Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and Hell the Tech are you. It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This one's a secret well. It published on April two thousand fifteen, and it is titled The Secret space Plane. Enjoy. So we're talking about a space plane, secret space plane, and uh, it's been reported on in the news several times. There's a at an upcoming launch that should be happening in May of um it is. As we record this, it's early April, so obviously that's still always out and depending on weather and stuff, it could end up being pushed back. But we wanted to talk about what this plane is and we'd love to talk about what it's doing. But as you'll find out, that's a little complicated. There are some guesses, and as we continue through today's episode, we will arrive at some of that. But to be absolutely honest from the jump, the people who do know what it's doing are totally not allowed to talk about it. Yeah, this is like almost Area fifty one level secrecy right where people it's it's it's common knowledge that the thing exists, but not common knowledge of what's going on with It's very much like Area fifty one, what's for many years. So the setup I have on this is on Friday October, an unmanned plane landed autonomously, I should add, at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, and it had spent six hundred seven in the four days, nearly two full years in lower thorbit in space. It flew for two years up in space. Yeah, um, so the landing marked the end of the I call it a test flight, but really you could just call it a mission of the X thirty seven B space plane, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle or O t V. And there are two of those planes in existence and together they've logged more than one thousand, three hundred sixty seven days in orbit total. Uh and that's across three missions. So that's a lot of time at once. So you might want to know what's going on. And the thing is, like we mentioned, so need to know basis that you don't need to know, and neither do we. Well, I think eventually that we're going to know, we being the public, eventually we have to know. Um, But there's there's a story behind this. It's a culmination of stuff that began decades ago. Right, Yeah, it started back in the nineteen nineties. Uh So turn your watch back, if you will, to the magical decade of the nineties. Grunge music is all the rage. You know, the Generation xers are making sardonic entertainment left and right, Empire records, that kind of thing. Um. So, NASA at that point was looking into the future of space exploration, particularly the type that doesn't need human beings on spacecraft. Yeah. Humans are such a hassle in space. You have to you have to spend so much time, technology and money just like make them not die. Yeah, get the little guys up there and back. Yeah. Yeah, keeping keeping humans alive in space is a tall order because there's a lot of stuff in space that is really deadly. Right. It's not our neck of the woods, a vacuum of space. You've got radiation, You've got micro gravity, which over a long enough time period can cause some serious health problems. Objects at high speeds, yeah, space debris, all this sort of stuff. And you know, clearly the space age we've had our share of tragedies and you know, we definitely aren't making light of that. That's one of the reasons why so much effort and money has have been put forward into these unmanned missions. And can we find ways of getting stuff to space, let's say, like a like a refueling mission or a you know, uh, you're replenishing inventory aboard the International Space Station without the need for a manned space flight. And so there there's a real reason why NASA was interested in this, and um they were, you know. Apart from that, it also reduces cost. Yeah, you don't have to have a life support system for a example, in an unmanned spacecraft. That alone will save you millions of bucks. Right. So in NASA announced that it was developing a pair of vehicles, one called the orbital Vehicle and one called the Approach and Landing Test Vehicle or a L t V UH. And the a l t V S purpose was to test the approach and landing systems of an unmanned plane, so this one was not designed to go into space. The a L t V and UH. NASA partnered with Boeing and the Air Force in order to get this program going. So the A L T V was just an unmantened I say just it was an unmanned plane, because it was amazing to me that you could build an autonomous vehicle that could land a plane, yeah, on a landing strip. Well, in this case, it wasn't taking off because what they did with this was they would lift it up on another vehicle and then drop it, and then they would allow the unmanned vehicle to fly itself to the proper landing destiny action and land so the al V it could not take off on its own, it couldn't go into space. But it was designed mainly as a test platform for the autonomous guidance system and landing sort of a proof of concept, Yeah, because I mean, obviously, if you want to build upon this and create a vehicle, an unmanned vehicle that can go into space, first you want to make absolutely certain that you have taken steps to a show that it can land before you pour in all the money that is necessary for it to be able to survive the rigors of space travel. Yeah. And there's a little bit of a I guess a geopolitical calculation with this kind of stuff too, because if in orbit decays, right, if the thing gets into space and it crashes or it just doesn't land where it's supposed to. Then not only have you the launching party lost billions of dollars, right, but you've also given all of this research to another country, and maybe not a friendly one. Yeah exactly. I mean we've seen this sort of stuff throughout the history of the uh well really the Cold War is you know, like things like the you two's YouTube spy plane going down and the fact that that was a huge concern that that uh, the the adversaries to the United States had suddenly gained access to some of that technology. Uh well, you know that's clearly another concern for this sort of stuff. You want to make sure that everything is working properly before you ever put it towards any kind of sensitive use or even just a scientific experiment or whatever. Like maybe it's too you know, um deploy a satellite or something, or even even something more sophisticated, like to fix a satellite to repair solar panels. Yeah. Yeah, So this, like I said, Boeing was partnering with NASA to develop these uh it would ultimately under this part of the the program own it would only develop the altar V for NASA. That's as far as it got it. But it was designated as the X thirty seven A aircraft or spacecraft. Really yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so much easier to say that than uh, you know, alt V or whatever. So it was similar to an earlier unmanned aircraft that was again made by Boeing, but this one was operated by the Air Force. It was the X forty A H And again the X forty A was meant as a test platform for things that would ultimately go on an unmanned space plane type vehicle. Uh so another proof of concept, kind of like the idea that we want to make sure that we get, you know, take the right steps. We're not gonna we're not gonna leap and jump over like six steps of development. We're gonna use this as an incremental approach. So the X forty A could not actually go into space, but again was to test certain technologies. It also was too small for NASA, and could we yeah, it was too small for naty could we Before we go on, could you talk a little bit about just, uh the dramatic waste in typical conventional launches. Oh? Sure, Like yeah, I mean, like so generally speaking, the rule of thumb is that a launch with a government funded space launch is about ten tho dollars per pound. Per pound, every pound of payload that you want to put into space cost ten grand. So imagine that you have a vehicle that has all these different support systems on it for astronauts. That adds to the weight, plus then you have the payload of the spacecraft itself. So something like the Space Shuttle program, which was designed to take material into space, either as like a satellite to be deployed, or tools to repair things that already existed like the hubble Um, or even just a trip to the International Space Station to bring supplies up there. All of that weight is a factor in the cost of launch. If you do an unmanned spacecraft and you reduce the weight of the spacecraft, you've reduced the You know, even even though the X three seven A was larger than the X forty A, it's still significantly smaller than a space shuttle, and that means that it would cost less to put up. You know, you have to use less fuel, so it costs less to put it up into lower thorbit. And when I say less, it's still really expensive. By the way when I the reason why I stressed government funded space launch is there a lot of private companies that have been arguing that by privatizing they could bring down the price of launching payloads into space. So things like space x have really helped to to reduce that cost. So then getting into the differences between the X forty A and the X thirty seven A, despite the fact that it's a lower number of the X three seven A is a bigger spacecraft. It's a larger than the X forty A. And there are other differences as well. Once we get to the one that actually was designed to go into space, Yeah, that one's got advanced thermal protection spacecraft systems, that kind of thing. So the seven A and the forty A were both designed just to be test platforms, so they didn't need all that all the extra stuff. So we're going through this incremental testing and starting to see if we can really make this this vision a reality, this autonomous, super secret spacecraft, which I just love the idea of it. H out at than how um, how do the bureaucratic changes. So yeah, this we're talking a lot about NASA right now, and you might be thinking, well, why is this space plane so secret. NASA is not about secrecy, and it's not. The thirty seven A wasn't meant to be secret at all. In fact, that's a lot of the information you can find about the spacecraft is right there on NASA as website because it's it's all publicly available. But some changes would end up making the let's say, the stewardship of the thirty seven X three seven program change hands. So first, in two thousand one, the Air Force withdrew its support for the project. It's financial support. It was one of three parties that was partner to fund this, the other two being NASA and Boeing. Air Force pulls out in two thousand one, NASA keeps going with the partnership with Boeing. Uh. They had to end up, um, you know, going to the government and saying, hey, we need grants and stuff in order for this to keep going, otherwise the project's gonna collapse from the inside. This continues until two thousand four, and that's when NASA ends up handing over the control of the X thirty seven program to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency also known as DARPA, which I've talked about multiple times this podcast. Yeah, we've talked about a couple of other shows to DARPA. I'm assuming that people have heard this name before, but the rumors are true. It is the closest thing the US has to a mad science department. Yeah, it's the Department of Defense is mad science department. And and it's not like DARPA is filled with a bunch of yeah in lab coats, like locked away forty forty levels underground. In fact, mostly what DARPA does is invite other entities to develop for specific purposes. So I did an episode not long ago talking about how DARPA was instrumental in the rapid development of autonomous car technology. Yeah. Um so in this it's very akin to that. This is an autonomous spacecraft technology. So you know, you're you're talking about the continuation of an idea and just expanding it, you know, expanding the parameters. Really uh So, in this case, DARPA takes over, and it meant that the X three seven fell under the control of the Department of Defense, which also meant that the X three seven suddenly became a classified project. It was no longer this this you know, very public facing project from NASA. Now it's a classified project under the Department of Defense. Yeah, which you know, which is kind of a bummer, but also understandable given that the kind of technology that they would be working on is not something you want or or really can have open sourced, you know, because other countries will get involved, other countries will reverse engineer, and there's a lot of um Again, this is this is where I think we start to see a political aspect to become even more apparent. But but the story is not done yet, right. So remember the Air Force had pulled sort of it's it's supporting two thousand one November two thousand six and announces it's going to develop a variation of the X thirty seven A. Remember the orbital vehicle that NASA had proposed. They never got to the point where that was actually built. They had built the one that was the approach and landing test vehicle, but not the orbital one. And the Air Force wanted to build an orbital vehicle. Uh. They called it the orbital test vehicle, so the O t V UH, and they designated it the X thirty seven B. So thirty seven A was the one that NASA used to test this approach and landing uh technology, and this one was meant to actually go into space. Uh. So the top secret program falls to the control of the Air Force. Now, the official word from the Air Force as to the purpose of the X thirty seven program is This is a direct quote from their website. The X thirty seven B Orbital Test Vehicle or O t V is an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space ace test platform for the US Air Force. The primary objectives of the X thirty seven B are twofold reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to and examined on Earth. So, um, there's some important stuff in there that really does play into the purpose of this thing. The big one being that it is a reusable spacecraft, so it's not a one and done right uh. And this was the same purpose for the Space Shuttle program. It was the difference between that and previous programs where like a capsule would go up and come back down and then once it came down it had to be retired. You couldn't use it again. This is the difference between you know, those and and those previous UH spacecraft and things like the Space Shuttle and the X thirty seven spacecraft. Yeah, we're kind of locked into it at this point because we've put so much money in at the front, so we'll have to we'll have to make that money back. Um. I'm I'm just tickled because what I love about these relatively obtuse kind of explanations is that there there's clearly, um, there's clearly a reliance on vague language. The word test is used three times in the first sentence, and the substantive You are right, they are seeing substantive things. The reusable spacecraft is probably the biggest part of it. Another part is the testing of the instruments, which, again, although you and I don't really know that, that seems like one of the best guesses. Yeah, and you know, you could argue that part of this, the existence of this is really just too incrementally build towards a future spacecraft that has not yet been designed for specific purposes that may go beyond this testing that we're talking about. Uh. And another one maybe that it's to test related technology that are not intended to make the spacecraft itself more effective, but rather just say Hey, we built this sensor. The sensor is meant to do this specific task when it's in space, but we don't know if the sensor can actually withstand being in space, like being exposed to radiation. But then you think, oh, I've got this unmanned vehicle. I can put it up into orbit for hundreds of days at a time and expose the sensor to the same kinds of radiation it will would experience if it were incorporated into some other type of spacecraft, and then we can test and see if in fact the thing we designed will still work, you know, once it's in space. So those are I mean, that's a valid thing. But but because of the secrecy involved, the fact that these these details cannot legally be shared, has led to some really interesting hypotheses, some more grounded than others. I like to use the term grounded. Yes, space ground here all day. I'm surprised we got this far without another space fund. We've got a ton in the notes, and they were all, well unintentional, might be going a bit far, Like I would realize that while typing it out, I'm like, oh, well, okay, but we do know, we do know a lot about the X thirty seven. You can see pictures of it online. You can see some great footage of it that comes from I think ultimately from the Air Force themselves. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean the landing is impressive, right, the fact that this is landing autonomously, so it's unmanned. But it's not just unmanned. There's no one remote controlling this aircraft when it comes down and land, right, it's not a drone. That's very important. Yeah, it's it's it's fully under its own nat navigation power. Uh. So here's some of the facts that we know about it. And a lot of this is because, again, it started its life out as a NASA project, so there were some details that were already out there and the Air Force is like, well, heck, we don't care about this part. This isn't the important part. Just don't talk about the lasers, right, yeah, I mean the tickle device. Yeah, it's just there to tickle space. That's all it's meant to do. So here's what we do know. Uh. It is twenty nine ft three inches long, which is about eight point nine ms. When it's on its landing gear, it is nine ft six inches tall or about two point nine ms now at that space. Even if you had a pressurized cabin, you wouldn't be able to really have astronauts right in it. Uh. The X three seven B does not have a pressurized cabin, so it cannot carry up anything living, at least nothing that you expect to remain. So it's it could carry up non animate uh like cargo that could and not a whole lot of it at that's at that size from wing tip to wing tip, it is four ft eleven inches wide or four point five meters, and it weighs a slimming eleven thousand pounds or four thousand UH. It's power system it uses lithium ion batteries to to supply power to its um it's thrusters, but it is uh it's got gallium arsenide solar cells to recharge those. That's why it can stay in space so long. Because that's the question that a lot of people have at the beginning, is how does it manage to retain power for that long and returned to its original um you know, returned to its launch point on its own power. This is not necessarily a powerful vehicle on its own No, it cannot take off from Earth and it certainly cannot escape Earth's gravity on its own. It has to have a launch vehicle, also more commonly referred to by we mere mortals as rockets. So you guess, trap one of these suckers onto a rocket UM, typically an Atlas V Applas Atlas five. I guess I should say, let's say V call I X I I UM the Atlas five rocket. You have to strap it up to one of those suckers to get it out into space in the first place. So, and that actually has raised some folks um objections to this whole approach, but we'll get into that a little bit. So the way it would work is originally they were thinking about having this kind of piggyback onto a space shuttle, so if you were going to launch a space shutle, you could also launch a space plane. However, the Columbia disaster really caused NASA to reevaluate the space shuttle program for quite some time. In fact, it was it was put on the ground for a good long time after the Columbia disaster, as NASA was reevaluating the program and seeing how to make it so that that kind of tragedy would never happen again, so that meant that that would no longer be a viable means of getting the X thirty event into space. So at that point, the reevaluation for X thirty seven mint they looked at it as a payload for other launch vehicles, and they settled on the United Launch Alliance at last five. We'll be back with more about the secret space plane after these messages. So the launch vehicle delivers the X thirty seven to low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit is the same orbit that you find the International Space Station. It's the same Earth orbit the Hubble spacecraft or Hubble space telescope is in. It's the same Earth orbit. Or it's the same orbit that all the Space Shuttle missions went to. So in other words, there have only been a couple of times that human beings have ever gone beyond beyond low Earth orbit. Those times would be when we sent people to the Moon. Otherwise, everything has been in low Earth orbit, which is relatively close to the Earth. From our perspective, it's way the heck out there. But if you were to look at Earth from a much like not even a bird's eye view, obviously, but much further out, you would say, oh, lower th orbit is still very much in the neighborhood. Yeah, a space bird. Well, I guess one of the great ways to imagine this is if you look at a picture with the distance between Earth's Moon and Earth and then you see the line your Earth orbit is very very close. Yeah, exactly, And it's also where a lot of space debris happens to be. There's other space because we do have satellites that are much further out right, We've got like the the geosynchronous satellites are much further out than lower th orbit. But those were delivered by unmanned spacecraft. They weren't They weren't put there by astronauts. Uh, So that that is, you know, we do have stuff that's further out, but it's not stuff from manned missions. And this unmanned mission would end up going and that's say, very low Earth orbit. Uh, and it could stay. Originally, I think they were planning on having it stayed between two entered in three days. Yeah, that would be pretty much the limit that was originally, or at least that was kind of what the mission parameters were going to be. But as it turns out, it can stay up there much longer than that. So the very first mission for an X thirty seven launched on April and landed on December three. Landed without a hitch. Some of their tests landings that they did where they just dropped one of these X thirty seven's from another aircraft, some of them were successful, not all of them were. Yeah, they had some issues where I think on the very I think the very first time they tried to land one um when the mission hadn't been scrapped for weather. It ended up landing on the landing strip, but it overshot a little bit and rolled off the end and sustained minor damage. No. No, And then remember they built two of these things. Originally they were just going to do one, but they ended up building two. So that first mission lasted two hundred twenty four days, and the X thirty seven traveled approximately ninety one million miles in those two four days, which is about a hundred forty six million kilometers. The second mission was launched on March five eleven. Now this was the second of the two X thirty seven, so it wasn't the same one that went up in important to remember because remember the whole purpose of these was so you have reusable the idea being you could turn it around fairly quickly and launch it for a new mission. But they didn't reuse the original one, not for this one. They decided, all right, we're going to stagger these. So the second one went up in on March two thousand eleven. Uh, this was supposed to only last only is a weird way of putting it. Only last two hundred seventy days as an incredibly long time to just be you know, just being a space craft. Remember it's not the International Space Station or anything like that. But on November twenty nine, two tho eleven, the Air Force announced it was going to extend the mission, you know, just let go for a while off. So it eventually landed on June twelve, which means it lasted four hundred sixty nine days. That is mind blowing. Yeah, so the spacecraft was just orbiting Earth for four six days. Sometimes, by the way, it's low enough that you can spot it. Amateur satellite investigators or observers can check it out. You can go online, uh and find the find the correct forums, which allow you to track pretty much anything that is in orbit. If it's close enough to be seen, it's it's the Great Achilles heel of secrecy in space. Yeah. Yeah, if you're like, hey, that's stars moving, the chances are it's not a star, and it's not. It's not the Death Star. Probably probably, it's more likely a space station or a spacecraft. Um. So the third mission launched onto Samarrella at h and this one was the same spacecraft that did the launched So this was the first one, the first X thirty seven b Um. Now this particular one, uh, lasted for six hundred seventy four days. This is the one we talked about where it was just shy of two years. Um, pretty amazing that it could stay up that long. It landed on October seventeen, So this is the one I was referring to at the top of the show. And uh, the fourth mission is scheduled to launch on May six, but again we're in early April as we record this, so that's still in our future, right. But what happens on these missions, that's a great question. Then Remember how I said it was classified in top secret? Do you think I have that clearance? Where are we going? I thought this was I thought you were doing a bit. You're the guy who who knows the stuff. They don't want you to know if anything, I should be asking you this question. Well, uh yeah, well here's the thing, and and and thank you for the shout out. But rumors proliferate in the in the absence of Transparency's actually absolutely like if you you know, you obviously can't deny the existence of this thing, because we all know it exists, but if you cannot also explain the reason for it, or what its purposes or what it is doing, then in the absence that vacuum of information, nature of whorrors a vacuum. So we'll fill it with conjecture. Don't worry about not telling us what it does. We will take care of that for you by suggesting every kind of hypothesis you can imagine. Okay, But with all that being said, now we get to do one of the most enjoyable, fascinating and sometimes slippery slopish kind of things, which is we begin to assemble some of the facts we definitely know and see if that builds out toward a larger picture. Right all right, Yeah, So here's here's what we know. DARPA took control of it. It's part of the Department of Defense. The Air Force is running it, so it's a military operation. With it being a military operation, you can therefore assume that it's going to be doing some things that would in the long term support military operations. Right, it's not. It's not gonna be a cable television satellite deployment device. That's not gonna help you know, the air forces. Like we're strapped for cash. Let's see if Comcast wants us to put something up in the sky, that's not gonna happen. So therefore we narrow that the down the possible uses for this to military things that would benefit the military in some form or fashion. Yeah, that makes sense, So that gives us some some direction. Uh So. One of the popular hypotheses is that the X three seven is acting like a spy settle light which maybe to spy upon land targets or even other spacecraft other targets in space, so it could be a satellite. Um. In fact, there were a lot of people saying, hey, this you know, most recent test had the spacecraft, the X thirty seven, on the same general orbit as a Chinese satellite. Yeah, the Tongue Young one or some and yeah, and that's a that's a space lab has been up for a while. It has its own refueling, So of course people people would guess that this is a satellite either spine on other satellites or giving imagery from the ground mapping. In other words, in the orbitable path of the X thirty seven B takes it over on Southeast Asia, Latin America, parts the Middle East, notably I Rock. So it's not an unreasonable guess. Yeah, you can understand why people would would suggest this. And we don't know all the equipment that's aboard the X thirty seven years. I have noticed that we didn't give you a rundown on like it has this kind of camera system on it or because we don't know, but we'd love to do that. But the stuff we do know is sort of vague. We know it has the solar array, right, we know that. We know that's what allows it to stay up for so long. Uh, you know, I can't say that would be able to stay up indefinitely, but it certainly is staying up there an incredibly long amount of time for something designed to fly up and fly back down. You know it's not again, it's not space station. Um. So here's the thing about the idea of it spying on the space Lab. That's not really physically possible, right, yeah, absolutely, because you can you can check out some of the words from the analysts. This idea of it following a satellite came about from that speculation. But there's a guy named Jim Oberg who is who is a space analyst, which is a great job to have. Yeah, I would love to have that job. Looks pretty empty to me. Yeah, I believe that's a star. No, it's moving, Yeah, exactly. We'd be very good at that. Yeah, I think I think we got a new podcast, so so um, let's go ahead and and uh, we'll we'll finish quoting Jim and invite him to the show later on our on our space anitles stuff. Uh. He points out that these two objects, the Chinese Space Lab and the X thirty seven B, there in orbits that crossed the equator about ninety degrees apart. So when they do criss cross each other's paths, they're going thousands of meters per second. So how how can you make an observation You're you're going by so quickly that there's no there's no way to get any meaningful information. Um, it would be kind of like, let's let's imagine that Ben for a moment, that that you're writing with Scott. Okay, yeah, Scott, Scott from car stuff, because you guys do car stuff. To Scott, he's got a lead foot man. He likes he likes to drive fast. So let's say that he's driving by uh, you're you're in the passenger seat. He's he's flying down the road. He's in one of his his amazingly souped up muscle cars. By the way, tostally making this up. But let's let's say that he's or sports vehicle. Let's say it's either faster than a muscle car. It's a sports car that's designed to go fast. It's it's one of those that was converted from an old race car. And you zoom past a person that neither of you know, and he asks you what colored their eyes were. It's like that, except multiply it by way faster speeds. So it's just it's it's impossible to get any kind of meaningful information from that. So what's another hypothesis. How about it's not actually doing any spying of its own, it's just testing spy technology. Okay, like, what why would they be doing that. Well, let's say that again, kind of like that idea of these sensors that you might want in order to uh to monitor something like uh nuclear deployment in another country, or any other kind of sensor you can imagine that would be useful for military purposes. And they've built these on Earth. See here's the downfall that we have about our our technologies for space. We have to build them for the most part here on Earth. Sore. Yeah, that's where we keep all our stuff, right, That's the way the tick would say, not the Earth. That's where I keep all my stuff. So because we have all that stuff here and we're developing everything here, we're building it here, we can never be fully certain that the thing we designed here on Earth is going to work the way we had intended once it's in space. So it may be that this is acting as a platform to test these technologies, see if they are in fact viable in a space environment, and return to Earth, so that we can be certain that the stuff we developed is in fact doing what it was intended to do, or at least figure out how it broke. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if it's not working, then we try and figure out why is it not working? What caused that? What was the thing was? Did it encounter a like some cosmic radiation and it ended up messing everything up? If so, is there some way we can shield it from that that kind of thing? I think actually that this is probably the the most likely out of all the different hypotheses. Yeah, I agree, because pretty much what the Air Force has said, and and it's it has precedent behind it because they've continually built these platforms, as you said earlier, So it makes sense. And you also want to check because especially if this is new, uh new technology of any sort, it's going to be a little bit delicate and you know, sensors are well sensitive. Yeah yeah, And and you could even argue that maybe it doesn't even go that far. Maybe it's just the Air Force wanting to test this autonomous uh nature and to make sure that they can rely upon it even if the mission extends much further out than what was originally anticipated. That's valuable information to know. Maybe it's not doing anything remotely you know, secret right now, other than just making sure it works, which that's important to know, and we can't know without the tests. So then there's another hypothesis where um, the X thirty seven is a delivery mechanism for space weapons space weapon. How do we define space weapons? That's an excellent question. It's one that cannot be answered right now, because it's a question that comes up over and over in treaty discussions and uh arms control discussions. People disagree over and by people I mean states like country. These disagree over the definition of space weapons. So for example, perhaps you have a missile detection system, like a satellite system that's deployed. Some would argue that as a space weapon. Now it might be up space weapon in the form of defense, but they would still argue that counts under certain definitions. And other states, presumably the states that actually have missile detection systems in place, would say this totally doesn't count as a space weapon. And we'll talk more about why they would say that a little bit later. But the Pentagon, just for the record, denies that in fact, the X thirty seven has anything to do with space weapon deployment. Explicitly denies it. And also, you know this concern about space weapons and militarization. I know, we'll talk about it a little bit later, but there is also precedent in unclassified public record Pentagon statements, especially under Rumsfelds heading of the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, there is an active desire on the part of not just the US but other countries to to explore the possibilities of defensive capability in space. It just makes sense. It's not a secret. I mean, anyone who lived through the eighties remembers the star Wars program, the so called star Wars program, which was a proposed and ultimately abandoned plan to put an anti missile system into space to protect against the potential first strike situation or even you know, not even a first strike, but maybe even a counter strike if you're being super cynical of uh, you know, a system meant to to uh disarm or disable incoming missiles that could target the United States. Ultimately, it didn't go into place. Um and I want to say I've done an episode about that, but if I haven't, I absolutely need to. Yeah, I feel we talked about this, maybe we talked about off air, but that would be that would be a fantastic episode. Uh, It's it's such an it's such an interesting thing. We could also talk about dead hands systems, but that's a story for another day, A strange love stuff. Yeah, I'm almost certain that Chris and I did one episode on it at some point, but I'll have to do as search because once you do around seven hundred episodes, you really can't remember what kinds. Yeah. Well, and for me, honestly, after I did about ten episodes, I was But so anyway, there are other hypotheses as well or other other um statements that have come out from various experts about the potential use of the X thirty seven. Uh. Laura Grego of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the design of the X thirty seven really limits what it could be able to do, and she says that really can't maneuver easily in orbit, so it would be very limited in its use as either spy technology or a space weapon. Like we were saying earlier, you can sometimes see this thing from Earth, so maneuvering it is it's really hard to make that a secret, right, right. Let's say, like if if everyone notices that the X thirty seven happens to be in a particular quadrant that's near say a Russian spy satellite, and that spy satellite suddenly goes offline. It does not take a lot of imagination to connect those two things together. Yeah, so probably not going to be used for clandestine purposes in that case. Um. She also says it's not large enough to be a satellite launcher. It doesn't have the cargo capacity to hold most satellites. I mean, if you're talking about like the small cluster satellites that some people have referred to. Maybe, but it's not designed to carry anything of substantial size, so that's probably not what it's being used. What it can do, she says, is carry cargo up into space and that's about it. Then you have another expert, Mark Gubrand or Gubrid, who is an adjunct assistant professor of physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, who says that space planes like the X thirty seven are not more effective than traditional launches of satellites or space weapons, even potential space weapons. So in other words, putting them into other types of spacecraft to go up into space that that aren't designed to come back down, so there's no real advantage, Like, yeah, you've got the reusable factor, which presumably would cut down on the cost somewhat of space launches, but that it's such a complicated endeavor and it's really designed to stay up there for a really long time, that it doesn't make sense to use it as a delivery mechanism. There's no reason why your delivery mechanism would need to remain up in low Earth orbit for hundreds of days. You just get out there, you deliver it, you're done. So his argument is that, well, it doesn't really make sense. In fact, he would argue that the only reason at the program still exists because it has so much momentum, that there was so much money and effort put into developing it, that it would you know, it's kind of taken a life of its own. It's a soak cost at this point. Yeah, saying that, you know, it doesn't make sense compared to the alternatives. However, it's we already got the ball rolling and now it's going to continue to roll right wherever it ends up rolling. And then there's another interesting thing that you have proposed. You said, what what if it's what if there's a psychological aspect? Yeah, there there's some who have suggested that perhaps at least part of the reason why this project. Let's say that the project ultimately people say, yeah, there's no there's no practical reason to continue it because we can accomplish a lot of the same goals using alternative means that don't require this autonomous vehicle. UM. Some have said, well, maybe it's just a kind of freak out potential adversaries like the Chinese. I like, okay, first off, that sounds so ridiculous on the offset. It sounds like a billion dollar prank, you know, I agree, like, like, hey, guys, you know, I'm concerned about what's happening over in China, and obviously we can't declare war or anything like that, but how do we scare them? Now? You could say that, however, SPOT think was kind of that, you know, that's not a bad that's not a bad comparison, and we we do know that right now, there's there's this very um sensitive is a good word, A sensitive and ongoing uh elbow knocking between nations in space. UM. One thing that working on this episode made me think about was the incident in two thousand seven where the Chinese government shot a satellite down from space and it was it was pitched to the public as like whom it was bad and we wanted to make sure that nothing terrible happened to it, so we took care of it. But it was also there was a sigh logical aspect between the countries right too. Here's what we can do, ye look at our capability. We can bring down a satellite from the surface, like we can launch an attack from the surface of the Earth and bring down a satellite. Also, the rest of the world said, guys, don't don't clutter up space more than it already. You are literally making it more dangerous for everything else that's out in low earth orbit. I mean, maybe that's the reason there hasn't been any extraterrestrial contact. Maybe we're the equivalent of people who have refrigerators and stuff in their yard, or or or the equivalent of like, well, you know, I really want to check out that beautiful waterfall, but there's all this abandoned barbed wire and broken glass here. I'm kind of scared that if I try and walk through there, I'm going to cut myself up. Like that's that's because I mean, space debris a serious problem, not just for manned missions, but unmanned spacecraft as well. Like you know, we could have communications satellites that would get taken down if they encountered space debris. We're talking about things that could be really tiny, I mean just like a couple of centimeters per side, but traveling at those amazing speeds, they could do massive amounts of damage if they collide with something. Now, on the positive side, space is really big, right on the On the the less positive side, first of all, there all all of these things are largely in the same general orbit, you know, lower thorbit. Secondly, the more debris you have, the more the greater the odds increase of some sort of unintended collision. We've got a bit more about this secret space plane to talk about, but first let's take a quick break. So making more garbage up there is not great. And then there's also, um a quote that you found from the London Times. Ah, yes, uh, well back and unnamed Air force official yeah or woman or that person, yes, a recurring character. An unnamed Air Force official did note that the ultimate goal of the X thirty seven B is to aid terrestrial war fighters, which is still pretty vague. It's super vague, but it does confirm that there is a military aspect by the Air Force who knew. Yeah, right, I think again, you know, we see people chasing explanations or speculation about what this is. But there's clearly something about UM an informational edge that I think he's in there. And you know, to be fair that that phrasing, it could mean anything, right, it could anything. It could It could mean reconnaissance. It could mean support in the sense of uh sending up a new satellite, small satellite, I guess, or or some other kind of payload. Or it could mean some kind of weaponization. I mean, it's so vaguely find that it could mean any of those things. So again, and more often than not, it fuels the speculation as opposed to oh now I understand exactly. Yeah, it's there's there's something a little platitude and this about it. But but this brings us to a bigger issue, which you and I have been fascinated by. Yeah, the concept of weaponization of space, like putting weapons into space for the purposes of warfare. So we're talking like everything from those missile defense systems to something that's more of an attack based form of warfare, something like a system that could either launch missiles or other types of weaponry from space or support some other coordinated warfare efforts. Uh. And obviously this is one of those things that is a very delicate subject, particularly when you look at the Earth and you say how many nations are actually space faring nations? Right, not as many as you think there there. Um, there are some big strides being made that will change the game, but right now the a lot of other nations are still catching up to what the US and Russia did in the eighties. Yeah, so you've got things like you've got coalitions like the European Space Agency, and you've got countries like India or China or Japan that all have to some extent worked on this sort of stuff, some of them using the resources of other nations in order to actually launch things. But it is one of those deals where you know you have the the potential to affect a huge number of people, some of whom are living in nations that have absolutely no capability of going into space at the moment. So it ends up raising some concerns, and in fact, the space race itself raised a lot of concerns. You get to a point where h the then Soviet Union can launch a satellite into space. In this case, Sputnik Spotney could not do much. It essentially beat Essentially, all it really did was send a message that said I'm still here until until it stopped UM. But that was enough to terrify people in the United States because the other implication was that if the Soviet Union could send a rocket all the way out into space, it could also send a rocket all the way over to the United States. So it raised a lot of of concerns, not just about intercontinental ballistic missiles, but also are we one day going to have war breakout where the weapons are in space? Because that is terrifying, just a nuclear weapon dropping from near Earth orbit. Yeah. So in nineteen sixty seven, several countries came together and there was an open signing in nineteen sixty seven that took place in UM the so Union and the United Kingdom and the United States for a treaty that is called here's the full name, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies. I guess they didn't have a lot of time to work on the title, were working on the actual agreement. It wasn't so zippy with the title. It is informally referred to as the Outer Space Treaty, which, oh, that makes a lot more sangiesier. So set up a lot of ground rules about about space because obviously at that point only really two nations were in the space game, but they were two nations that were philosophically opposed to one another. They were in the middle of a Cold war. Uh, And so you have all these other countries saying, you guys are getting like, first of all, you're really angry at each other. Secondly, you've both amassed a huge number of weapons. Third you've demonstrated that you are very much interested in going in the outer space, and we would like to have to have us all kind of calm down, set some ground rules and just chill out a little bit. But these are these are actually some fantastic rules, to the point where I wish more nations were on board with this plan. But what are all right? So, first, space exploration as discoveries belong to all humans, not just one nation, so you can't hoard all the info. So yeah, it's it's saying, look, there's the potential for what we learn out in space to benefit all of humanity. We cannot silo that information so that one nation benefits at the expense of everybody else. So there was an agreement that anything we learned that can become a benefit needs to be shared with everyone. Anyone who with a technological capacity can explore space, so it can't be off limits to anyone. So in other words, if the United States has to developed this space faring technology and then some other country that the US is maybe not so friendly with, does, the US can't move to block them, right like Iran. You will hear stuff about the Iranian Space Agency, and you know, for some people it might seem strange that, uh, it might seem strange that there's such controversy over nuclear weapons but relatively little controversy over um any space exploration. Because this, yeah, exactly saying that, you know, philosophical disagreements or ideological disagreements or or political arguments aside. All nations, all states have a right to space exploration if they have the technological capacity to do so. Uh, you can't claim space property. Yeah, you can't. Can't go out there and say this part of space belongs to the US or to the Russia or to whatever. Uh, So you can't land on the Moon plan a flag and say that it belongs to you. Now, So, Eddie, Iszard's whole routine about how you can conquer just as long as you have a flag does not apply to outer space. He's going to be so upset nobody telling you guys, right well, this also means that the US can't lay claim to the Moon because we have an American flag up there. Um, obviously the American flag is really in this sound studio someplace, the whole hoax deal. And because somebody