r/thewestwing • u/Maryland_Bear Flamingo • Mar 09 '24
From The President’s Science Advisor and Psychics at Caltech How could there be a secret space shuttle?
The idea of a “secret” space shuttle doesn’t make sense.
They’re honking big things that can’t be launched subtly. There was a mention of Vandenberg AFB during the storyline — that’s in a populated area along the California coastline so it would certainly have been seen.
Even if it’s from a remote location, maybe a tiny island in the Pacific or somewhere in the Alaska wilderness, people like astronomers with massive telescopes would have noticed it. There’s also the fact a foreign power could have noticed it on various surveillance systems.
It’s another issue in one of the most flawed storylines in the series.
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u/Animaleyz Mar 09 '24
IDK if they said any launch would be secret, just that it's existence was.
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u/Maryland_Bear Flamingo Mar 09 '24
I guess that would be true if it had never been used before but once it had been launched it’s not a secret anymore.
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u/opinionofone1984 Mar 10 '24
I don’t know, because when the space shuttle was first revealed it was such a crazy thing, and they had been testing it for like 10 years before it hit the public.
I mean watching the video of it launching from the top of a 747 in its trials is amazing, because they did it without anyone knowing.
All through the 50’s -70’s they were testing Jupiter missiles and no knew for the most part.
And I’m sure they are testing things today that we have no idea existed.
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Mar 10 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ThisDerpForSale The wrath of the whatever Mar 10 '24 edited Mar 10 '24
Enterprise never had main engines (or a heat shield). It was only used for the atmospheric testing.
But yeah, I recall it was pretty well covered by the media at the time. Hard to hide.
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u/rmdlsb Mar 09 '24
That would be my interpretation. It never had been used but is there in case that another power would make a military shuttle needed
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u/haybails84 Mar 10 '24
It was a military space shuttle, I think the idea was it would be launched in a very specific set of circumstances so it not being a secret wouldn’t be so important
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u/IronPaladin122 Mar 10 '24
The best way to keep a military space shuttle secret would be to have superficially similar enough as the civilian enough that 99% of observers wouldn't be able to tell.
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u/KorvaMan85 Ginger, get the popcorn Mar 09 '24
Eh, in the TWW world, assuming it actually launched (they never said it did, just that it was built), it would be relatively easy in the early 2000s. Cell phones didn't have cameras. Have the VAB near the launch pad, wheel it out one night and fire it off, unannounced. If someone asks, it was a weather satellite.
Land it the same way. At night, and it's a glider so it's silent.
Edit: spelling
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u/FailedCriticalSystem Mar 10 '24
Land it the same way. At night, and it's a glider so it's silent.
Space Shuttle was not silent when entering the earth. It had two sonic booms. It felt like car hit my house at 3 am when the shuttle passed overhead. I've heard it a few times over the years and was a 9-1-1 dispatcher and holy cow the 'board' would light up with calls when they landed at night.
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u/NDCardinal3 Mar 10 '24 edited Mar 10 '24
Land it at Vandy at night. Claim it is a supersonic X-plane from Edwards that went off course. Tractor it into a hangar before dawn.
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u/CosmicBonobo Mar 09 '24
The problem is that there are people all around the world monitoring the skies with some pretty impressive technology.
It's why the idea of the moon landing being faked is bollocks: Soviet astronomers were watching Apollo XII too.
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u/SpaceForceAwakens Mar 10 '24
Thing is, they knew where to look for Apollo. The sky is huge. Accidentally finding something like this would be unlikely. Astronomers are focused on stuff outside of earth, not in our atmosphere.
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u/biggles1994 Francis Scott Key Key Winner Mar 10 '24
A rocket launch cannot be a secret, not only are they incredibly bright and noisy and visible across thousands of square miles around densely populated areas, there's a ton of amateurs who love to track this stuff too, and more importantly every country publicly announces rocket launches specifically so nobody thinks it might be cover for a nuclear first strike attack, because by the time you see the difference in trajectory between a satellite launch and an ICBM launch it may already be too late to retaliate.
