Video: Secret Space Plane Shatters Orbital Record as Chinese Rival Looms

The second copy of the Air Force’s X-37B robotic space plane landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early Saturday morning, ending a record-breaking 469-day orbital mission that began atop an Atlas rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 5, 2011. The safe landing of Orbital Test Vehicle 2 after more than 15 months in space is an indisputable triumph for the U.S. military and space industry. Much less certain is the X-37′s future. Budget cuts, labor woes and the looming specter of a Chinese rival could blunt the diminutive robo-shuttle’s orbital edge.

The Boeing-built X-37B, in development since the 1990s, was designed to operate nine months at a time between refueling and refurbishment. But with just two copies of the roughly billion-dollar space plane in the inventory, the Air Force wanted to get as much mileage as possible out of each. After OTV-1′s proof-of-concept flight from April to December 2010, OTV-2′s mission became an endurance test. “One of the goals of this mission was to see how much farther we could push the on-orbit duration,” said Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, the Air Force’s X-37B program manager.

The key to the X-37′s marathon flight: fuel and energy management. “It sips fuel like a Prius,” one space insider said of the mini-shuttle. Even so, Air Force controllers on the ground had to pay close attention to the X-37′s orbital profile and its use of engines, batteries and extendable solar panels.

Officially, the 29-foot-long X-37 is a research vehicle, meant to carry small experiments in its payload bay, which is roughly the size of a pickup truck bed. But the winged vehicle’s maneuverability and flexibility mean it’s capable of much more: spy missions, cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, even sneaking up on and tampering with enemy satellites. Some observers speculated that OTV-2 was monitoring China’s Tiangong space station, a notion that Secure World Foundation analyst Brian Weeden dismissed. “If the U.S. really wanted to observe Tiangong, it has enough assets to do that without using X-37B.”

Continue Reading “Video: Secret Space Plane Shatters Orbital Record as Chinese Rival Looms” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

CIA Refuses to Confirm or Deny Drone Attacks Obama Brags About

Armed MQ-9 Reaper drones like this one are used by both the U.S. military and the CIA. Photo: USAF

The Central Intelligence Agency continues to refuse to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, despite President Barack Obama and even a former CIA director’s admission of the agency’s targeted killing program.

Despite numerous public comments on the CIA’s drone attacks in far-flung locales such as Yemen from various government officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta and Obama, the CIA is taking the position in court that it would have to eliminate you with one of its drones if it acknowledged the program.

So on Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal appeals court to expedite a hearing (.pdf) on its Freedom of Information Act request seeking details of the drone program. Hours later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set a September 20 oral argument. (.pdf)

The development comes as 26 members of Congress asked Obama, in a letter, to consider the consequences of drone killing and to explain the necessity of the program. The use of drones to shoot missiles from afar at vehicles and buildings that the nation’s intelligence agencies believe is being used by a suspected terrorist began under the Bush administration and was widened by Obama to allow the targeting of American citizens. Drone strikes by the Pentagon and the CIA have sparked backlashes from foreign governments and populations as the strikes often kill civilians, including women and children.

Continue Reading “CIA Refuses to Confirm or Deny Drone Attacks Obama Brags About” »

Tags: , , , , ,
Back to top

Navy May Need to Design Ships With Laser Guns in Mind

Unless the Navy starts building destroyers like the USS Spruance that can generate the power necessary to operate a laser gun, the Navy might never get its forthcoming focused-light weapons, according to a congressional study. Photo: U.S. Navy

After more than 20 years of research and development, the Navy’s dreams of laser weapons are about to come true. But like the dog who chases the car and doesn’t know what to do when he catches it, the Navy’s thoroughly unprepared for its coming arsenal of focused-light weapons. A new congressional study warns that the Navy runs the risk of outfitting its surface ships with laser guns that their on-board power systems can’t handle.

As Chris Partlow says to Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, this is one of those good problems.

