This actually sounds plausible. I'm not sure how well the service module survives the reentry (hopefully not at all) But I bet alot of nations will start asking questions if they dont provide disclosure beforehand.

Plausibly, there is no real monitoring of co-orbiting bodies in space. If there aren't cameras pointed at every location of the sattelite (why would their be?) you could place a small kill device nearby to avoid the need to shoot down the satellite in the future.

Satellites are flimsy things, all one would need to do is break the mirror/telecom array to stop satellite guided weapons.

Rather than blowing up satellites and causing debris, wouldn't you rather attach a thruster to move it out of orbit?

I highly recommend the second book of the saga.

>> Did we build this so we can nuke anybody on the planet at any time?

This was actually a concern with the space shuttle! I suppose it could be a concern for any spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit.

I’m not sure what value there’d be in dropping one or two nukes on an enemy. Any nuclear capable power would not be disabled by a few nukes going off, they’d know who dropped they nukes, and they could retaliate. If we had 10K nukes in orbit and could synchronize them to blanket a country & disable its nuclear response capability, maybe that would be worth something if the other side didn’t also fill space with nukes (which they would).

Watching https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station close up.

The lack of awareness of the Tiangong stations in the west is distinctly strange.

It's for deterring other countries from deploying a thing that can nuke anybody on the planet at any time. See also: Space Shuttle.

It's testing ability to on-command manipulate orbits in space with very low fuel, which is useful for anything we throw up in space.

The other less (directly at least[0]) world ending capability it might unlock is being able to non-destructively interfere with the satellites of other nations. I think they'd prefer to avoid creating huge debris clouds if they could. The X-37B seems like it has the ability to visit and interfere with multiple satellites in a single launch. By being able to drastically change it's orbit it can alter it's orbit to intercept a target satellite and do it's work before the satellite's owner can respond to have the satellites maneuver.

[0] I say less directly because some nations like Russia have doctrine that states they may respond with nuclear weapons to conventional attacks that degrade it's ability to use their nuclear weapons or detect launches so messing with their observation satellites could snowball. According to some reporting one of the big hold ups with the US and other countries authorizing Ukraine to use provided weapons to strike inside Russia is there are dual use facilities that Ukraine would love to strike but also serve as important parts of the Russian nuclear system (early warning radars in the south that monitor airspace over Ukraine and provide launch warnings from places like Turkey/the Mediterranean).

If they can miniaturize the re-entry vehicles enough to make them undetectable, or if they can leave them "parked" next to larger satellites so as to hide them, then having such hidden orbiting warheads would seem to allow for plausible deniability in small nuclear bombings. But since everyone would know only we have this capability, the deniability goes out the window. Also, re-entry vehicles get very hot and are visible, and their trajectories could get plotted, thus providing evidence of whodunit. Plus the x-37b can't possibly carry very many warheads and re-entry vehicles.

On the whole I think it's very unlikely that the x-37b is placing nukes in orbit.

Note that between the X-37B's small size, tiny numbers, and extremely limited ability to change its orbit, it is useless for "we can nuke anybody on the planet at any time" missions.

Is there any one or any time we can't already nuke with an ICBM? Not sure I really see what extra capability would be added by putting nukes on a space plane.

Officially its a platform for testing various technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#Speculation_regard...

What would be the benefit of this over an icbm? Is it lower latency that gives the target less time to intercept?

I wonder if it is used to detect nuclear bombs in orbit? That would explain the level of secrecy.

The US military already has the ability to nuke anybody at any time. There are a thousand other more plausible options, assuming you don’t believe the official explanation.

Note that the X37B has been flying since 2011 and is part of a larger program that has been ongoing at Boeing since the late 90s. It's likely that a lot of the hard work was accomplished before the MBAs at Boeing ruined the company to the extent that they have today.

The Starliner program is a painfully unprofitable fixed-price contract with NASA. Which is a relatively minor Boeing customer.

Vs. the X-37B program is likely to be a highly profitable cost-plus contract with the Pentagon. Which is a far bigger Boeing customer.

I'd figure that Boeing has kept its eyes on the bottom lines when assigning people and resources to the two programs.

Boeing hasn't really had to do much on the X-37B for ages and I suspect the company is quite silo'd (for good and bad reasons).

I imagine skunkworks is an entirely separate part of the company.

Not needing to be human-rated helps quite a bit (and increases the level of acceptable risk).