space community initiated a portfolio of ambitious new programs. ![]() "Greater experience with space capabilities led to increased demand for them, which led to yet more experience with them." Responding to growing demand, the U.S. "This created a feedback loop," Eric Sterner, an analyst with The Marshall Institute in Virginia, tells Danger Room. warfare that didn't somehow involve space. Orbital cameras tracked insurgents and terrorists. Jet fighters and bombers dropped GPS-guided bombs. Air Force controllers accompanying the ground troops used satellite communications to guide in air strikes. Soldiers used satellites' positioning signals to navigate across unfamiliar terrain. The wars in Iraq in 1991 and the Balkans in the mid-to-late '90s - not to mention the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the second Iraq war between 20 - drove home the importance of spy satellites, space-based radio relays, GPS and other orbital systems. The result was a period of unchallenged orbital dominance for the U.S., which year after year poured no less than $50 billion annually into space gear and operations. Meanwhile, China's rise as a world power, and space rival to America, had yet to begin. >'The technologically ambitious programs started to collapse.' At its low point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Moscow had access to just 80 satellites. The Russian orbital arsenal declined as old satellites failed and burned up and fewer new satellites took their place. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia's subsequent economic woes starved the former Soviet space fleet of funding. Just ask the Air Force, with its $400 million F-22 fighters replacing F-15s that cost a quarter as much. Still, it's almost unheard of for a major government technology to be cheaper than its immediate predecessor. Both craft were designed to carry scientific and military payloads into orbit: Atlantis, with its school-bus-size cargo bay, emphasized carrying capacity the X-37, optimized for endurance, has a bay the size of a pickup truck's bed. There are lots of things Atlantis could do that the X-37 cannot and vice versa, complicating any direct comparison. ![]() ![]() >'Small' is the new watch-word for America's orbital force. (All cost figures in this story are in today's dollars.) The Boeing-built X-37 mini-shuttle set the taxpayers back an estimated $1 billion for development and construction and just $180 million to send into space. Atlantis cost more than $10 billion to design and build and around $500 million to launch on that one mission. The X-37's small size - barely a quarter the length of Atlantis - made a sighting even less likely.Įqually striking was the difference in cost between Atlantis and its tiny robotic compatriot. The X-37 was around 80 miles higher than the Shuttle, so it's doubtful the four-person Atlantis crew, conducting the 135th and last Shuttle mission, ever saw the robotic craft. For two weeks in July, NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis roughly shared its Earth orbit with the Air Force's X-37B, a 29-foot-long, highly maneuverable robotic spacecraft that entered service in early 2010 and has been cloaked in secrecy ever since. The past and future of America's space arsenal intersected, briefly, in the summer of 2011.
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