US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward orbital record

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by jdironman on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @06:47PM (#31914074)

This is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by jimmydorry on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @08:23PM (#31914909)

LibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by jdironman on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @09:18PM (#31915324)

To be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by unionpivo on Wednesday June 29, 2022 @02:22AM (#31917071)

Depending on what you do.

We need to process, millions of documents a day, and headless libre-office is a lot faster (an order of magnitude) than driving word. So far no other library does what we need (I mostly just administers the cluster that does this).

I know that's not what people mean when they compare "speed" of office suits, but some thing's libre office does are a lot faster than MS office.

Another place where libre office is better than excel is opening and manipulating huge CSV files, with millions of rows.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by oceanplexian on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @09:05PM (#31915234)

I mean at this point we’re crossing over into conspiracy theory territory, but I think the most realistic scenarios are where we are doing things that are on the edge of what’s possible.

For example we probably don’t have anti-gravity, or anything that’s a huge leap from our understanding of the laws of physics. But the military may have single-stage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft, and are keeping it close to their chest, while putting on a “show” with far less capable demonstrators as a fake out.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by jdironman on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @09:16PM (#31915314)

Wasn't trying to cross in to conspiracy territory at all, really wanted to gauge what others knew about resources determining where we are as a whole I guess. Well, as far as public domain knowledge goes. I don't believe the military / government has anything outside of what "known" physics allows of course. But at the same time we are always learning new things about how things interact and can be used.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by nradov on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @09:54PM (#31915553)

Secret hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft are unlikely. Those put out so much energy that they're just impossible to hide.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by LargoLasskhyfv on Thursday June 30, 2022 @05:45AM (#31930408)

Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft)#U.S._sightin...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by nradov on Thursday June 30, 2022 @12:18PM (#31934753)

I've heard of it but I doubt it actually exists. There's no real mission for it that can't be done better by satellites or low-observable drones.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by FredPret on Wednesday June 29, 2022 @01:13AM (#31916705)

They kept a Mach 3 plane secret for a long time…

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by nradov on Wednesday June 29, 2022 @02:11AM (#31917014)

No they really didn't. The Soviets, North Vietnamese, and North Koreans all detected and tracked the A-12 / SR-71 planes during operational missions. They didn't know all the details, but the existence wasn't at all a secret to our adversaries.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward o... by FredPret on Wednesday June 29, 2022 @09:03AM (#31919535)

It was secret from the public. Which means there are certainly military projects right now that are also secret from us, even if Russia knows

[ Parent | on HN ]