While there were some military applications to the space shuttle, it rather emphatically was not some sort of covert space bomber. It's ability to glide and boost itself back into orbit is very limited as it can't store a ton of propellant. While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose? It rather plainly has a thermal protection system on the bottom, and nothing usable as a bomb bay.
The whole idea is just preposterous.
The military applications of the shuttle were the ability to launch and capture satellites, as well as to potentially act as a reconnaissance platform. The X-37B largely continues those same missions.
The US military's idea of military capability of the shuttle was to covertly launch a spy satellite from California going south, release it over the pole and land without completing a full orbit. This would, hypothetically, evade Soviet radar. Because the Earth rotates under the shuttle while this happens, the shuttle comes over far away from the launch site (and from the runway), and so it needed the large cross range ability (1100 miles) and this required the wings, etc.
AFAIK, the Soviets said they booby-trapped their military satellites so retrieving them from orbit would be hard.
Shooting at satellites from the shuttle is weird - a first strike requires shooting down many satellites, so you would need your weapons platform in many orbits at once. Just shoot from the ground or use something like the ASM-135 ASAT.
>The IPM studies were conducted under the leadership of Yuriy Sikharulidze and Dmitriy Okhotsimskiy, two of its leading scientists.
>The IPM studies focused on the Shuttle’s possible use as a bomber, more particularly its capability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. Efraim Akin, one of the institute’s scientists, later recalled:
>“When the US Shuttle was announced we started investigating the logic of that approach. Very early our calculations showed that the cost figures being used by NASA were unrealistic. It would be better to use a series of expendable launch vehicles. Then, when we learned of the decision to build a Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg for military purposes, we noted that the trajectories from Vandenberg allowed an overflight of the main centers of the USSR on the first orbit. So our hypothesis was that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicion and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission. When we analysed the trajectories from Vandenberg we saw that it was possible for any military payload to re-enter from orbit in three and a half minutes to the main centers of the USSR, a much shorter time than [a sub-marine-launched ballistic missile] could make possible (ten minutes from off the coast). You might feel that this is ridiculous but you must understand how our leadership, provided with that information, would react. Scientists have a different psychology than the military. The military, very sensitive to the variety of possible means of delivering the first strike, suspecting that a first-strike capability might be the Vandenberg Shuttle’s objective, and knowing that a first strike would be decisive in a war, responded predictably” [14].
USSR military planners had a plan to very intentionally design Alfa and Papa class submarines with very bizarre specs, and uncertain strategic role with an intent to set American strategic planners on a wrong path.
They were intentionally let to sail close to population centres, with a lot of subassemblies given to civilian manufacturers to encourage leaks.
Amazingly, 30 years later we got to know that the plan actually worked for them. From what is known now, news of Alfa's existence truly did set the military, CIA, and the executive branch into a contention in late seventies.
Are they? They said:
>> developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle
"what they saw" being the important part. Everything that follows is a seemingly legit interpretation of what the Shuttle can do, if you (reasonably) assume the U.S. wasn't fully disclosing all capabilities and purposes.
Even if they were wrong about the capabilities of the shuttle (I'm in no place to say) that doesn't mean that the friend was at all inaccurate in what they reported.
With a little imagination? Shuttle positions rocket in orbit like a satellite and then ignites engine? Shuttle abandons its usual "slightly nose up posture" in preference for a nose-on-target posture; turning into a nuclear armed ICBM toting kamikaze.
Space is surprisingly good at punishing 'imagination'. The nose up posture is related to the aerodynamics of reentry. You can't blow through the atmosphere at Mach 25 dead on and have anything but a scorched hulk left afterwards. Those thermal tiles, and that particular reentry profile are required to allow the atmosphere to safely absorb the kinetic energy of a re-entering craft, while keeping the entire thing safe from becoming part of the exotic and exciting chemistry such a process involves and giving some level of control over the down range trajectory through adjusting the lift vector. That lift vector was engineered to be workable in the hypersonic regime, but once you got to subsonic, it was a bit like flying a brick as I recall.
