An amazing story in Aviation Week today. They tell of a secret airplane program that had been running for the last 15 years or so. It has been shut down so they now feel they can talk about it a little.
Contractors have been running a program which designed, built and operated an aircraft-based two stage to orbit spaceplane. A carrier aircraft flew up to around 70,000 ft and then dropped the spaceplane. The spaceplane had a booster rocket attached to it, which shot it up to the upper atmosphere or into low earth orbit. The spaceplane had fancy reconnaissance equipment so they could take pictures of anywhere on earth.
This explains why the Air Force mothballed the SR-71s in the 90s. There also have been sightings of a big delta-winged plane for the past 15 years or so. It also explains why the USGS were detecting Mach 6 sonic booms on their west coast seismic detection equipment.
People have been talking about a reconnaissance program called "Aurora" since the early 90s. People generally thought it was a Mach 6 plane that was like the SR-71.
The smoking gun for the program was 2 modified C-5 transport planes that NASA admitted to having but they didn't officially exist. Kind of like Area 51, it's there but we can't say its there.
Go read the whole thing. It is really amazing.
I think it is interesting that they hid much of the spending for the system in the A-12 (Navy attack plane) and the National Aerospace Plane budgets. Both of those programs have been canceled due to their budget overruns.
I have been on a mailing list for Skunk-Works related stuff for a long time, here's an interesting post from 1996:
Original Text
From: Kathryn & Andreas Gehrs-Pahl <schnars@ais.org>, on 9/19/96 7:12 PM:
To: "Skunk Works List" <skunk-works@mail.orst.edu>
I got the following email on June 29, 1996, from <pcstone@cct.infi.net>,
which I believe sounds like a pretty similar encounter. The only aircraft I
could think of at the time, resembling that mystery plane, would have been
a
Beech Starship or maybe a Rutan VariEze or LongEZ. The engines of those
aircraft are definitely on top, and not below the wings, though, and they
are both propeller driven. Also, the canards are not on the very front of
the planes, especially on the Starship.
One of the differences, with respect to the XB-70-like aircraft, are the
winglets, pointing up, rather than down, and the apparent black color.
Does anyone have other suggestions?
- -- Andreas
>From: pcstone <pcstone@cct.infi.net>
>Subject: Mysterious plane I saw
>I live in the countryside of Maryland. Last week my wife and I were out
>on the driveway and overhead flew a black military looking plane. The
>design was such that is had a set of smaller wings extruding from the
>front of the plane. These wings came from the very tip. That is to say,
>there was no part of the nose protruding out in front to the wings. The
>main large wings started about half way down the fuselage and swept at
>about 45 degrees till it was even with the rear of the fuselage. The rear
>wings tipped up sharply at the ends. There was no upright tail section at
>the rear. The only vertical members were the flipped up portion of the
>swept back wings. From directly below the plane, the rear main wings
>formed a delta shape. Like a triangle, the back portion of the wings were
>straight from tip to tip. The egines were in a horizontal allignment
>clustered at the rear of the plane directly under the fuselage.
>This plane looked a bit larger than a standard fighter plane, but not as
>large as something like a B-2.
>Any ideas? I would love to find a picture and get some info.
This thing's been out there for a long time.
