AMATEUR astronomers are enjoying a cat-and-mouse game with the US military in keeping track of its secret space plane, the X-37B.

The X-37B - amateur skywatchers are enjoying the cat-and-mouse game with the US military's "space weapon"

The X-37B was launched in April amid much publicity, but scant detail about its true use.

Built by Boeing’s Phantom Works division, the X-37B program was originally headed by NASA.

It was later turned over to the Pentagon’s research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.

Only a very select few in the US military know what it’s for, but observers on Earth believe they’re putting together the puzzle piece by piece.

Several sources claim quote arms control advocates who say it’s clearly the beginning of the “weaponisation of space”.

In May, avid skywatcher Ted Molczan studied the X-37B’s orbit from his home in Toronto and said its behaviour suggested it was testing sensors for a range of new spy satellites.

Since then, the X-37B been arguably the least-secret secret project on the planet, as fellow backyard astronomers joined in the scrutiny, aided by how-to video guides and apps such as the Simple Satellite Tracker.

That is, they did until July 29, when the shuttle disappeared, causing all kinds of consternation and conspiracy theories about its fate.

It took amateur skywatcher Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, who noticed that it failed to appear as scheduled above his base on August 14, another five days to find it.

When he did, he noticed it was some 30km higher and on a different trajectory, according to calculations from other colleagues in Rome and Oklahoma.

The X-37B’s new track takes it on a six-day orbit of the Earth, as opposed to its original four-day orbit.

Mr Molczan believes this may be another small piece to the puzzle about what role the shuttle may play in US military operations.

“This small change of orbit may have been a test of OTV-1′s manoeuvring system, or a requirement of whatever payload may be aboard, or both,” he said in a release paper about Roberts’ X-37B find.

The shuttle has been in orbit now for 124 days. It uses a solar array once in space for power, which theoretically will allow it to stay airborne for up to 270 days.

But the additional presence of large fuel tanks and a rocket motor allows it to change orbit, as evidenced by the latest sudden change of course.

According to the The Register,  this is a key component of its surveillance-related capabilities, along with the fact it can land in a much more versatile fashion than other shuttles.

Using its “cross-range” wings, it can duck off elsewhere once its entered the Earth’s atmosphere rather than follow its oribital track to a pre-specified landing pad.

This means the X-37B can get up and down from space in one orbit, as its wings allow it to compensate for the slight turn in the Earth and bend it back to its original launch pad.

The Register says that capability would make it difficult to track, as it would only pass over a region once.

Theoretically, it could drop a spy satellite on one run, then pick it up on the next without the satellite having ever been detected.

Other observers claim the X-37B can carry a payload roughly the size of a medium-sized truck bed, or enough to hold a spy satellite.

According to the Pentagon, a second X-37B is under construction, so expect the guessing game to continue for some time about what the US military is really up to in space.

Until now, all that remains known about the X-37B is that is it has at least one trick – the ability to hide from skywatchers for two weeks.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has some advice for the people of Earth – it’s time to get off.

“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” Hawking said to Big Think , a global forum that includes interviews with experts.

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

The physicist called humankind’s survival “a question of touch and go” and referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as one time people narrowly avoided extinction. He also referred to the 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons, including 7,770 still operational, scattered around the planet.

If that doesn’t drive us off, University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith said global warming may reach a point “where all of Earth’s water will simply evaporate.” He said life will disappear on Earth long before the 7.6 billion years some say the aging sun will expand and destroy Earth.

CNet news said that Hawking has concerns about how humans “are eating up finite resources” and has claimed man’s genetic code “carries selfish and aggressive instincts” that have helped humanity survive in the past.

Hawking suggests that if man can avoid disaster for the next two centuries “our species should be safe as we spread into space.”

According to the Daily Mail , Hawking warned earlier this year that humans should be cautious in trying to contact other alien life forms because there is no way to know if they will be friendly.

“If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue,” he said.

Vernos Branco, a Las Vegas Sun reader, suggested in a letter to the editor that it may not be that easy to escape. He wrote about how humans have continued to move from one place to another as they settle in an area, use all the resources, pollute the area and move on.

He said now that man has technology that can destroy the environment faster, we are running out of space to live in.

“The planet will be fine and heal; it is man who will vanish,” he wrote. “… If we develop the technology for space travel, we will do the same to that environment, until we learn not to. Man will become extinct due to his greed.”

It may not be that easy anyway to just hop to another planet. University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese told Big Think that the closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. That’s 4.2 light years away, which means man could reach the star in 4.2 years – if man could travel at the speed of light.

At this point man travels at about ten thousandth of light speed, which would make that journey about 50,000 years.

There is also the cosmic radiation danger unless man creates a warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology.

If man can develop the technology needed, she said, man could travel into the future.

Interplanetary adventurers must contend with deadly solar radiation – but the moon’s magnetic memories may hold the key to safe space flight

BORED on their six-month journey to Mars? Not a bit of it. Whenever the astronauts look out of the window, they find themselves mesmerised by the glowing, shimmering sphere of plasma that surrounds their spacecraft. Hard to believe that the modest electromagnet at the heart of their ship can produce something so beautiful.

Not that the magnet’s raison d’être is aesthetic, of course. Its main function is to keep the astronauts from a slow, horrible death by radiation sickness.

NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars – and understandably so. Six months’ exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, has hit upon a phenomenon that might just solve the problem. They have shown that a magnet no wider than your thumb can deflect a stream of charged particles like those in the solar wind. It gives new life to an old idea about shielding spacecraft, and might just usher in a new era of space travel. “Space radiation has been called the only showstopper for the crewed exploration of space,” says Ruth Bamford of RAL. “Our experiment demonstrates there may be a way the show can go on.”

The inspiration behind the idea is as old as the Earth. Life thrives on our planet because its core is a churning cauldron of molten iron. The result is our magnetosphere, the magnetic field that wraps itself around the Earth and deflects the solar wind. Without this shield some of the particles spat out by the sun would charge through our bodies, shattering the machinery of our cells. In the absence of our protective magnetic field, complex life on Earth would probably be unsustainable. … Continue Reading

Nasa has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon — effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight program despite a congressional ban on its doing so.

Legislators have accused President Obama’s Administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill.

Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America’s greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was “over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation”, but he has met opposition in Congress, which has yet to approve his plan.The head of Nasa, Major-General Charlie Bolden — an Obama appointee — has now written to aerospace contractors telling them to cut back immediately on Constellation-related projects costing almost $1 billion, to comply with regulations requiring them to budget for possible contract termination costs.

The move has been branded a “disingenuous legal maneuver” and referred to Nasa’s inspector-general for investigation. “It’s bordering on arrogance by the Administration to boldly and brazenly go forward with this approach. It shows a blatant disregard for Congress,” said the Republican Congressman Rob Bishop, of Utah, whose constituency stands to lose thousands of jobs. Two weeks ago the Senate passed legislation that compels Nasa to continue work on Constellation unless Congress directs otherwise. That legislation is due to be signed into law by Mr Obama this month while Congress continues its deliberations over his proposal to cancel the current space space progam.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican and member of the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said: “The timing of Nasa’s decision to push forward with these actions now, before this becomes law, is highly questionable.” Nasa is “willfully subverting the repeatedly expressed will of Congress”, she added.

Scott Pace, a former Nasa executive and now the Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: “The effect will be to stop work on Constellation and lay off or transfer people to other jobs. If Congress then says it wants to continue going ahead with Constellation, those people will be difficult to re-hire. It’s already a difficult situation, but this will introduce more instability.”

Constellation was born in 2004 from President George W. Bush’s vision for returning Americans to the Moon by 2020 and using it as a base to build the knowledge and technologies for a manned mission to Mars by 2030. Since then, more than $9 billion has been spent on designing and building the necessary space vehicles.

An independent review panel appointed by Mr Obama last year concluded, however, that without an extra $3 billion a year Constellation was on an “unsustainable trajectory”. In his proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, unveiled in February, Mr Obama made it clear that there would be no extra money for its continuation. The proposal has yet to clear Congress.

Distinguished space veterans, including the first and last men to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, have complained that the abandonment of Constellation will set America’s space capabilities on a “downhill slide to mediocrity”. They say that, while Mr Obama has outlined a vision for Nasa that includes sending people to Mars at some point, it lacks a concise plan for developing the rockets and spacecraft to get them there.

“The Administration has no planning, no program and no idea — they’d just have these things happen mysteriously,” Mr Bishop said. “Rockets aren’t something that Wal-Mart puts on its shelves. You have to have a plan for how you get from A to B, and Obama has just said we’ll work it as we go along and maybe some day we’ll end up on an asteroid or the Moon or somewhere. The bottom line is, those ‘maybes’ will never happen.”

Private rocket developers, to whom Mr Obama proposes outsourcing the task of carrying crews and cargo to the International Space Station after the shuttle fleet retires, are making advances. Ten days ago Elon Musk, a spaceflight entrepreneur — and founder of the online payment system PayPal — launched a near-flawless test flight of his Falcon 9 rocket, which is designed to take payloads and ultimately human beings into space.

Triumphs and tragedies

Oct 4, 1958 A year after the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the US Congress passes “an Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes”. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is born

Feb 20, 1962 John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth. The Russian Yuri Gagarin had made the first space flight a year earlier. Glenn returns to public adulation and later becomes a US senator

May 25, 1961 President Kennedy announces that he is setting the United States the goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the decade

January 27, 1967 Three US astronauts die in a fire during a simulated take-off, the first to die in the space programme

July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong takes man’s first step on the Moon and plants an American flag, a significant propaganda coup. The US is still the only nation to have put a man on the Moon

April 13, 1970 An oxygen tank explodes aboard Apollo 13. It becomes clear that there is not enough air in the capsule to keep the three astronauts alive. They manage to board the self-contained Lunar Module and land safely in the Pacific

April 12, 1981 The US launches Columbia, its first space shuttle and the first spacecraft to land on a runway instead of in the sea

Jan 28, 1986 The Challenger space shuttle explodes 73 seconds after take-off, killing its crew

April 24, 1990 The Hubble Space Telescope comes online after being carried into space by a US shuttle

Feb 1, 2003 Columbia breaks up over Texas returning from its 28th mission, killing the crew

Feb 1, 2010 President Obama announces plans to cancel additional funding of the programme to return US astronauts to the Moon by 2020

An artist's impression of Japan's space probe Hayabusa and an asteroid, called Itokawa

Scientists are anxiously awaiting the return of Hayabusa – Japanese for “Falcon” – in the hope that the probe has successfully gathered tiny fragments of space rock, which could provide more clues about the origin of the solar system.