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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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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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Mar 8 2006, 11:04 AM
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#2
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It should be remembered that there is still -- to put it mildly -- a difference between accelerating something to Mach 5 and accelerating it to orbital velocity. It may be that AW got hold of garbled accounts of some very high-speed but suborbital unmanned reconaissance drone that could be launched from such a plane.
As for the supposed higher efficiency of "black" programs: remember that "lack of bureaucratic oversight" also leaves such programs' managers free to flush a lot more of our money away on red herrings. We have just had a dramatic reminder of this in the Duke Cunningham case; he designed his little bribery scheme to revolve around black programs, so that nobody would be aware that he was using his clout to divert Pentagon money into questionable black programs in return for personal bribes from the contractors involved. By the way, Jeff Bell has gotten back to me on another point: how likely is it that the Pentagon would fly its most top-secret plane over Salt Lake City at 2:35 in the afternoon? "F-117 and B-2 always flew at night when they were black programs... "All you have to do is compare the alleged vehicle with real programs. Basically, the claim is that a black program succeeded in building a manned SSTO rocketship light enough to be lifted by a modified B-70 and small enough to fit undeneath it. The whole history of X-15, NASP, DC-X, and X-33 shows that this is impossible. A launch at Mach 3 and 100,000' just won't reduce the ~90% fuel fraction needed for ground launch enough to allow this. Every real air-launch proposal has used multi-stage expendables carried by heavy-lift jumbo jets -- and they still only can handle small lightsats. The laws of physics are the same at Groom Lake as everywhere else. "I'm sure that the lowly production workers cited in the article were actually working on classified programs (the reported false billing to NASP sure explains where all that money went). But people at this level are routinely fed disinformation about the real goals of projects. "Also, it happens that the government spends large amounts of money on projects that are technically impossible. The nuclear-turbojet airplane lasted to 1961, the nuclear-ramjet cruise missile to 1964, the nuclear-thermal rocket to 1972. All these projects were kept alive by interested politicians long after the best scientific minds had declared them worthless. Lately we have had a whole series of impossible projects funded by DARPA like the Falcon launcher and the nuclear isomer bomb. Just because the author of this article put 2 and 2 together to make 5 doesn't mean that no such program ever existed. "I no longer trust anything in the aerospace press. Recall that an editor at JANE'S wrote a completely insane book about the Nazis developing flying saucers powered by zero-point energy -- and AvWeek published a totally credulous article about this same imaginary technology. "The Space Cadets will go gaga over this report. For years they have been hoping that some black program like this will someday go white and solve all our spacelift problems.' |
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Mar 17 2006, 04:14 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 212 Joined: 19-July 05 Member No.: 442 |
It should be remembered that there is still -- to put it mildly -- a difference between accelerating something to Mach 5 and accelerating it to orbital velocity. It may be that AW got hold of garbled accounts of some very high-speed but suborbital unmanned reconaissance drone that could be launched from such a plane... Or possibly something even older, I recently learned that there were unsuccessful attempts to launch small satellites from a USN F4D in the lead-up to the top-secret Operation:ARGUS (August 1958), a series of nuclear tests designed to see if radiation from a nuclear device could be trapped in the Earths magnetic field. |
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