks because once its orbit is determined by other countries everybody knows WHEN IT WILL BE OVERHEAD for years to come.

There's a famous example from the 70's when all of Russia's diesel subs simply disappeared , Russian figured out the orbits of all of our satellites and simply ordered their subs to submerge whenever an American satellite was overhead.


This satellite is different


1. You launch it

2. Let it orbit until its "found" by the people you're spying on.

3. Use its engines to move to a new orbit.

4. You continue this game of hide and seek until you run out of propellant .

5. You land, refuel and refurbish

6. Go back to step 1.



This satellite combines the duration of a spy satellite with the unpredictability of a spy plane.

Thanks...

Brilliant, isn't it? You can bet amateurs who are finding this thing are providing a service to the air force by doing so; we help them place an upper limit on how long they can go between maneuvers.

So is this the real "Airborne Laser Test Bed"?





Time to get the popcorn.

Actually they aren't useless after a few weeks. They still give you the data but what you as a country have to do is data analysis of the pictures and the video and the IR and other sensors in the package. You see if a country figures out that you have a satellite up in orbit observing an area (you know that many of the satellites are looking at a broad swath of landmass so it's really hard to get away from it's sight), they will start to hide their activities and such to make it harder for said country to tell what they are doing. But thats where Analysis of the data comes in, they are able to figure out what is going on from the satellite data regardless of what they are hiding. It's real hard to hide what you are doing if a country has wind of what you may be doing.

Also the 70's russian subs missing, that was the result of the biggest traitor in US history. His name was John Walker, Jr. Wiki him and you will see, they made a movie about him. In regards to the subs he gave them information about where the underwater mikes where and overnight we couldn't find them. Also I believe he was the same one that also told them about how noisy their subs where and it had to do with their screw design and that helped also.