Russia bars US from using Russian rocket Engines

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will bar the United States from using Russian-made rocket engines for military satellite launches, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Tuesday, retaliating for sanctions on high-tech equipment which Washington has imposed over the Ukraine crisis.

He also said Russia would reject a U.S. request to prolong the use of the International Space Station beyond 2020.

Russia pledged to respond in kind when the United States said last month that it would deny export licenses for any high-technology items that could aid Russian military capabilities and would revoke existing licenses.

Moscow's measures would affect MK-33 and RD-180 engines which Russia supplies to the United States, Rogozin told a news conference. "We are ready to deliver these engines but on one condition that they will not be used to launch military satellites," he said.

Washington wants to keep the International Space Station, a $100 billion orbital outpost that is a project of 15 nations and a showcase of Russian-U.S. cooperation, flying until at least 2024, four years beyond the previous target.

In spite of differences on foreign policy and security matters, Washington and Moscow have cooperated extensively on space exploration. Russian Soyuz spacecraft are the only way astronauts can get to the space station, whose crews include both Americans and Russians.

Rogozin also said Russia will suspend the operation of GPS satellite navigation system sites in Russia from June and seek talks with Washington on opening similar sites in the United States for Russia's own system, Glonass.

He threatened the permanent closure of the GPS sites in Russia if that is not agreed by September.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska,; Editing by Steve Gutterman and David Stamp)

WFAA: Amarillo Interceptors and the Flying Dorito

WFAA: AMARILLO — BYRON HARRIS:

What's that in the sky over Amarillo?

"It was the strangest thing I've seen, as far as aviation," said Dean Musket, part of the motley crew of airplane buffs who sits down at an airport restaurant in this West Texas city and looks up.

"They are aviation junkies," waitress Erin Williamson said. "They love it."

And they are seeing things you can't see anywhere else.

Military aircraft cruise over Amarillo like sharks looking for baitfish.

"If you're flying east, west, or vice-versa across the United States, you're probably flying over Amarillo," Steve Douglass said.

A group that might be called the "interceptor club" watches everything military that flies over. But back in March, they spotted three craft they'd never seen before, about six miles up.

"We had captured something completely unique," Douglass said.

It was trianuglar, like a stealth bomber... but not a stealth bomber.

"The back edge was smooth like a Dorito," Douglass said. "It wasn't jagged."

A few weeks later, the same shape was snapped by another spotter in Kansas.

"This is when we first saw it flying in formation from the backside of the airport," said Douglass, who is something between an aircraft enthusiast and a fanatic.

He's sitting in what he jokingly calls "Kitch Com," a nook of his kitchen crammed with electronic gear to monitor aircraft traffic. He's got a special antenna to pick up satellite transmissions.

"On this side, it's my bunker, and on this side, it's my kitchen, which is microwave ovens and food," he said.

On the day the mystery planes were spotted, Douglass recorded air traffic controllers giving the aircraft a clear lane through the sky. The Air Force confirms nothing.

Now Douglass suspects the triangular shape may be a stealth transport. "You could put a dozen Navy SEALs in, fly them over Afghanistan or Pakistan or whatever-stan, and have them inserted in some way without an adversary being any the wiser," he said.

At the Old English Field House Diner, Erin Williamson has become part of the group.

"They're out here four or five days a week," she said. "They watch the planes; they take pictures; they'll let us know if there's an important or cool looking plane coming in."

The patches on the wall show all the military pilots who've stopped for lunch, along with a movie star or two.

On this day, six Air Force trainers landed; a special ops plane from a nearby airbase buzzed; three air force tankers passed at six miles high.

But no flying Dorito.

BREAKING: Pro-Russian insurgents claim to have shot down several Ukrainian choppers

TIME: The mayor of separatist-held Slavyansk, in the country's restive eastern region, claimed on Friday that pro-Russian insurgents shot down several helicopters as the Ukrainian military launched an unspecified operation near the city

The tense situation in eastern Ukraine appeared in danger of spiraling out of control Friday, as the government launched its first big assault on pro-Russian insurgents occupying cities, the insurgents shot down government helicopters, and Russia said the renewed violence that killed at least three people had ended any hope of a peaceful end to the standoff.

The insurgent-appointed mayor of the east Ukrainian city of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomarev, claimed that pro-Russian forces occupying the city shot down helicopters on Friday morning as the Ukrainian military kicked off an operation near the rebel enclave, the Associated Press reports. There were conflicting reports about how many helicopters were shot down—Russian state news outlet RT reported that at least three helicopters had been downed by pro-Kremlin militia fighters, but that couldn’t be immediately confirmed and other reports said two choppers were downed. At least one helicopter pilot was killed during the fighting, while another had been detained, the AP reports.

That came after the Ukrainian military launched an unspecified operation near the rebel-held city on Friday morning, with news of sporadic gunfire and explosions erupting on the city outskirts. The new pro-Western government in Kiev has been grappling with Russian encroachment for month, starting with a crisis in Crimea that led Russia to eventually annex the peninsula, and more recently with insurgents who have been occupying buildings in several Russian cities.