Could a nuclear payload be lifted by the shuttle? Yes. Would the size of the resulting payload make it as effective as a rocket launched warhead? Not so much.
The Space Shuttle was an interesting effort in engineering extremes that only really got off the ground I think due to the unique situation of the time. The Apollo missions were a success, but Vietnam, and a souring disposition toward manned space programs really put the kebash on what the Shuttle was just meant to be one piece of.
I wish I could remember the exact name of NASA's solar system colonization plan back then, but it was truly a glorious thing to read. Politically impossible. Probably economically ruinous given the wars we'd get entangled in over the next 50 years. But a beautiful dream at least.
Interestingly enough, I think it was really a necessary fumble to make in order to realize that reusable rocketry was the more economic launch paradigm to go for.
And that was in 1988!
It just happened that it flew real missions with astronauts on board, so it wasn't used.
Some time after the second wreak, NASA added the ability to run a cable for that. The idea was that a rescue mission would be launched, and the cable would be installed in the abandoned shuttle to allow a landing attempt.
BTW, the first mission was flown manually. I don't think the landing software could have been written without data from the first flight.
Nitpick, but the first flight of the X-37B program already demonstrated this back in 2010.
It's very cool that the Buran completed a single 3 hour trip unmanned, it went down as the first unmanned space flight that not many people know about. There's nothing much more to say other than that, which is disappointing.
The X-37B and its predecessors have been flying for nearly 10 years. I've been following these programs for apparently a lot longer than I realized. The take away with this program is they are launching these missions without much fan fair and the only brag is the incredible amount of time these missions are active in space. Literally every mission I've seen has the same information being released which is a picture of the vehicle touched down and the time spent in orbit... that's it. As with the last mission, this will be forgotten, another will go up to space and in a couple years we will get another press release.
Considering the huge amount of effort to launch one, the short duration a shuttle can remain on station and the limited number of them we could have ever built and put in orbit, what would be the point? Let's assume for a moment we (well...US leadership) lost our collective minds and decided that we wanted to swoop down and nuke Red Square for the LoLs. Hell, let's assume we had every Space Shuttle up and each one swooped down and toasted a city. It's nowhere near the capability to prevent the next action being the retaliatory strike which would incinerate the US. 10x the number of Space Shuttles wouldn't prevent that. And we'd have to plan months in advance for this 'first strike', and prevent anyone from knowing we were loading nukes in the shuttles.
Maybe your 'Trusted close relative' really believed all that stuff. Crazier crap was taken as truth in the Cold War. But in reality, that's not what the Space Shuttle was for.
The thing with a shuttle is it's easier to stealthily violate the treaty than launching a bunch of suspiciously poorly built cylindrical tubes and calling them defunct space telescopes.
Not the cheapest way to do it by any means, but I suppose masquerading as a harmless civilian space plane gives you some degree of plausible deniability, since it would be violating a few treaties to have such a system.
For more info on this, Mustard's documentary on the Buran: https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175
According to him, the USSR military developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle. Unlike the ICBMs, the shuttles decoupled the event of the payload launch from event of the payload delivery, i.e. bombing. The early shuttle missions demonstrated the ability to "dive" to an orbit from which they could deliver a nuke directly to Red Square and then return back to the low Earth orbit. Shuttles could also perform attack missions against targets in the Earth's orbit, approaching and destroying USSR's satellites as a prelude to a nuclear war.
Buran was designed to perform both of these missions. Unlike the shuttles, Buran could perform them while 100% unmanned. Until this X-37B flight, US did not have a public demonstration of a technology matching what USSR had with Buran in the late 1980s. Given the "hot peace" nature of the contemporary relationship between US and Russia, it is not surprising that US would want to demonstrate that it went above and beyond what USSR accomplished in space warfare. X-37B does that.
If you are wondering about the 2-year mission for X-37B: when Buran launched in 1980s US immediately started speculating that the "unmanned" capability of Buran was just another lie by USSR. Can't say the same about about X-37B considering that it was in orbit for twice the time of the longest manned mission.