[Tyler]

Phantom of the Operating Shuttle?
     


Dvice.com
reports about a mysterious Robotic Shuttle that will be launched
April 19th.  This is the first time I've even heard of such a shuttle
replacement.  I mean, I thought NASA dumped the idea of a shuttle
completely and went for the super Apollo type mission to go to the Moon
or Mars?
 So at a time when mothballing
the old Space Shuttle debate is going ballistic, what happens?
 Well, it looks like the Air Force pulled a fast one and went ahead and
had it's own space shuttle secretly built by Boeing Phantom Works.  The
new autonomous robotic Space Shuttle is dubbed the X37B.
 Revealing a new Space Shuttle at this time is probably not going to
help the Obama administration with all the harsh
Space
Agency criticism they've been getting lately.  In my opinion it shames
the Obama Administration and NASA because neither came up with this
dreamy vehicle, the Air Force had to.  One could argue that NASA has
limited funds or how NASA and the Air Force is sort of two
sides of the same coin, yada yada.  It probably shames the Air Force too
for not informing Obama they had a secret space shuttle.
 Anyway, the Air Force didn't commission just any space shuttle to be
made, they had made a small, efficient, robotic,
autonomous space shuttle.  It can go up, deploy some secret
payload, and come down and land
all on it's own the article says!
OK, well, details are sketchy so it's probably not completely autonomous
but it appears to be just as much autonomously controlled by robotic
equipment as the original shuttle was controlled by humans in the
cockpit.  That's very impressive.  Awesome.  So... now that such a robotic
shuttle is
made public and known to exist, I wonder if the Air Force will let NASA
use it
for non-military missions?  Naw, probably not.
   

http://robots.net/article/3005.html