already sold off most of the property on the Moon. I have a couple of acres myself. Yeah, you love those. I mean, I'm sure those businesses are all on the open up right. Yeah. Whenever you hear something like a a company offering up space real estate, this treaty says that's not legal, at least not for states to do. So. Governments can't do it. If you say, well, I'm a private individual, therefore I can claim it. I'm sure you're going to have that. That's gonna be very difficult to defend that. Not that not that there's any reason to defend it. Right now, it's totally not practical, but anyway. Um. Also, no one is allowed to create weapons of mass destruction and place them in space. This is a big one. And yeah, now it's talking about weapons of mass destruction, so it's a very specific definition of the type of weaponry. Right. We're talking about a weapon capable of killing or otherwise injuring a huge number of folks at one go. Right, Yeah, a catastrophic effect every time the weapons used. So any weapon that does not fall under that category is not you know, it's not prohibited under these terms, and that has led to discussions of other treaties that would end up filling in some of those gaps. We will get to that in a second. Other rules include the fact that celestial bodies can only be used for peaceful purposes. That one's so interesting to me because you know what what that also encompasses, right. That means not weaponizing an asteroid, for instance, or altering the path of something else in space so that it collides with the planet. You can't use an asteroid as a projectile weapon and aim it on at like you know, Russia, um, which you wouldn't want to do anyway. I mean, like you don't want to cause a planet wide extinction level event, which is you know, like I mean, this is the kind of stuff that that has killed off entire you know, populations, entire you know, species, collections of species, your past. So yeah, you cannot use celestial bodies for any you know, uh, for any non peaceful purpose. Governments are responsible for space activities, even if the activities themselves are carried out by private organizations, which is very forward thinking since only state run operations had existed at that point. So in other words, if space X does something really dumb mountain space, the United States government would be held accountable for that, because that's uh, the presumably if they launched from the United States. I mean, it is a US centered organization, So even though it's not run by the government, the US would still be held responsible because they would essentially be allowing for it to happen. Be aware of space billionaires, because there you could get a lot of trouble with your home country. Yeah, yeah, your home country would get into a lot of trouble and stuff trickles down, right, So we should say host country. That's what I mean, that's true, that's true. That's probably the best way of putting it. Uh So if your stuff, meaning a state's property, falls out of the sky and damages someone, you are at faults. So, in other words, if the US puts up a satellite and the satellites orbit decays, and the decaying orbit means the satellite starts to fall into the Earth and does not burn up entirely, and it ends up colliding with like a public library over in Eastern Europe leaking dangerous chemicals, that US the US is at fault. There's because they were the ones who put it up there, and they did not find a way to um to bring it down safely. Usually things like that are done in a controlled way, where it's purposefully brought down so that anything that would make it through the atmosphere. The rare instance that that actually does happen with land in an ocean, for example. UM, but you know, it's always possible that you could have a situation where you know, the the spacecraft is not responding to your commands to have it, you know, de orbit in a in a controlled way. And that's kind of what this is covering. Also, states are not supposed to contaminate celestial bodies, no littering I'm talking to But look, take on any photographs, leave only footprints, right, and maybe a flag and maybe a couple of lunar landers. I mean, come on, the moon is pretty big. That's not really littering, right. Uh So, over time, obviously this has been kind of updated. But there have been other post treaties that would end up beefing up these rules and defining them further, but they have had limited success in adoption. And there are a lot of reasons for that. So a proposed treaty in fourteen would have placed more limitations on weapons and space, at least in theory. The draft treaty is formally called the Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects. So it's supposed to limit states abilities to do things like launch missile attacks on satellites or or put weaponization into space, even if it's not mass destruction. And there were two countries that submitted this treaty to the United Nations, and it was Russia and China. Now, the United States opposed the treaty and said it would not sign such a treaty. And you might think well, why would the US say, no, I'm not going to sign an treaty that doesn't allow us to weaponize space. Does that mean the US is very much interested in sending up tons of weapons into space. Yeah, that that part is hard to answer, But I can tell you what the official answers have been, which is that China and this is there. I am paraphrasing, but this is their perspective, not necessarily my own. China and Russia don't play fair. That's that's what they're That's what essentially the message has been, is that that this treaty is something that if the United States signed it, because the US are the good guys. Remember this is a narrative. They're saying that the US are the good guys. The US would abide by this treaty, but Russia and China their tricks, ee, my precious, and they would totally ignore the treaty and say, look at the dumb Americans. They're totally abiding by these rules we've set, whereas we're actually going to send up as many weapons into space as we can, and we're going to end up getting dominance. It will be an arms race in space that we will have a leg up on because we're not paying attention to the treaty. It's difficult because there it goes back to this idea of verification, right, and that is such a tricky, nearly impossible thing when you're talking about state secrets like this. How do you how do you verify that no one is up to anything shady? Right? Yeah? That was in fact that that was actually the way the us UH representatives worded it. They said, well, and other people have essentially said more or less what I said, just a nicer language, but the the specific line was that this treaty as it stands is impossible to verify, meaning that you cannot there's no there's no regulatory agency that could monitor states and make certain that no one was actually doing what the treaty said. So, in other words, they said that you can't enforce the treaty because you cannot be certain that people are abide by it, and so it ends up being a meaningless treaty. In the first place. It doesn't work because there's no means to monitor and therefore enforce it. So if there's no way to do that, then the treaty might as well not even exist, because what you are doing is creating a pressure on countries that want to follow it in good faith, while other countries may not share that and they'll just they'll violate it anyway, and there's no way to tell that they're violating it, because again there's no way to monitor it and verify it. So, um, I I totally get their point, Like, I don't disagree with that, And some might say, well, there's also ulterior motives that could be in play. Let's say that the United States wants to be able to have the option to send weapons, even if they're not weapons of mass destruction up into space. Send signing such a treaty would say that they would not do that, and maybe they want the option to remain open. It may be that they're even specific plans in place that we're not privy to and obviously would not be privy to. I'd like to