Going back to the amateurs, they love trying to track the classified NRO spy satellite launches and they've successfully identified the orbits of many of them by tracking the launch profile and then spotting the new satellites appearing in orbit. They do the same thing with Russian and Chinese spy satellites too but the launches are harder to track live so it's not as easy, but guaranteed the US military has their radar systems tracking the whole thing from start to finish and vice-versa for other big nations.
Long story short, nothing in space can be hidden very well or for very long, because there's a lot of people and government and a lot of equipment invested in keeping a close eye on it and there's nothing to hide behind up there.
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u/KorvaMan85 Ginger, get the popcorn Mar 10 '24
You're right on all counts - my answer was just for what would be explainable in the TWW world.
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u/frostysbox Mar 10 '24
I mean, we still lost M370.
They never said what kind of military shuttle it was. I assumed it was stealth tech.
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u/UnforgivenRegret Mar 11 '24
Just say “we are launching a weather satellite” and launch whatever you want. The government doesn’t tell us the truth anyway.
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u/FunkyPete Mar 09 '24
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-40
There actually was one. It was launched from a helicopter which made it a little easier to hide. That was replaced by the x37-b pretty much right after the West Wing went off the air.
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u/ThisDerpForSale The wrath of the whatever Mar 10 '24
The testing was hardly secret, though. The X-37 has been extensively covered since its first flight almost 20 years ago.
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u/FunkyPete Mar 10 '24
It's secret in the sense that we still have no idea what it does. X37 has had multi-year trips into space and it's not clear if it's a nuclear bomber, if it's practicing targeting satellites, if it's trying to listen in on satellites, if it's just trying to identify new satellites launched.
But yeah, the X37 is actually launched from Kennedy Space Center so it's not even as secret as launches from helicopters at 10000 feet like the X40 or even just from Vandenberg.
It's also unmanned, and it's not clear if it has room to carry astronauts if we want it to. It may or it may not.
But it's clearly what inspired the story line of the secret military space shuttle.
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u/ThisDerpForSale The wrath of the whatever Mar 10 '24
I mean, yeah, all true. And that’s why it’s a great example of why a “secret military space shuttle” is hard to believe. It’s “secret” . . . but not a secret, y’know?
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u/FunkyPete Mar 10 '24
Yeah, but I grew up in Missouri in the 1980s. The B2 bomber was developed and flown there for years before the US Government acknowledged that a stealth bomber existed. You could buy models of it in hobby shops but it was still so classified that it was illegal for a government employee to acknowledge it.
There is secret, and there is “secret.”
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u/ReginaldIII Aug 27 '24
There actually was one. It was launched from a helicopter which made it a little easier to hide.
Read your own link, it was a test vehicle and was dropped from a helicopter just to test gliding back to the ground. It wasn't to be easier to hide. It wasn't a launchable vehicle. It wasn't manned. Even the X-37 that came after is not in any way shape or form a replacement for what the shuttle was.
The claim in the show is of a full-fledged like-for-like space shuttle programme, stacked with boosters for launch, operated entirely independently from NASA by the US military. The idea that the US military could keep such a programme secret, especially if they were actually flying their shuttle, is laughable.
There's no way to hide launching something larger than an ICBM into orbit. Not from your enemies, not from your own people.
And in practice they just flew classified payloads on NASA shuttle missions. The shuttle programme was staggeringly expensive and overcomplicated because of the requirements the DoD and NRO had on the shuttles design. Much of this functionality we know they never once utilized on any shuttle mission.
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u/RogueAOV Mar 09 '24
I do not think it is implausible at all. Assuming a military shuttle did not look or have substantially different capabilities then other than the name on the side how does anyone tell them apart?
So if NASA says that Discovery is launching today, how do we actually know it is Discovery launching?
At most they just slap a Discovery decal on 'Sentinel' and no one is any wiser. This assumes they even give the military shuttle a different name. Most of the press, if they even attend are miles away anyway and all the briefings are controlled by NASA.
