The USA Space Force has unveiled an official painting depicting an area plane intercepting an adversary satellite, perhaps illustrating a touch of what we are able to expect if orbital warfare is in our future.
Space Operations Command (SpOC), which provides orbital warfare and intelligence capabilities to the U.S. Space Force, unveiled the painting during a ceremony at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado on Oct. 20. The artwork, titled “High Ground Intercept,” was commissioned with artist Rick Herter and is SpOC’s first official painting.
The painting depicts a roughly delta-shaped space plane, known as a “futuristic intercept vehicle,” opening its payload bay doors because it moves into position to have interaction an adversary satellite that’s itself targeting a friendly spacecraft. The space plane is paying homage to past U.S. military space planes corresponding to the X-20 Dyna-Soar and even today’s highly mysterious X-37B, although SPoC stresses the painting’s spacecraft is fictional.
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“Due to highly classified nature of many space operations, SpOC requested that Herter depend on historic space planes and his own imagination,” SpOC historian Christopher Rumley said in a Space Force statement.
Painting a purely notional space plane wasn’t easy, artist Herter said, because he had little or no reference material to work with. “Essentially the most difficult projects are when a client gives the artist a general concept of what they need but cannot give specifics,” Herter said within the statement. “With a purpose to get the proportions and angles of the vehicle correct inside the painting, I built a crude model of my space plane design, which I could then use as my reference point.”
While the U.S. Space Force has created units dedicated solely to targeting adversary satellites, its exact orbital warfare capabilities remain unknown because they’re highly classified like most U.S. military space assets.
Space Force does operate an experimental space plane, the X-37B, to loft classified payloads into orbit for testing before the plane lands back down on the bottom, at which point those payloads might be removed and examined. Most other details in regards to the X-37B are unknown.
The space plane used as reference for “High Ground Intercept,” the X-20 Dyna-Soar, was designed by Boeing within the late Nineteen Fifties to be a reusable spy spacecraft and anti-satellite platform. There have been even ideas to make use of the X-20 to drop bombs at high altitude and speed.
Neil Armstrong, the primary human to walk on the moon, was secretly chosen for the Dyna-Soar test regime, but this system was cancelled before its first flight. Its legacy lived on, nevertheless, influencing the design of NASA’s space shuttle.