GIGANTIC Aviation Week story, Pentagon has been flying 2-stage orbital spaceplane throughout 1990s&# Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

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.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

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.'

[tty]

[quote name='BruceMoomaw' date='Mar 8 2006, 12:04 PM' post='44581']
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.[/quote]

On the other hand we have U-2, SR-71 and F-117...

[quote]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....[/quote]

B-2 was never a black program, and there has never been any restrictions on daytime flights with it. It is true that the operational F-117 squadrons flew only at night (which was what they were meant for by the way), but if you check the record you will see that most of the early test flights were done in daylight. Anything else would have been insane, and this applies to our hypothetical "DarkStar" as well. When it comes to operating a recce system You have another constraint. Since you must overfly the target when weather and lighting is suitable you have rather limited discretion about when to fly.
As for overflying Salt Lake City, aircraft occasionally do have to divert for technical or operational reasons. Both U-2 and SR-71 had to land in places they were not meant to a few times while they "were in the black".

[quote]"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.[/quote]

I must say don't quite follow the reasoning here. The X-15 was certainly never meant as a SSTO. The DC-X was a moderately successful technology demonstrator for control and maintenance concepts and NASP was meant to take off from the ground, which is a much more demanding mission profile, for several reasons.
The fact is that would not be very hard to build an expendable SSTO which could takeoff from the ground. As a matter of fact the Titan II first stage (which had a fantastic mass ratio of more than 20) could have lifted a small payload to orbit even back in 1962. However the achievable payload fraction is so low that it is an uneconomical way to operate unless you have a reuseable launcher, which in turn increases the vehicle weight to a point where SSTO is probably impracticable using present-day technology.

However launching at Mach 3.5 at 100,000 feet changes things quite a bit. Not only does the necessary delta V decrease by nearly 1 kms-1, there is also a number of other effects that reduce the 1.5-2.0 kms-1 required for a ground launch in addition to the orbital velocity of 7.8 kms-1.

1) Time-to-orbit is shortened, reducing the loss due to "gravity drag".

2) You start out 30 km further from the Earth's center, reducing the amount of fuel required to raise the vehicle to orbital altitude.

3) Most aerodynamic drag is eliminated.

4) The engine can be optimised for running in vacuum or near vacuum, which appreciably improves the Isp. Incidentally this militates against AW/ST hypothesis about an aerospike engine, since the main motivation for such engines are their insensitivity to atmospheric pressure changes.

5) At 30 km and Mach 3 you are well on the backside of the Q curve permitting a lighter structure (this is a bit uncertain since it depends both on what Q is reached during re-entry, and on the flight profile of the carrier aircraft).

Note that the benefits of launching from a B-747 at 50,000 and Mach 0.85 are much smaller.

[quote]"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.[/quote]

I probably have rather more practical experience of secret programs than JB. They don't stay secret because the people who work on them can't figure what they are doing, but because they choose not to tell what they know. Incidentally my experience (admittedly from outside the US), is that when something does leak it almost always happens "at the top", not at contractor or military unit level.

[quote]"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.[/quote]

And the Internet....

[quote]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.[/quote]

I read AW/ST regularly and on the fairly frequent occasions when I have been in a position to check on them I have found them reasonably reliable. Politically they are very much by, of and for the US military and aerospace establishment, but making allowance for this and in purely factual matters they are on the whole more trustworthy than ordinary news media.

[quote]"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.'
[/quote]

Not me, such a spaceplane would be uneconomical compared to an ordinary ELV. But not, I think, impossible.
Strange by the way that nobody has mentioned what seems to me the most obvious problem in keeping such a spaceplane secret. The plasma trails from re-entries should be highly visible, especially at night

tty