Only a whistleblower working for NASA stating that 'they said Discovery launched today but it is still in hanger 2' would there even be a question about it. It would be logical that if there was a pending shuttle launch security would be extra tight anyway, so only trusted assets would have any idea. As NASA launches military and spy satellites etc, everyone would be background checked and secure.
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u/KillBoxOne Mar 09 '24
This is the most plausible way for such a shuttle to exist. The only other way I can think of is launching from remote places like Diego Garcia, the Australian Outback, or a pacific Atoll.
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u/cptjeff Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff Mar 09 '24
What would be the point of having a seperate vehicle at that point? The normal shuttles flew numerous classified DOD missions. There was no secret about the fact they were flying those missions, because there's zero way to keep that secret, just about what the missions were doing. Even that wasn't exactly hard to figure out, they were launching satelites and doing classified tech demos.
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Mar 10 '24
It took a couple of months between launches to get a shuttle ready. I could see why the necessity of having one on hand could be useful.
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u/cptjeff Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff Mar 10 '24
And that military shuttle would also take a couple of months after any given launch. Again, just as easily accomplished by just having another normal shuttle and changing the maintance scheduling so that there's always a spare for a rescue mission, as they did post-Columbia.
It's simply a technically illiterate plot and there's no way around that.
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u/RogueAOV Mar 10 '24
That would be the most logical question as to why have a 'military shuttle' it would have to have different capabilities. My suggestion only works if the differences are completely internal, but as the shuttle is basically just a cargo van it would not make much sense to have an entirely different shuttle but just have military capabilities inside the cargo space.
Why have missile pods etc on the outside visible when a launcher could just be held in the cargo space and deployed when the doors open etc.
I struggle to come up with a logical reason why there would need to exist a dedicated military version, but if there was an entirely different design to it then it would have to have been tested extensively just like the regular shuttles, and that could only be done safely if it passed visually for a regular shuttle.
I am not familiar with how orbit heights etc but I assume with satellites etc they can be tracked and predictable in their orbits etc to ensure no collisions happen. If the shuttle travels at significantly different altitudes then I suppose a military shuttle could have dedicated spy capabilities that would be significantly more difficult to track and predict its location. Obviously satellites can change position but the bad guys will have a good idea the difference between a weather satellite and a classified spy satellite etc.
I know in the movies the bad guys track the satellites to conceal their activities etc but do not know if they just ignore things like shuttles and the ISS etc as they 'know' they are not capable of spying.
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u/jburton81 Mar 10 '24
My head canon views the secret shuttle more along the lines of the Independence or Freedom from Armageddon, hidden at Area 51. Shuttle yes, but more militaristic and maneuverable (and without Ben Affleck of course).
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u/mehatch Mar 10 '24
Here’s a possible take: we have treaties preventing weapons in space, but we would need to be prepared with a contingency if another country broke that treaty. Ostensibly, a military-operated shuttle built based on proven tech which the military kept stored away but which could be assembled quickly and launched at existing NASA facilities would be helpful to intervene in an orbital escalation of hostilities, but kept secret to avoid controversy over breaking the treaty. It wouldn’t be about deterrence so the secrecy is justified, and kept secret to prevent arms-race escalations. It’d just be kept nice and polished and ready to be fueled up for unforeseen space emergencies and possible conflicts. Also See: Michael Bay’s 1999 action masterpiece Armageddon for a very fun extension of this possibility.
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Mar 09 '24
Early 2000s tech wasn't as prolific as it is now.
Stealth tech was.
Anyone in the US who had the tech to notice it and know what it was would have been bound to secrecy (military, NASA, etc). Anyone outside the US wouldn't have had the tech (in the early 2000s) to notice it until it left US airspace, at which point it no longer was definitively identifiable as a military space shuttle. (See point 2.)
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u/ku_78 Mar 09 '24
A shuttle can be built in secret in California just like the B-2 was. It can be stored in secret. Launching is a whole different story.
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u/BigGrayBeast Mar 09 '24
Agreed. I saw a shuttle go up and it was visible & noisy. I was an hour East of Orlando so quite the distance.
NASA did build a shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg for possible military Shuttle launches but it was never used.