think that that's not the case. But at the same time, I'd also like to think the government's not looking at all my emails, and that unfortunately has proven to be false. So yeah, it's always weird when an intern at the n s a response to when your emails, Yeah, yeah, like you send any Like I'm emailing you and the n s A interns, like, oh, Ben's that lunch right now, He's not going to respond until like four, Gary, I appreciate it, but school that stops kind of creepy, like say hi to your dad for me. Uh yeah, that that would be weird, but also just just annoying here. Also, we know that the ability to interfere with another state satellites, it could be so crucial and so pivotal that it's going to happen. Somebody's going to try to do that. As as you've said before, you said in our notes here, this space war stuff is not some distant sci fi thing. It's real, and it's kind of we're kind of in the middle of the story. Yeah, the idea that you know, China bringing down a satellite by firing a missile at it purely because that was the most effective means of taking down the satellite does not ring true, right. It definitely seems more like a demonstration of here's what we are capable of doing. So if we ever enter an actual like conflict, whether it's an official war or not, we have the capability of bringing down your satellites. And so yeah, I mean we're talking about satellites that could provide communication, GPS data, all this kind of stuff. I mean, obviously, the further out the satellite is, the harder it is for you to create a system that's going to be capable of bringing it down. You're gonna be able to hit the ones that are more in lower thorbit than the ones that are further out. I mean, you're talking about a target that's further out is and it's moving at an incredible speed like that. I'm not saying it's impossible. It certainly isn't. It's just a lot harder, But at any rate, the capability has been demonstrated. And uh, that is a very vulnerable and valid target if you are if you're very serious about warfare, right, yeah, absolutely, And this this brings us all back around to the subject we looked at today, which is the X thirty seven. And I gotta tell you, man, I've been holding onto this reference to the whole show, so okay, I've just gotta let it go. There's something about an unmanned vehicle in the darkness of space, just sort of orbiting in the silence that is so very event horizon to me. What's gonna come back the next time at Lands John a little hitchhiker. Yeah, I found your thing. Man, I don't know what happened to the drive out. He was gone when I got on. I promise you thanks. I've been working on that character for a while. Um. Yeah. And it's interesting because you know, this is not necessarily the end of the the space plane discussion. There's been some other talks about what the space plane my do, even in in light of the counter argument saying that perhaps it's not the most um efficient or useful means of getting things into space. The Air Force itself had announced back in twenty eleven that it would develop a new spacecraft based on the same design that would be even larger than the X three seven be Remember the thirty seven is larger than the X forty. This one would be bigger than the X thirty seven, and the numbers ranged between like a hundred sixty and so bigger by almost a factor of two when you get to the higher ends. And uh, this one would potentially have a pressurized compartment, which means that could carry stuff what lives. Yeah, and and the it has been suggested, could carry a group of astronauts up to six into space. They don't have to pilot the thing because it could still have autonomous control, although they said it would also have manual control, so uh, astronauts could presumably I assume astronauts. Maybe they mean manual control from the ground, which is also a possibility, but that, um, the astronauts would not necessarily have to pilot this thing. It would be the X thirty seven C. Yeah, no idea if that project is still happening or not, like it was announced inn But again, when you're talking about secret space planes, right, you don't get a lot of updates until they launch one and then it lands and then people are like, oh, so I guess that's still a thing. So we don't know. I mean we I don't know. People know. It's not me, Yeah, I'm not I'm not privy to such information. But it could be that we see a development and who knows, maybe there will be demonstrable uses for space plane technology that uh end up being uh, you know, the best option, and that the objection saying that, hey, you have other means of getting stuff into space that end up being less complicated than this methodology. Maybe that will end up being mood. It's kind of hard to say right now, because obviously if you were to an astronauts up you're probably not doing one of those crazy the body. It would be very very tough on the on the human body. And I can't imagine you could carry enough oxygen, water, food, like, yeah, all the stuff, all the stuff that's necessary to keep people alive. I don't think you could carry all of that aboard a space plane that's designed to be up there for six hundred days. That's just not going to happen. So even if you were to say, well, we want to find out what happens to best not when they're in a spacecraft for two years, and uh, whether or not they come back as the Fantastic Four. I mean, you know, it's worth a shot. But but but one thing we have learned about space radiation is it does not work the way that Marvel Comics may have feeled you as a child. No, it can. It can really mess you up big time. And uh, you know, you're talking about particles that move with a ton of energy that have the capacity to do really like cellular level damage that can end up causing huge issues. Yeah, like irreparable damage. But let's let's go big, because despite these problems right despite the secrecy, and I know it's a wellyon and spooky and stuff. I'm so excited because this gets us one one tiny step closer to one of the one of the big dreams I've had, uh since we started working together, which is the podcast on the Moon. I mean, if they can just get us to the moon, Jonathan, we could do the rest might be uh might be a little quiet up there. I don't know how we're going to talk into the microphones. The way of the set up. We'll just go it's a sound studio. Come on, We'll just so just move the whole studio to the that makes more sense. I was just thinking of the table on the mics, also about how long the cords would have to be, and that anything we asked nol we'd have to wait. Yeah, there'll be there'll be a Yeah, there'd be a noticeable delay. Um. But I'm still in favor of it personally because I think I think that could really position us in a way that other podcasts just haven't thought right to take advantage of that. I mean, it's kind of amazing to me that hasn't avenue. Honestly, don't ideas all right. So anyway, this has been a lot of fun to talk about the you know, even though obviously what we don't know as members of the general public far outweighs what we do know. But it's also fun just to kind of explore the psychology of not just like conspiracy theories in the sense of well, and since we don't have information, we have to fill that vacuum, but also just the idea of what what could be the motives for pursuing this. I mean, obviously we're talking about something that costs a huge amount of money. Maybe ultimately it's just a test of autonomous technology and a new uh a new form like a new new a new environment, and that that ultimately could become really important, but in a totally different implementation. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff from twenty fifteen. I'll have to do an update on this one, obviously, but if you have suggestions for other topics that I should tackle, whether it's a company, technology, a trend in tech, anything like that, reach out to me on Twitter to handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W I talk to you again really soon. Y. 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