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But if you were properly equipped, you would see beams rising up to meet with various satellites, some going to the moon, some even further - the beams which meet satellites are probably not from an observatory.
Properly aided, your eyes would see something like this:
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/ffb54d5692a2.jpg[/atsimg]
abovetopsecret
The origins and purpose of this patch remain obscure. The green figure holding the sword (or dagger) wears the cloak-and dagger garb often associated with black projects. There is a star in the northern hemisphere under the letter "S" and another red star in the American Southwest. The red star might refer to an operating location, but the patch provides no real clue as to where it might be. The Southwest is home to numerous classified units. Air Force Space Command in Colorado; Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico; White Sands, New Mexico; Groom Lake, Nevada; and the Tonopah Test Range are all possibilities, and there are many more.
The words "A Lifetime of Silence" no doubt refer to the fact that members of this unit or project cannot speak about what they do. The image of a "Green Door" is also obscure. Military intelligence officers have a tradition of working behind locked green vault doors, but the symbol is widely used in popular culture to designate an inaccessible place.
In Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman's 1917 novel The Green Door, a young girl named Letitia longs to open a mysterious little green door in her house, but her aunt forbids it with the words "It is not best for you, my dear." The 1956 hit song "Green Door" is about a man who couldn't get into a party raging behind a green door.
The Alternate Space Control Center missions include operational direction of the entire global Space Surveillance Network for Commander-in-Chief Space (CINCSPACE). The Center also detects, tracks, identifies, and catalogs all manmade objects in space and provides ephemerides on these objects to about 1,000 customers; and monitors the space environment and informs owners and operators of U.S. and allied space systems of potential threat to their assets by continuous liaison with the systems' operations centers.
The tether is about four kilometers long, and when fitted with a conductive wire and an electron gun, the satellite can move up or down in orbit. This is especially valuable to dead satellites, he said.
Wilhelm said that if a dead satellite needed to be moved out of orbit, it simply could deploy a tether and something as small as a two pound weight. After completing the electrical circuit, the space junk can be moved out of orbit.
According to NASA, the tether system "has the potential to provide a near-propellantless propulsive capability to upper stages." Using the earths magnetic field, the charged particles in the tether can move the satellite.
"It's cheaper and simpler," Wilhelm said. "A satellite could be totally dead and could still do it."
Momentum-exchange tethers (nonconductive tethers representing passive propulsion). They allow momentum to be transferred between objects in space, such as two spacecraft (tethers may redistribute momentum of a system from one body to another, but overall momentum is always conserved). The principle is based on the gravity gradient force.
Two objects, separated by a distance but tied together by a tether, are "pulled" apart by the gravity gradient force [this causes vertical (radial) alignment between the two objects]. Due to irregularities in the central body's gravitational field, the nearly radially aligned tether system actually librates, or oscillates, in a pendulum-like motion, about the system's center of mass. This swinging motion may be used to raise or lower the orbit of a tandem system without using any propellant.
-directory.eoportal.org...
Originally posted by Chovy
Nice job zorgon. Maybe some of those triangles people
see in the sky are part of the navy space command.
Originally posted by QBSneak000
Probably not related but....I used to wonder why on some shuttle missions there have been former Navy Seals members..... odd to me because I assumed that it was either Air Force pilots, teachers or Dr.'s of some kind but now I'm thinking these guys were part of the Navy Space Command maybe?
The first military Shuttle mission was launched from Pad 39A at 1500Z on 27 June 1982. Military space missions also accounted for part or all of 14 out of 37 Shuttle flights launched from the Cape between August 1984 and July 1992. While many details of those missions are not releasable, some features of Shuttle payload ground processing operations and range support requirements can be summarized for what might be termed a "typical" military space mission.
A military space shuttle would have been the military equivalent of NASA's space shuttle. Many experts believe that it is extremely unlikely that NASA, the United States Department of Defense or any other Federal agency could keep the existence of such a spacecraft secret, given the official knowledge that stated extensive technical support and launching establishment would be necessary to fly it.
It should however be noted that, early in the design phase of what eventually became the Space Shuttle, there were plans for the U.S. military to purchase some of the vehicles for its own purposes (mainly the servicing and crewing of proposed 'surveillance space stations'). The design requirements that thus emerged (in particular, the need for a longer-range glide capability, enabling the shuttle to land at specific U.S. Air Force bases), affected the eventual design of the vehicle, increasing its complexity. However, none of these 'Blue Shuttles' were ever built, and the U.S. military turned to increasingly sophisticated unmanned satellites as a more viable alternative.
Regular space shuttles have on occasion carried out missions for the military. It is noteworthy that NASA and the DoD agreed on delivering Discovery to Vandenberg AFB, first in May 1985 and then in September of that year. Discovery would have been dedicated for military and civilian flights from Vandenbergs SLC-6 launch complex. The schedule slipped until the Challenger Accident in January 1986. In the wake of Challenger, on December 26, 1989 the Space Shuttle Program at Vandenberg was terminated by the USAF.
Military Shuttle flights were conducted from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the last dedicated mission being STS-53 in late 1992, deploying a military SDS B-3 communication satellite. Some military payloads have been flown on regular civilian Shuttle missions afterwards.
The Soviet Buran space shuttle was designed with military applications in mind as well. One of the main reasons for its creation was to counter the perceived military advantage that the NASA space shuttle gave the USA. On the first launch of Buran's energia booster the military Polyus satellite was launched.
First mission dedicated to Department of Defense. U.S. Air Force Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster deployed and met mission objectives. This mission's accomplishments are classified due to the nature of the work done. The shuttle deployed a single satellite, 1985-010B (USA-8).
According to Aviation Week, STS-51-C launched a secret, Magnum ELINT (ELectronic INTtelligence) gathering satellite into geosynchronous orbit. An identical one was also launched by STS-33 and STS-38.
Also according to Aviation Week, the shuttle initially entered a 204 km x 519 km orbit at an inclination of 28.45 deg to the equator. It then executed three OMS (orbital maneuvering system) burns, the last on orbit #4. The first burn is to circularize the orbit at 519 km.
The satellite was deployed on the 7th orbit and then ignited its IUS rocket at the ascending node of the 8th orbit, to place it in a geo-synchronous transfer orbit.
The classified payload was deployed successfully and boosted into its operating orbit by an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster according to an Air Force announcement.
Originally posted by AKARoncowhat is the point of tether technology?