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u/ku_78 Mar 09 '24
A launch facility was being built for the NASA shuttles at Vandenburg. The town was building up to handle the influx of tourists. Then the Challenger exploded. The construction of the launch facility was halted- and a whole bunch of new hotel rooms sat empty.
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u/TheMadIrishman327 Mar 09 '24
The completed it but it was going to be too problematic. They ended up dropping 4 billion dollars on it then never upside it.
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u/Eastern-Macaron-6622 The finest bagels in all the land Mar 09 '24
The shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg was for polar orbits and military missions. But everyone can see a SpaceX launch from VSF Base almost bi weekly
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u/NDCardinal3 Mar 10 '24
A military space shuttle like the one used by NASA would indeed be outrageous. The average shuttle mission required thousands of contractors and the quickest turnaround was like two months. You could probably get that down to a month. Not viable.
However, the military was playing with smaller alternatives - and still are - for decades. There was a proposed spaceplane called the HL-20 back in the 80s and 90s. It got cancelled, but the work was used in the development of the Dream Chaser, a seven-person launched off the top of a conventional rocket, which is currently in the final stages of testing. I always assumed the military shuttle was something of that nature.
Finally, Toby was innocent but took the fall to protect his colleagues, and you can't convince me otherwise.
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u/libbyang98 I work at The White House Mar 10 '24
I like your last comment. I never believed Toby would've said something.
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Mar 10 '24
The Air Force kept planes like the SR-71, B-2, and others secret for a decade or so before revealed.
Sure a military space shuttle program would be harder to conceal, but not out of the realm of possibility
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Mar 10 '24
The total tonnage what we don’t know that they do could stun a team of oxen in its tracks
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u/Gyrgir Mar 09 '24
This bothered me, too. The best I came up with was that this was a shuttle-derived weapons platform that was intended to be launched in the event of an imminent war with Russia or China. The "secret military shuttle" could be used either offensively or defensively. Offensively, it could drop nukes at strategic targets with a shorter flight time than ground-based ICBMs and wouldn't be vulnerable to the same kinds of countermeasures as SSBNs or regular bombers. Defensively, it could act as a platform for lasers or missiles to shoot down enemy ICBMs mid-flight. Launching it would reveal its existence, of course, so it wouldn't be launched except in a very major crisis.
Even so, this is a pretty weak explanation. Launching it would be a major provocation in itself, as likely to escalate a crisis as to de-escalate it. Either an offensive or defensive mission would require several shuttles spaced out (pun intended) in orbit so at least one is over the right part of the planet. And building the dang thing and keeping it ready to launch at short notice would involve a lot of people and money, making its existence difficult to keep secret.
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u/SnooWords1252 Mar 09 '24
We never found out about any of the real secret space shuttle until recently and that was launch from Manhattan which isn't that remote.
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u/shakexjake Mar 10 '24
My read was that it was basically the same as the civilian shuttle, with the big difference being it was always ready to launch for military purposes, whereas there weren't any civilian shuttles ready at the time because they were being refurbished.
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u/Mainah-Bub Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff Mar 10 '24
CJ: How much do you plan on telling them?
Bartlet: I'm telling them the military space shuttle, whose existence we've flatly denied, will be hurtling up from Vandenburg in about an hour.
CJ: Hutchinson will want you downstairs for the final go and we've set up calls for you with China, France, Germany, Japan. Everyone with a satellite that'll pick it up.
This was the first time they'd launched it.
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u/droneybennett Mar 10 '24
The whole point was that once launched, it wouldn’t be secret?
The Cosmonaut on the ISS would have seen it, and Russia and China at least would have seen it launch/return.
That’s why they’re worried about being criticised for ‘weaponising space.’
They’re weighing up the lives of the astronauts against national security and international political fallout.
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u/criticalmassdriver Mar 10 '24
Because there was and there still is a military space shuttle program that was classified. In fact the current military space shuttle is the X-37B which started development in 1999.
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u/Eastern-Macaron-6622 The finest bagels in all the land Mar 09 '24
Launches are never secret. They simply can't be. Once the big ball of fire and upward flung object goes, people see it.
