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

[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.