sure http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1967.0.htmlCFE said:Any additional info on the 1985 Lockheed concept? An artist's concept was in Gunston's "Future Fighters" suggesting a turboramjet propulsion system. Top speed was estimated at Mach 5.
These 3D drawings from FAS where something of the first I saw on the internet, somwhere back in 1995...hesham said:Hi,
http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/aurora.htm
The air-launched system was a fictional design from a November 1988 issue of Popular Science. Aside from the air launch aspects, there was solid engineering and merit to the system they described given late 1980s technology.CFE said:Any additional info on the 1985 Lockheed concept? An artist's concept was in Gunston's "Future Fighters" suggesting a turboramjet propulsion system. Top speed was estimated at Mach 5.
I also remember reading a story from 1988 or 1989 suggesting that an SR-71 follow-on would be air-launched from the cargo bay of a C-5. Does anybody else recall similar reports? When combined with the early 90's report of a lifting body being loaded into the back of a C-5, it's easy to see where some of the details in the "Blackstar" story came from. I'm skeptical that you'd want to launch any kind of aircraft from a C-5 because of the restrictions it would place on your wingspan (and ultimately the size of the vehicle.)
Every time I read certain wikipedia articles, I cry inside a little.airman said:Aurora - a famous speculative project
an article by wikipedia :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_%28aircraft%29
Very interesting and credible chonology... But X-24C was already a dated design by 1977, wasn't it?Michel Van said:my reversed engineering approach on Aurora
http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php/topic,23507.0.html
NASP was supposed to be a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) tech. demonstrator.Gannet said:My personal opinion is that the Aurora is the precursor (Technology Testbed) to the National Aerospace Plane (NASP). I do not believe that the U.S. would had pursued the NASP unless the critical technologies were already proven.
Unfortunately the FAS material is very dated, and was more aggregation than analysis. COPPER CANYON and related programs were focused on rocket-only SSTO, not air breathing at all. This would have very little to do with AURORA, and didn't have as much to do with NASP as was thought at the time the FAS material was written. There are other threads on the site that go into more depth on COPPER CANYON and related programs.Gannet said:The following link provides additional info that lead other people to conjecture that the NASP was based on the existence and/or development of the Aurora SR-75 (Copper Canyon)
http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/nasp.htm
What I am talking about is pure airbreathing all the way to orbit.Gannet said:...
From Bill Sweetman's Book entitled AURORA The Pentagon Secret Hypersonic Spyplane; Motorbooks International, Mil-Tech Series; Osceola, WI 54020; 1993; p86 he stated the following:
...
"Aurora is not just a spyplane. It is a very important stepping-stone toward real access to space, the kind of access that NASA's civil-service lifters promised from the shuttle but failed to deliver. Unfortunately, one factor above all prevents Aurora's potential from being exploited and prevents it true importance from being recognized. The US government says that it doesn't exist."
And earlier:
My personal opinion is that the Aurora is the precursor (Technology Testbed) to the National Aerospace Plane (NASP).
I do not believe that the U.S. would had pursued the NASP unless the critical technologies were already proven.
...Usually, where tech articles are concerned, there's a high level of reliability. It's the genre articles that have been pwned by teenage catamites using sock puppet accounts to get themselves voted as admins so they can take total control of any number of articles and generally abuse anyone who tries to add true facts and/or correct obvious errors. Still, where Aurora is concerned, nothing's ever been revealed officially, so technically it's fiction and therefore a genre article. Best way to determine this is to see just how many reverts have been done in the past year, and if they've been reverted by the same one or two people each time. Then check those person's personal pages for controversy issues. It's not hard to spot a rogue admin, although it's *really* hard to get anyone at Wikipedia to do anything about it because it would be an admission that the system is *broken". Jimbo Wales can't have that, because it costs him donations.quellish said:Every time I read certain wikipedia articles, I cry inside a little.
Wasn't there a case recently of a guy who was employed by a religious cult to keep their record clean on Wikipedia who basically worked he way up to the top – wrote all the procedures for dealing with rogue posters and the like – and was then exposed as the very same (in relation to his cult) and forced to quit from the upper reaches of Wikidom... Since all the effort has gone into building it up I don’t see why Wikipedia doesn’t just go commercial and remove the anyone can change it bit. Surely with their market reach they would be worth billions and could easily fund professional management of their resource while making huge profits.OM said:It's not hard to spot a rogue admin, although it's *really* hard to get anyone at Wikipedia to do anything about it because it would be an admission that the system is *broken". Jimbo Wales can't have that, because it costs him donations.