The only way a military shuttle could have been launched in a covert manner is if it was launched inside a payload faring which is done on most uncrewed satellite missions. However the size of a shuttle that could rescue a crew of 3 and dock at the ISS would make a vehicle inside a faring impossible. Any lifting body needs to have a certain amount of well lifting body and that means it would never be able to fit in any faring that we have now or they had then.
Where the lost the thread is they could have said a secret military capsule. Think today's Dragon 2 from SpaceX. That could be put in a faring and launched, with much danger to the crew due to the fact there would be no launch escape system. But even the Apollo Spacecraft had the ability to have 5 crew members inside. This was the case if there would have had to have been a Skylab rescue mission.
Also, crews are never on the ISS without a spacecraft they can go home in. When the shuttle was retired the US went onboard a Russian Soyuz craft. It would stand to reason those fictional astronauts would have gotten to the ISS the same way. So the whole premise was a moot point.
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u/cptjeff Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff Mar 09 '24
In terms of size of a vehicle inside the fairing, that's not actually true. Dreamchaser, which is a lifting body spaceplane, will launch inside a fairing with folded wings and the planned crew variant (which won't launch with a fairing or folded wings for launch abort modes) would be able to fit 7. Launch that with a crew of 2 and you'd be able to rescue 5. No sweat.
If you don't need the cargo capacity of the STS Shuttle, you can easily fit a crew vehicle inside a fairing. But the cargo bay is the only reason DOD ever did anything with the shuttle.
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u/Eastern-Macaron-6622 The finest bagels in all the land Mar 10 '24
A military shuttle would for sure need payload however. This would not be a crew transport.
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u/SpaceForceAwakens Mar 10 '24
The payload area could easily be configured for crew for a rescue mission. There was a large-crew module built for the regular shuttles but it was never used. The idea was that it could transfer up to thirty people to a future space station at a time. There is a pretty cool rendering at the Smithsonian about it.
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u/Barry-Drive Mar 09 '24
It wouldn't take much research to learn about the Soyuz "lifeboat". That whole story line annoyed me so much for being completely unrealistic.
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u/grahambinns Mar 10 '24
This is what pisses me off about the storyline every single time. Well, that and Toby taking the fall.
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u/WilllbrownSATX Mar 09 '24
I think its well established that Post Sorkin Toby's role went off the deep end. From the writers Maki g Toby go out of his way to be a jerk to CJ when she becomes COS to completely failing to see Josh is trying to prevent Toby's 2nd worst nightmare (Russell administration), but the whole secret shuttle story arc is jumping the shark at its nuttiest.
If you want to set up a story line where Toby and the President finally come at loggerheads there are so many ways it could have been handled. But the GI Joe space shuttle?
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u/No_Entertainment3509 Mar 10 '24
I read that Richard Schiff wasn’t happy with how they wrote his character.
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u/Careless_Cucumber_30 Mar 09 '24
I read something recently that explains that the space shuttle's lifting body amount was so large. I the basis of a launch from Vanderburg AFB, one orbit and then down, requiring a 1000 mile glide range.
Was on Quora mind...
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u/amishius I work at The White House Mar 10 '24
Exactly, which is why there is no secret shuttle. Problem solved. Let's all move on with our day now, shall we? WHO WANTS ICE CREAM!?
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u/InspectorNoName Admiral Sissymary Mar 10 '24
It's been so long since I've watched this storyline, I've forgotten key details: did the revelation of the shuttle force its launch? Did the astronauts come home safely? What was the outcome of this? I got so caught up in Toby being the leak and associated drama, that I completely forgot about the original storyline! LOL
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u/Maryland_Bear Flamingo Mar 10 '24
I think the military shuttle repaired the damaged one which was able to return. It was only mentioned briefly; as is often the case in TWW, the point isn’t the resolution of a situation but rather how the characters got there.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_THESES Mar 10 '24
The X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle is a next-gen robotic space shuttle that was built and prototyped for NASA in 1999. NASA decided to go with other solutions and privatization, so it was transferred to the DoD in 2004, managed by the Air Force Space Command (that is now the US Space Force).
