Navy guys and students of history should immediately get why this is a *bad* thing for us. Apparent-peer-to-peer refueling has a whole bunch of unpleasant implications.
Posted on 07/15/2025 9:12:13 AM PDT by Red Badger
Those who know won’t say.
I would question the ‘no other nation has achieved’ statement.
Just not ‘public’...i.e., ‘black’
Feminists immediately condemned the male satellite for refuelling the female satellite without verbal or written consent, noting the male satellite didn’t even take it out and pay for a vegan dinner first.
A Quark could stay up for a long time collecting space junk. Marooned in orbit with the Betties. Wow!
The big surprise for me about NASA is it WASN’T JFK who proposed the moon landing.
It was actually Eisenhower who began talks with NACA in the 50’s to see if it could be done.
JFK just took credit for the idea.
YAWN
Space station is routinely resupplied.
Been refueling and reprovisioning the Space Station for 30 plus years now.
First? In 2007, DARPA along with Boeing, Ball Aerospace and other team members, flew the very successful Orbital Express mission in which two unmanned spacecraft conducted rendezvous and docking operations, followed by hydrazine fuel transfer (both pressure-driven and pump-driven) from Boeing’s ASTRO spacecraft to Ball’s NextSat and back again from NextSat to ASTRO.
Well, I guess my son lo longer holds the Guinness World Record for closest satellite orbit.
(Actually the mission at NASA he worked at held the record but he’s personally beat it but never called Guinness)
I say future combat only in the sense that currently we do not have satellite to satellite or satellite to surface combat actively going on. As in, this could literally start tomorrow.
It’s not a proven refueling and resupply operation yet, no, but it’s the hard part done. The rest is just engineering details if they haven’t already accomplished it.
Space Station rendezvous is only semi-automated and the station, vehicle and docking ports are a LOT larger and engineered with more room for error.
Put in terrestrial terms, space station refuel/reprovision is like underway replenishment at sea between ships, satellite reful/rearm is like air to air refueling.
It isn’t. There is no stealth in space and the X-37 is clearly visible from terrestrial observation stations when in normal satellite orbits.
Also worth noting, per your other post about Communist propaganda - this wasn’t the Commies crowing about this happening. This was outside observers noting it happening, with the Chinese not saying anything at all about it.
First between mass produced satellites instead of one-offs, at the very least.
Navy guys and students of history should immediately get why this is a *bad* thing for us. Apparent-peer-to-peer refueling has a whole bunch of unpleasant implications.
X-37B is likely an on-orbit recon system that can also deploy additional satellites and drag them onboard to service them
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Just guesses. It could also be used to trade goods to aliens for all we know.
If so, the aliens don’t show up on radar, nor is there a gap in VLA radar observation near the X-37 when it’s up there. :P
Why would the Aliens want to show up on radar? They seldom do anyway.
“Why would the Aliens want to show up on radar? They seldom do anyway.”
We know they are there because their advanced technologies prevent us from seeing them.
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