But then you lose the whole point of Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't meant to be a source for academic papers or news articles, even though some use it as such.Abraham Gubler said:Wasn't there a case recently of a guy who was employed by a religious cult to keep their record clean on Wikipedia who basically worked he way up to the top – wrote all the procedures for dealing with rogue posters and the like – and was then exposed as the very same (in relation to his cult) and forced to quit from the upper reaches of Wikidom... Since all the effort has gone into building it up I don’t see why Wikipedia doesn’t just go commercial and remove the anyone can change it bit. Surely with their market reach they would be worth billions and could easily fund professional management of their resource while making huge profits.OM said:It's not hard to spot a rogue admin, although it's *really* hard to get anyone at Wikipedia to do anything about it because it would be an admission that the system is *broken". Jimbo Wales can't have that, because it costs him donations.
I think it is impressive what Reaction Engines is up to.Nik said:Um, used to be a sour joke here that UK.Gov 'classified' Alan Bond's HOTOL work and kept it thus beyond reason because a HOTOLski could have outrun an Aurora, never mind a Blackbird...
Irony is that the exasperated Mr. Bond went away and designed something better. He's now talking plausibly about a couple of hours to the Antipodes with Lapcat, and first-flight of Skylon in 2018...
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/
The Aurora legend certainly took on a life of it's own.airrocket said:Aurora was and is a great urban-legend manifested in the demise of the SR-71, mock-ups of some of the FDL lifting bodies and the emergence of early stealth technology. Closest we've ever got to Aurora is the X-43 and X-51. My opinion the Aurora concept has morphed into Blackswift which even today only exist in the CGI world. China will probably fly an Aurora knock-off before the US gets around to it.![]()
1 Introduction
The seismic network in Southern California routinely detects sonic booms
from aircraft. The high density of sites and the extensive ground coverage
of the network, over 50,000 square kilometers, provide a unique opportunity
to study the long-range propagation of direct and indirect sonic booms.
In Section 2, the fundamental features of sonic boom carpets under a
realistic atmosphere are presented. The pressure signals from the N-wave
signal in the atmosphere produce a small, but detectable, ground motion
as outlined in Section 3. Seismic data from three over°ights are presented
in Section 4: a west to east SR-71 pass at M = 3:15, the landing of space
shuttle Discovery, STS-42, at Edwards AFB, and the passage of shuttle
Discovery over Washington and Oregon. Section 5 presents the results of
an analysis of a set of "mystery booms" which occurred in California in
1992 and 1993.
One of the most interesting things about the mystery booms/skyquakes to me was that they fit the Groom Lake flight test schedule at the time.Artie Bob said:For me, the most credible evidence was the report coming from Cat-Tech in the early 1990s. There were reports of small tremors from the inland empire that occured quite regularly (same day of the week. Thursdays, IIRC and about the same time in the morning). When queried, the Cal-Tech seismology group replied the tremors were not seismic, but rather shocks from an aerial vehicle. Every supersonic aircraft apparently has its own "footprint" and this did not match any type previously identified by Caltech. Because of the multiple number of seismic detectors, the vehicle could be tracked. It approached the area from the SW, descending near Catalina Islandand across the Southern California area, the track pointing to central Nevada. This data also allowed Cal Tech to estimate the size and weight of the object. All this information was reorted in the Pasadena local newspaper, but there were never anty follow-up stories. IIRC, I clipped the article and have it somewhere.
Best Regards,
Artie Bob
Thanks! I'd never read that before. Proof that you don't have to doctor pictures to fool people, a scale model and a proper lighting can do the trick!!!SOC said:Yup, those are definitely fake. The guy explains how he did it on page 10.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040823164323/forum.a-10.org/topic.asp?whichpage=1&ARCHIVEVIEW=&TOPIC_ID=2241
Yes there are still loose ends.quellish said:The Aurora legend certainly took on a life of it's own.airrocket said:Aurora was and is a great urban-legend manifested in the demise of the SR-71, mock-ups of some of the FDL lifting bodies and the emergence of early stealth technology. Closest we've ever got to Aurora is the X-43 and X-51. My opinion the Aurora concept has morphed into Blackswift which even today only exist in the CGI world. China will probably fly an Aurora knock-off before the US gets around to it.![]()
By the mid-90s Aurora was supposedly an operational cryogenically fueled hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft meant to replace the SR-71.
Even a very small number of such aircraft would leave a huge logistical footprint, and that never materialized. The strategic reconnaissance mission of the SR-71 had long been orphaned, and other than for a few specific needs the tide was turning in favor of persistent surveillance rather than quick reaction.
That said, there is still considerable anecdotal information that suggests a small test force of very fast and/or unusually propelled aircraft were being flown at the time. There was also a role for such an aircraft in SAC's planning at the time, supporting the B-2 in prosecuting strategic relocatable targets (i.e. locating mobile ICBMs and telling B-2s where the haystack is).
It's a fascinating set of mysteries.