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_*]

Jeffrey Bell, that eternal party-pooper, caught not only that one but a large set of what look like additional downright fatal errors in the whole story, to wit:
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This story is riddled with absurdities:

"A large 'mothership,' closely resembling the U.S. Air Force's historic
XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under
its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before
dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter's engines fire and boost the
vehicle into space."

Starting out from Mach 3 and ~100,000' will not give enough of a boost
that a small single-stage vehicle can reach orbit, or even a once-around
trajectory. Whoever wrote this article has been reading too much
t/space propaganda.

"The manned orbiter's primary military advantage would be surprise
overflight. There would be no forewarning of its presence, prior to the
first orbit, allowing ground targets to be imaged before they could be
hidden."

Soviet missile-warning satellites would pick up the IR plume from the
second stage, and since it would not be at a known space launch site
they would interpret it as a covert nuclear missile launch. At a minimum
you would get a major diplomatic crisis, at worst an accidental nuclear war!

"The spaceplane is capable of carrying an advanced imaging suite that
features 1-meter-aperture adaptive optics with an integral
sodium-ion-sensing laser."

This technology only works looking up, not down. The turbulent layer in
the atmosphere is close to the ground and far away from orbit. You
don't need it in space (besides the provocation of firing a laser at a
Soviet installation from orbit).

"The orbiter's belly appears to be contoured with channels, riblets or
'strakelets' that direct airflow to engine inlets and help dissipate
aerodynamic heating. These shallow channels may direct air to a complex
system of internal, advanced composite-material ducts, according to an
engineer who says he helped build one version of the orbiter in the
early 1990s."

Composite materials are held together with epoxy glue and are highly
flammable (see DC-X fires). You need Ti or steel for hypersonic intake
ducts because the air is red-hot.

"One version of the B-70 could have been used as a recoverable booster
system to launch things into low-Earth orbit. . . . The DynaSoar
program, the first effort by the [U.S.] to use a manned boost-glider to
fly in near-orbital space and return, was considered in this context in
November 1959. The B-70 was to carry the 10,000-lb. DynaSoar glider and
a 40,000-lb. liquid rocket booster to 70,000 ft. and release them while
traveling at Mach 3. With this lofty start, the booster could then push
the glider into its final 300-mi. orbit."

Again, the rocket equation tells you this won't work. You would need
something bigger than Titan II for the booster and that is far too heavy
for the B-70 to lift. North American was notorious in those days for
proposing unworkable ideas, e.g. the orbital X-15.

So to me, this article has as much credibility as last year's article on
spaceships powered by zero-point energy. It seems that AvWeek's staff
now lacks even basic technical knowledge.
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Which presumably means that I do too, since I didn't catch any of this at the time. Put not your trust in Aviation Week, apparently (although I still wonder if this may have been a distorted version of a real story).