"The statement that this @usairforce X-37 flight deployed small satellites is alarming, since the US has not reported those deployments in its UN Registration Convention submissions. This would be the first time that either the USA or Russia has blatantly flouted the Convention."
I'm also alarmed by this. I wouldn't want Star Wars (neither Lucas's nor Reagan's) to become our future.
It may be that those deployments were replacing existing satellites. I'm sure other nations know when the vast majority of satellites were originally deployed, which gives them a rough estimate of what technology they might have. Being able to subvert this assumed knowledge by changing what the satellite is is quite possible more useful than launching a new one and having them both up. Even if what the space plane did was tracked so there's not likely to be any surprises, in-place upgrades might have their own uses.
If that's the case, and it's just replacing existing satellites, they're still tracked accurately under that convention. Not that the USAF would say either way unless pressed by national powers, as the ambiguity helps their mission. It also helps internet blow-hards that like to take relatively small amounts of information and construct narratives they can lambast. It's entirely possible the USAF deployed new satellites, or replaced some satellites, or did nothing like that and the messaging is posturing or disinformation.
If it was doing stuff with satellites, I'm actually more interested in how it got inventory to do so over a two year time span. Did it drop to lower altitudes to refuel and get more satellites to deploy/replace/upgrade?
> If it was doing stuff with satellites, I'm actually more interested in how it got inventory to do so over a two year time span. Did it drop to lower altitudes to refuel and get more satellites to deploy/replace/upgrade?
1) CubeSats can be very tiny, and perhaps it was only releasing babysats for part of the mission, or at long intervals
2) surely we'd have noticed if there was a space fuel depot,
2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
> 2) surely we'd have noticed if there was a space fuel depot
> 2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
Well, it's a space plane, so I was thinking of a more exotic variation of conventional air refueling, but upon further thought that seems very unlikely as if it was that easy to get from land to the refueling point and from the refueling point to space, we'd see that as the usual way to get to orbit instead of rockets (or rocket attached ships). I don't spend a lot of time thinking about rocketry and orbit unless in a discussion about it, so this wasn't immediately obvious to me initially.
That said, it's possible that some satellites actually contained extra fuel for future use when deployed, either in them or as a separate attached payload. In that case, there wouldn't be one large space fuel depot, but possibly many small ones.
I know that amateur astronomers have tracked the position and trajectory of X-37B so surely countries with advanced space programs (Russia, China) would be able to do this with ease? I think a rendezvous with a known satellite would be detectable.
Probably. At the same time, two years is a lot of time, and maybe enough to spend some time around many satellites such that it's hard to tell what's upgraded and what isn't. For hedging opponent behavior, it may be more beneficial to have 100 satellites with a 10% chance of being upgraded than 10 satellites with a 100% chance. And that's assuming that's even what it did, there's a lot of possibilities. When it comes to surveillance capabilities and maintenance/upgrades of that system, I would consider anything from an official source as an "unreliable narrator."
Casually announcing that your secret space plane has deployed even more secret mini-sats in unknown orbits is a pretty weird thing to do and it makes me wonder why they announced it.
I guess, but "spooky spaceplane that could be doing ~~anything~~" has its own value just by being spooky- what is it doing? Nobody knows! Except (maybe) now we do, and the next time we put it up in space there's going to be lots of questions about stealthy CubeSats.
So it makes me wonder why they chose to announce it rather than keeping it vague and spooky, which is a different kind of international posturing.
I think it's more about the principle of the thing.
It's definitely a bad thing to have satellites up there that no one knows are there (because of collision risks, etc.), and the US not registering theirs opens the door for other nations/entities to see what we're doing and choose to do the same, which would be bad for everyone.
I'm also alarmed by this. I wouldn't want Star Wars (neither Lucas's nor Reagan's) to become our future.