Laser weaponry has progressed to the point where it’s only a matter of time before they’re disabling ships and burning missiles out of the sky. “Over the next few years,” estimates a new Congressional Research Service report acquired by Danger Room, lasers “capable of countering certain surface and air targets at ranges of about a mile could be made ready for installation on Navy surface ships.” Laser weapons with a 10-mile range aren’t much farther away. If only the ships can handle them.

If the Navy hasn’t come to grips with the imminence of its laser cannons, Congress needs to step in, the report suggests. One major issue: “the potential implications of shipboard lasers for the design and acquisition of Navy ships, including the Flight III DDG-51 destroyer that the Navy wants to begin procuring in [fiscal year] 2016.” In plain English: Unless the Navy starts designing ships to carry laser weapons right from the shipyard, it may never get the futuristic weapons it wants.

Continue Reading “Navy May Need to Design Ships With Laser Guns in Mind” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

‘Gray Eagle’ Drone Fails All the Time, But Army Still Wants More

The Army's Gray Eagle at an unknown airfield. The Army's ambitious drone program is suffering from poor reliability and repeated delays, according to a Pentagon report. Photo: U.S. Army

The Gray Eagle is supposed to be the Army’s own version of the Air Force’s famous Predator drone. The Army wants its own version of the Predator so much, it’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and buy 164 of the things through the year 2022. Problem is, the Army is having trouble getting the drone to, y’know, work.

Beginning in March 2011, “poor reliability across all major subsystems” led to delays that would seemingly never end, according to a report from Edward Greer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for developmental test and evaluation. During the same month, a Gray Eagle drone crashed in California after a faulty chip blocked a subsystem from sending commands to “a portion of the aircraft’s flight control surfaces,” Col. Timothy Baxter, the Army’s project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, elaborated in an e-mail to Inside Defense.

“Flight testing was suspended,” Greer’s report added. The faulty chip was replaced and testing resumed, but the Army was now left with fewer available flight hours. The drone’s mean times between failures — or the average time the drone or a component works without failure — is also short. First, the drone itself has an average failure every 25 hours, short of a required minimum of 100 hours. The drone’s ground control station has a rate of 27 hours before a failure, short of a required 300. The Army has since lowered the requirement to 150 hours. The Gray Eagle’s sensors fare a bit better: 134 hours to 250 hours required.

Then the Gray Eagle was delayed again last October. The report concludes that for the 2011 fiscal year, the Gray Eagle is meeting only four of seven “key performance parameters,” and the drone’s “system reliability continues to fall short of predicted growth,” which could be a problem for the upcoming tests scheduled for August. The Gray Eagle is also necessary for the Pentagon’s plans to double its unmanned air force.

Continue Reading “‘Gray Eagle’ Drone Fails All the Time, But Army Still Wants More” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

US Outsources Its Africa Spying

Air Force Lt. Col. Douglas Lee, commander of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing's MC-12 squadron, displays one of his Beechcraft spy planes in Afghanistan, 2010. Photo: Spencer Ackerman/Wired

Africa is important enough to the United States to spy on. Just not with official US military personnel. The military’s Africa Command is outsourcing dramatic amounts of surveillance missions. And if something should go wrong, the contractors are on their own.

That’s what the Washington Post‘s Craig Whitlock found after poking through an obscure program called Tusker Sand. Starting in 2009, Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, began paying private firms to fly MC-12 Beechcrafts outfitted with sensitive cameras to perform sensitive spy missions in places where the military doesn’t typically operate, like Uganda or Burkina Faso.

As some of those contractors learned, if their planes went down, AFRICOM wouldn’t go to any effort to recover American citizens. And there was a strong possibility those Americans would be captured or killed.

“Among the jobs to be outsourced: pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists,” Whitlock writes. “The expectation was that the personnel would be veterans; most needed to certify that they had passed the military’s survival, resistance and escape training course, because of the possibility of aircrews being downed behind enemy lines.”

Continue Reading “US Outsources Its Africa Spying” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS