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Powered landings after an intense atmospheric deceleration.
No, powered landings all the way down. At least on the Moon and Mars (from orbit). With more fuel you could do the same from Earth, but why bother?
This is the X-37B. There's a contract for an X-37C, 1.8x as big and possibly capable of carrying humans.[1] That would be a nice little spacecraft. It's time to get past capsules, without building something as big and fragile as the Space Shuttle. The USAF and Boeing aren't saying much about it, though. [1] http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/spa...
I thought the link to the x-37c was interesting but I can't find anything that suggests it is anything more than a proposal at this point.
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No, powered landings all the way down. At least on the Moon and Mars (from orbit). With more fuel you could do the same from Earth, but why bother?
Are you sure about the orbit? Could a Red Dragon not land directly from a Hohmann transfer?
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Technically, the space shuttle and this space plane are lifting bodies, which I think is pretty cool and elegant.
... there's something particularly evocative about this image taken during early lifting body research: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/multimedia/imagegallery/...
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Are you sure about the orbit? Could a Red Dragon not land directly from a Hohmann transfer?
Wikipedia seems to imply that the plan for Red Dragon is a direct atmospheric entry. It makes sense, they don't have a second stage that would last long enough to get there. They don't have the delta-V to get the second stage into a mars transfer with a huge amount of fuel and I doubt there's much utility in spending the 2.3km/s (or thereabouts) of delta-v in getting from the Mars transfer to a low Mars orbit when yo…
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You might think so, but the difficulty doesn't scale linearly with size and weight. For example there's a practical upper bound on airbags to absorb landing shock; we can't just build larger ones for a capsule carrying humans.
I would imagine that the airbag solution would be rather unpleasant for humans, even if it were possible/practical.
Whatever the X-37B does, it seems to do it very well. This is its fourth mission. Missions - that don't need people - are the luckiest missions in the world..
Anyone find it interesting that this thing is landing several days after a North Korean missile failed minutes into flight? Time to re-arm?
This is the X-37B. There's a contract for an X-37C, 1.8x as big and possibly capable of carrying humans.[1] That would be a nice little spacecraft. It's time to get past capsules, without building something as big and fragile as the Space Shuttle. The USAF and Boeing aren't saying much about it, though. [1] http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/spa...
I'm not sure describing the space shuttle as 'fragile' really does it justice. The ceramic tile system was fragile, but the requirement for the tiles came from the required re-entry mass, which included carrying down a full payload bay as well as the astronauts. That was imposed on the system as a military requirement (the rumor is that the Military wanted to be able to potentially snag a satellite and return it to e…
Edit: I would argue that the huge mass of the (STS) oribiter was pretty much its greatest problem, and could be largely attributed to the requirement that the whole thing must be reusable. Not only was it problematic to bring all that mass down, but consider this: the system could bring almost as much mass to orbit as the Saturn V rocket [3], but almost all that capacity was consumed by the orbiter, leaving "just" 27,500 kg for payload. Of course, that is still a huge payload capacity, and the orbiter itself could, to an extent, be considered useful payload.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/sound-supp...
[3] The maximum takeoff weight of a space shuttle orbiter was around 109,000 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_orbiter#Shuttle_...) while the maximum LEO payload of the Satrurn V was around 140,000 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V).
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Hubble fixes? Also it seems that quite a few shuttle missions were satellite servicing missions including relaunching sattlites that failed to get into the correct orbit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49
Yeah, the SSPD (NASA office behind Restore-L) started with the Hubble reservicing missions