GIGANTIC Aviation Week story, Pentagon has been flying 2-stage orbital spaceplane throughout 1990s |
GIGANTIC Aviation Week story, Pentagon has been flying 2-stage orbital spaceplane throughout 1990s |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Mar 6 2006, 02:24 AM
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Guests |
It may even have been manned:
http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/chan...ws/030606p1.xml My God, what a story -- if it's even partially true. And, judging from this article, they are absolutely certain they have proof (along with proof that the thing, although it works, has recently been mothballed as not cost-effective). It's important to keep in mind, though, that this thing is NOT a workable prototype of the originally planned 2-stage winged Space Shuttle. The second stage -- the spaceplane that actually achieved orbit -- was relatively small and probably very inefficient as a cargo carrier; its advantage lay in allowing the US to get a military reconaissance (or weapons) satellite into orbit surreptitiously, with no advance warning of the launch going to other countries. Even at that, as I say, AW reports that the thing has been recently canned as not worth its (doubtless huge) black-budget expense. |
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Mar 6 2006, 06:30 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 356 Joined: 12-March 05 Member No.: 190 |
Completely fascinating. Virtually all the details seem to be very plausible. Except for one glaring oddity. The section stating: "The spaceplane is capable of carrying an advanced imaging suite that features 1-meter-aperture adaptive optics with an integral sodium-ion-sensing laser. By compensating in real-time for atmospheric turbulence." makes no sense. Sodium lasers used for AO are used to create artificial guide stars in the earth's natrual sodium layer at ~90 km up. If you are orbiting and looking down, this is useless to you. >90% of the phase altering atmospheric turbulence occurs below this layer and shinging a bright yellow laser DOWN, to say nothing of its utterly unacceptable use in a clandestine situation, would do virtually nothing for you in terms of image sharpening. I have little doubt that this thing exists (how else could they've dumped the SR-71??!) but there are a few little things that make it seem like while they were getting the story at least a few people wanted to have a little fun with them.
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