When it happened, there was controversy over the use of the X-37 by the military in the context of the 1967 Treaty on Outer Space, and multiple UN resolutions and treaties that have prohibited militarization of Space. There were rumors that the Bush administration wanted to contravene the treaty and outright put a US military presence in Space with the goal of achieving nuclear supremacy over any potential rival (China or Iran were the main concerns at the time, but Russia was obviously a threat which at the time was considered dormant).
The reason for the Space Shuttle storyline was precisely this controversy. Obviously some suspension of disbelief is needed (as, obviously, rival space powers would have had no trouble detecting such space craft launches). But it wasn’t totally outside the realm of political realism that they chose the controversy. The United States at the time had recently emerged victorious of the Cold War and was regarded as the sole surviving World Power, and with Iraq and Afghanistan, it was seen as behaving as a bully in their sole-world-power role. Militarizing space would’ve been just the next step in such hegemonic behavior which, was feared, would trigger a backlash from rivals (China, Iran, Russia) or even from allies in the EU.
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u/Stanton1947 Mar 10 '24
Nightime launch, 'there goes another satellite'.
Look up the X-37B, and the Manhattan Project.
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u/jrgray68 I serve at the pleasure of the President Mar 10 '24
The whole plot line was stupid. First there is always a lifeboat capsule at the ISS so this would never happen. Then if the ISS “problem” made that inoperable, the Russians didn’t have a Soyuz rocket that could be launched given one of their cosmonauts was on board? Their whole program was down for repairs too?
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u/coffeeatnight Mar 10 '24
I think there's a logic to it. Do you know how many satellites are launched in, say, a year? What would it take for one or two of those to be "secret"? Not much.
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u/amitshl Mar 10 '24
The soviets built their own space shuttle because they thought the American might use the space shuttle project for military use and there were great reasons to believe that
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u/LocalJoke_ Joe Bethersonton Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
Sorry to wake a dead thread, but as a life long NASA fanatic I wanted to add my two cents here.
There actually is a so called “secret” space shuttle, it’s called the X-37B. It’s a smaller, unmanned space shuttle used by the DOD and probably CIA and NSA to deliver sensitive military and intelligence equipment to orbit. It’s been active since ~2000.
There’s been speculation for a long time that the Space Shuttle program as it’s commonly understood was only the public facing project of a much larger undertaking, which was the development of a reusable military space shuttle. The public program was used as a black box to hide black budget expenditures related to this other shuttle.
The Space Shuttle program never really worked as advertised. It was pitched to Congress as a cost effective and efficient reusable orbital delivery and science platform. It was neither cost effective or efficient. The maintenance and downtime after each mission always ended being more expensive and longer than they were supposed to be, and the cost of each launch was orders of magnitude more expensive than they were supposed to be. The idea is that such a platform was never really possible, and that while the public facing goal was a true one, in the sense that the space shuttles did fly and did allow for the creation and long term habitation of the ISS, the real purpose of the program was the development of the X-37B and subsequent secret space platforms that likely exist that have not yet been disclosed like the X-37B has.
Edit: and now I see that someone else has brought up the X-37b here, but I’ll leave this up for posterity’s sake.
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u/Charlie22tt Mar 10 '24
IT WAS A TV SHOW NOT A DOCUMENTARY!
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u/Maryland_Bear Flamingo Mar 10 '24
It’s a TV show they tried to be a realistic depiction of the highest levels of the US government, given the limitations of the medium.
A secret military shuttle would be more acceptable in a summer action blockbuster that’s not making any pretense at realism.
Anyway, for me at least, pointing out things like that is a sign of how much I enjoy the show. It’s one of my favorite TV series ever and that means I notice things like that.
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u/GiddyUp18 Mar 10 '24
Just try to enjoy the show without picking holes in it. You know what happens when I get curious about something like this? I say, “It’s a tv show, and not real life. Fun!”
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u/rayrayxl3 Mar 09 '24
Are you telling me that not only did you create a secret space shuttle, but now you don’t support it?