Russia signaled that the latest violence would doom any hope of a sustaining a peace deal that was reached last month in Geneva, one the United States and Ukraine have accused Russia of never respecting in the first place. Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, called the latest Ukrainian military moves a “punitive operation” that had killed “all hope for the viability of the Geneva agreements,” the New York Times reports

USAF "Mystery airplanes were B-2s"

USNI: The mystery jets that were spotted over Amarillo, Texas, and Wichita, Kan. earlier this year are in fact Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers on a training sortie, military sources told USNI News on Monday.

“The Amarillo jets were B-2 training sorties,” an U.S. Air Force official with direct knowledge of the incident told USNI News on Monday.

The jets were enroute to the Utah Test and Training Range to practice dropping bombs after a brief delay at the Melrose Air Force Range in New Mexico.

Flying out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., the B-2s would likely have navigated via Amarillo to get to Melrose Range.

The Kansas picture is likely any number of training sorties flown around Kansas and Missouri,” the official added.

Whiteman, the home station of the B-2 fleet, is just outside of Kansas City near the border between Kansas and Missouri.

Earlier reporting that suggested that the images showed a thus far unknown type of triangular aircraft were mistaken due to the poor resolution of the photos.

The triangular planform on apparent display in those shots is the result of an optical illusion that obscured the trailing edge of the B-2s design.

“Given the resolution of this photo, we can’t even tell if it is a military aircraft, much less an Air Force one,” Air Force spokeswoman Jennifer Cassidy told USNI News on April 21.

The U.S. Air Force fields 20 of the stealth bombers.

AUTHORS NOTE: This statement is a half truth. The aircraft over Amarillo on April 9th were B-2 bombers.

The aircraft Dean Muskett and myself photographed on March 10, were not.

It reminds me of this non-denial denial: Technically they are correct - it's called the F-117A Nighthawk not F-117 Night Hawk. 

click to enlarge

-Steve Douglass 

RELATED LINKS: 
Mystery in New Mexico - was it the crash of something black?

Flying triangles and B-2s over Amarillo. What's the USAF up to?

Mystery aircraft photographed over Amarillo

Texas Mystery aircraft also photographed over Kansas 

Kansas Mystery aircraft photos analyzed. 

Mini robotic shuttle X-37B passes 500 days in orbit mark

The U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane launched on its third and latest mission on Dec. 11, 2012. As of today (April 24), the vehicle has been aloft for 500 days — far longer than its officially stated maximum orbital lifetime of 270 days.

US Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Passes 500 Days in Orbit

An unmanned military space plane has achieved a major longevity milestone, zipping around Earth for 500 days on a clandestine mission for the United States government.

The U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane launched on its third and latest mission on Dec. 11, 2012. As of today (April 24), the vehicle has been aloft for 500 days — far longer than its officially stated maximum orbital lifetime of 270 days.
This NASA Marshall Space Flight Center image shows on-orbit functions for the reusable X-37B space plane, now under the wing of the U.S. Air Force.

"Clearly, and understandably, the Air Force initially set the expected parameters [of the X-37B] conservatively, not really knowing what it could do until it was tested — which is what they are doing now," said Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

"Personally, I think it's commendable that they are pushing it to the extent that they appear to be," Johnson-Freese told Space.com via email. "That's the only way to really know what it can do."


The X-37B/OTV spacecraft undergoes final testing at Boeing for a 2010 test flight.
A tiny robotic space shuttle

The reusable X-37B looks like NASA's now-retired space shuttle, only much smaller. The robotic space plane is 29 feet (8.8 meters) long by 9.5 feet (2.9 m) tall with a wingspan of nearly 15 feet (4.6 m). Its payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed. (The space shuttle's payload bay, by comparison, could fit two entire X-37Bs inside.)

Like the space shuttle, the X-37B launches vertically with the aid of a rocket, then returns to Earth horizontally for a runway landing. While the shuttle needed a pilot, however, the X-37B comes home autonomously, without any guidance from human hands.
The U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane is a miniature space shuttle capable of long, classified missions in orbit.


The Air Force has two X-37B space planes, both of which were built by Boeing's Phantom Works division. These two planes have flown a total of three missions, which are known as OTV-1, OTV-2 and OTV-3. ("OTV" is short for Orbital Test Vehicle.)

OTV-1 blasted off in April 2010 and circled Earth for 225 days. The second X-37B vehicle launched in March 2011, initiating the OTV-2 mission. This spaceflight lasted 469 days, finally touching down at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012.

The current OTV-3 mission employs the first X-37B, the plane that flew OTV-1.

There's no telling when OTV-3 will end, experts say; the X-37B is solar-powered and thus can keep circling Earth for long periods. Further, observations by amateur satellite trackers indicate that the vehicle has made just one or two maneuvers during OTV-3, suggesting that the craft has plenty of thruster fuel left, said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.

The current mission "seems long, but that's based off of the original [270-day] estimate. We don't have anything else to go on," Weeden told Space.com. "And it's not long for other satellites. It's common for satellites, especially typical national security satellites that are well-designed, to be in orbit for years to decades."

The Air Force's X-37B robotic space plane sits on the runway after landing at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on June 16, 2012. The vehicle spent more than 15 months circling Earth on a mystery mission.

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