Regular hangers-out in conspiricy theory circles will have heard rumblings for years about some super-secret "black project" named "Aurora".
Back in the early 90's, when I was studying Aero Engineering at university, I spent far too much time hanging out in the library, reading periodicals like Aviation Week. There were fairly regular snippets covering reports of various unusual goings-on - sightings of strangely-shaped aircraft and other oddities.
Probably the most compelling evidence for such flight tests are the series of unusual sonic booms chronicled above Southern California, beginning in mid to late 1991. On at least five occasions, these sonic booms were recorded by at least 25 of the 220 US Geological Survey sensors across Southern California used to pinpoint earthquake epicenters. The incidents were recorded in June, October, November, and late January 1991. Seismologists estimate that the aircraft were flying at speeds between Mach 3 and 4 and at altitudes of 8 to 10 kilometers. The aircraft's flight path was in a North North-East direction, consistent with flight paths to secret test ranges in Nevada. Seismologists say that the sonic booms were characteristic of a smaller vehicle than the 37 meter long shuttle orbiter. Furthermore, neither the shuttle nor NASA's single SR-71B were operating on the days the booms were registered.
[...]
"On Apr. 5 (a Sunday) and Apr. 22, radio hobbyists in Southern California monitored transmissions between Edwards AFB's radar control facility (Joshua Control) and a high-altitude aircraft using the call sign "Gaspipe." The series of radio calls occurred at approximately 6 a.m. local time on both dates.
"Controllers were directing the unknown Gaspipe aircraft to a runway at Edwards, using advisories similar to those given space shuttle crews during a landing approach. The monitors recorded two advisories, both transmitted by Joshua Control to Gaspipe: "You're at 67,000, 81 mi. out," and "Seventy mi. out, 36,000. Above glide slope."
(For those who didn't spot the subtleties of that last bit, those altitudes (I'm assuming they're in feet) and distances indicate a descent of 6 vertical miles in 11 miles of horizontal travel - which is an
awfully steep descent, starting at a rather high altitude. Covering the remaining 7 miles altitude in 70 miles of ground distance is a much more sane rate of descent)
This page includes extracts from a few of the articles I remember, amongst other stuff relating to the Aurora rumours.
Having read all that stuff, I came to the conclusion that there really were probably at least two classified aircraft programmes out there - one big one, and one small one. At least one was seriously fast and high-altitude. Neither was probably ever officially called "aurora", but in the absence of any proper name, that seems a perfectly good handle to hang all the rumours on.
So why am I blithering about all this stuff now?
Aviation Week just published a piece describing a two-stage to orbit spaceplane they call "blackstar" that has allegedly been decommissioned, having been flying for at least 15 years.
The gist of it basically appears to be: take a plane looking something like the abandoned
XB-70 Valkyrie Mach 3 long range bomber prototype, and use it to lug a small manned spaceplane (the article suggests something like the
X-20 Dyna-Soar) up to altitude for a supersonic air-launch. The spaceplane then goes on to sub-orbital or even orbital flight.
This does look like a very effective way to join-the-dots on a lot of the rumours.
I'd take the fine detail with a tonne of salt. For instance, the suggestion that left-over components from the XB-70 program were used is nuts - there's a 20 year gap between the end of that program and the suggested start of the "blackstar" program. In that time, the materials science of aerospace engineering advanced a
lot, and the Valkyrie was definitely old-school, not to mention that major aircraft structural components generally don't like being left in a warehouse for a couple of decades.
On the other hand, as a whole, in engineering terms, it sounds vaguely sane. For US Military definitions of "vaguely sane", which is to say, "bonkers, but it might just work..."
If you wanted to build a carrier plane that could lift a smaller vehicle up to 90,000 feet and Mach 3-4, then the XB-70 sounds like a plausible example to follow.
There's much less detailed description of the "orbiter", but what there is fits other factors. The article mentions the
[X-30] National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) project, which was launched by the Reagan adminstration amongst much fanfare in 1986, and finally fizzled out in the early 90s, having consumed vast amounts of money for very little visible result.
At that time, I was a plane geek, then a student of aero engineering. The more I learned, the more the NASP struck me as complete la-la-land fantasy. The concept of a hypersonic (that's mach 5 and above) sub-orbital, air-breathing, scramjet-powered
passenger plane was so far beyond the state-of-the-art that it was just laughable. Once I stopped being a naive little kid and started to realise that governments might have impure motives, it seemed obvious that the NASP was either a colossal pork-barrel to keep the military-industrial complex happy, or a cover for something else. The visible work on the design of the NASP was centered around the problem of building a hypersonic air-breathing plane. Use the NASP's air intakes to feed the aerospike rocket mentioned in the article, and you've got something that sounds a lot like that "orbiter".
I keep putting scare-quotes around "orbiter" because I'm not convinced that it needs to actually orbit in the true sense of the word. If the presumed role of fast-response photo-reconnaissance is correct, then a once-around-the-planet suborbital flight, possibly including Dyna-soar-style atmosphere skipping, would be perfectly good enough. It would also make an air-breathing rocket propulsion system far more useful. A slower-than-orbital speed would make launch and re-entry much easier (from an engineering perspective) and give more time over the target, at lower altitude, for observation, while still staying all-but-invulnerable to surface-to-air missiles (when I say "slower" and "lower", I still mean mach 8-10 plus and 30-50 miles altitude: damn fast, and damn high). That sort of flight profile also makes much more overtly hostile missions (like bombing - either conventional, nukes, or nutty stuff like kinetic-kill "rods from god") more feasible. Crazy, for all sorts of reasons, but feasible.
Anyhow. It's now past 0100hrs, and I've got to get up in the morning, so I'd better stop with the mad-plane-geeking.
[hat-tip:
autopope,
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calatrice's enthusiastic anti-recommendation, probably never will) but the film is powerful, moving stuff. A proper grown-up intelligent British1 SF movie. Go see it.
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