Blackstar?

[mmcirvin]

Aviation Leak claims that the US may have been operating a secret orbital spaceplane system in the 1990s, now quietly cancelled for unknown reasons.

I don't know what to think of this. The basic design doesn't seem outrageously absurd to me, since ideas along these general lines have been batted around ever since the 1950s.

That business about the revolutionary fuel, "a boron-based gel having the consistency of toothpaste and high-energy characteristics, but occupying less volume than other fuels," smells funny; it strikes me as the kind of thing one usually hears associated with hoaxes. But apparently a fuel based on ethyl borane was proposed for the XB-70 supersonic bomber back in the fifties, which could make this either more plausible or just a cleverer hoax.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Whatever happened to the ULTRASEKRIT "Aurora" plane, anyway?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Good question.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

They're flying it over Finland! I photographed the characteristic donuts-on-a-rope contrail just a couple of years ago!



More seriously, though, this page from the same site is interesting in the context of the article:
http://www.aemann.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/donuts/buzzard.html

[ckd]

I don't uncritically believe what I read in AvLeak, but this is certainly possible IMO. The launcher vehicle could be the "Aurora", even.

Interesting conjecture, at the very least.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

The article suggests that the orbiter separated from the mothership at supersonic speeds. Does that sound amazingly hazardous to anyone else? I always thought that the chief advantage proferred by mothership aircraft was altitude, not speed, but then again, the speed of sound is a bit slower up there, so maybe it's not so unreasonable.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sounds tricky. Though rocket booster separation certainly happens at way-supersonic speeds without destroying anything (usually).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's true, and at considerable altitude as well. Although the rocket booster already has its engine on at separation, while in the case of mothership/dropship deployment (and in some but not all cases of missiles being fired from aircraft), usually the smaller vehicle's engine ignites after dropping. (I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the larger the missile, the more likely it drops first instead of shooting off the wing, but then again, larger missiles generally mean longer range missiles, which can mean more hazardous fuels, etc.)

I dunno. Go Enginerds!

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

"CRITICS ARGUE that there was never enough money hidden in intelligence and military budgets to fund a small fleet of spaceplanes and carrier aircraft. However, those who worked on the system's development at several contractor sites say they charged time-and-materials costs to a number of well-funded programs."

Why have I never heard anyone make this very reasonable, plausible point when someone brings up the "$500 hammers and the $8000 toilet seats" thing? Seems like we're getting some interesting stuff with those toilets.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

David Brin, in one of his short story collections, has a tantilizing story about where all that money went. The story title is something like "The Third Sense" or something to do with the sense of smell.

As for the toilet seats, I happen to know that they cost that much because they had to create a new mold for the toilet seats, the old one having been lost or destroyed when the company that sold the Pentagon its last order had gone out of business. The Pentagon's toilets are non-standard enough that they couldn't just buy mass-market commercial toilet seats, so they had to pay for everything, and they had to do it through the procurement process, the regulations in which add expense. So, indeed, the first order of toilet seats cost them way the hell too much per seat. But that's what happens when you place a special order and you'll always be the only customer.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

rec.arts.sf.written had yet another thread about the expensive hammers and such recently. The outrageous-sounding line items are usually held to result from a combination of several things: the occasional design-dictated necessity of using slightly nonstandard items that aren't made in mass-market lots; things with special properties (they went on and on about the non-sparking hammers); and the accounting practice of distributing the cost over the components of a project in a mechanical manner because it's easier than figuring out exactly what every individual thing cost.

Still, NASA's planetary science program had gotten the message in recent years that you can achieve lots of economy by planning for it in advance when designing spacecraft. E.g. their recent habit of using somewhat radiation-hardened variants of commercial PC electronics, so that it isn't necessary to fund a lot of design work. And the fact that all their planetary missions seem to have standardized on exactly the same 1-megapixel square monochrome CCDs. Of course this stuff wasn't flashy enough to stay in the budget this time around...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've heard that Henry Spencer wrote something perceptive about this on Usenet: that the scenario that best fits the facts may be that the program existed, but barely worked or turned out to be wildly impractical.

I'm a little skeptical about speculation that this is the secret space program that isn't screwed up like the Shuttle, as pauldrye sort of put it; it's always easy to think the world of programs that either we don't know much about or that never made it to production. The extreme case is that of the space enthusiasts who believe that getting to space is cheap and easy using every possible method except the ones that have actually been tried.

boron gel fuel

[(Anonymous)]

A search turned this up:

Sylvia and David IA Fine Rocket Propulsion Center

http://aerodyne.technion.ac.il/~rocketw3/new_page_2.htm