…the news gets out? I mean, with all of the kooks that seem to hang out in the Nevada desert, somebody MUST have seen this plane by now!
Seriously, suppose the Art Bell types areright…and Area 51 contains several advanced weapons that the US Congress and public have been kept in the dark about. How long could the secrecy last?
I assume that the people who work in Area 51 take a drink, upon occasion…so how long before an inebrieated mechanic spills his guts at a local tavern.
Would the “men in black” appear and spirit him away?
Or would the secrets wind up in a pentagon file, never to bee seen?
How long did the secrecy last for the F-117 stealth fighter, which IIRC was also tested at Groom Lake in Area 51? Until the official roll-out, barring espionage or carelessly drunk mechanics who would be arrested by federal officers and prosecuted under due process of law for serious breach of the clauses in the contracts they signed detailing matters of national security, that’s when.
Come on, ralph, your OP’s seem to be getting more superficial and ill-conceived even though you’ve been here for quite a while now. I genuinely like the spontaneity and randomness of the subjects you propose for debate, but might I politely request that you try to make them a little better informed? I don’t wish to sound snarky - it just seems that you could answer your own questions yourself within a couple of minutes most of the time.
We have had a plane with that raw power for decades.
http://www.voodoo.cz/sr71/index2.html
Okay, mach 5, I think. But the missile platform designed for it is still in service, and worked when it was tested. The VF-12A (Armed SR-71) was a fully capable fighter. There just wasn’t much use for it at the time.
As far as the general viability of black projects? The F-117 A has a model number suggesting development started around the end of '74. Rumors about the plane didn’t start till… mmm. '86 or so. There were rumors about black projects, but nothing that’d give you any hard info, and I was at a point where I’d have heard anything leaked civilian-side on the matter.
Right now, the current big spook projects that I know of are the mysterious Aurora, which may actually exist, as far as some reports about half a month back, and the giant, stealthed, heavy lift balloons. Aurora dates to a few months before the announced cancellation of the SR-71 project, and the balloons are maybe five years back.
So. How long before vauge rumors of things? Eh. Those happen, but they happen constantly. How long before rumors specific enough to know the type of project? No more than four years, I think. Detailed rumors… long time. The pilots won’t say a thing, though. It’s simply that you can’t hide flying things all that well.
I asked a hard question! Now, I can understand how back in the 1970’s, the CIA could keep a big operation like the “Glomar Explorer” secret for quite a while…but that was pre-internet days.
Now, suppose you have a top secret project, employing thousands of scientists, engineers. mechanics, machinists, etc…all with internet access. How long could something that big be kept secret? Plus, all those people hanging around the desert-with night vision scopes and video cameras.
I just don’t see the gov. being able to conceal all the stuff that the Art Bell types hint at.
They are openly testing scramjets that can do Mach 7 so far already.
I though the Air Force had moved much of its R&D operations from Groom Lake to another facility because of UFO hunting nuts giving the place too much publicity?
Or is that just what they WANT you to think?
For the period of five to seven years, yes, they could. The only issue would be a fighter of the type you suggest would have a rather… distinctive… flight profile, capable of being detected perhaps hundreds of miles away. However, the USAF has recently stated they’re looking forwards to Edge of Space operations.
In short, if they were building one of these jets, we’d be hearing scattered rumors about it, right now. On the other hand, we hear scattered rumors about things they’re not building, too. Is it possible to keep it quiet? Yes, for the short term. Not for the long term.
One convention among the kooks really bothers me, and that is the whole “Area 51” thing. It is a map designator for a portion of a test area, that’s all. In spite of that it has taken on this whole aura of mystery, like the old saw about “Aliens at Area 51”. What a crock.
Anyway, it’s not too terribly hard to keep a secret. Just attach draconian penalties for blabbing and release tiny tidbits of information to keep the cranks at bay and voila!, at the end you’ll have your fait accompli.
A few years ago my uncle (who lives in Nevada) was driving across the desert at night when he was buzzed by a large, black, bat shaped object. He had no idea what it was, but suspected that the government was involved. He tells me that such “UFO” sightings are comon in the Nevada desert.
About a year later, the B2 Spirit was unveiled to the public. So they don't always keep as tight a lid on these things as some people think.Well, I’ve actually been to Groom Lake and seen some interesting things…no aliens though. Could they keep it secret? Certainly, at least for the short term. I SERIOUSLY doubt anyone there is going to spill the beans though. What you’d get is the odd sighting by someone outside…like we had with the Stealth Fighters. Mostly they will be written off because the folks seeing them will think they are UFO…which they ARE in the respect that they are unidentified by the clowns looking at them.
One has to see the security of the place to believe it though. I think most of its public record (when the site was fully in use) so look it up sometime and you’ll understand why you don’t get a lot of leaks internally about projects.
BTW, there isn’t any projects that the Congress and Senate don’t know about…at least not the subcommittee’s anyway. I have no doubt that there are projects that the FULL Congress/Senate doesn’t know about, but a small select committee pretty much knows about all of them.
As to the sensationalist OP header…I wouldn’t be surprised if the Air Force were experimenting with hyper or trans-sonic planes…or even looking into a sub-orbatal fighter, at least from an experimental perspective. I’m fairly confident that the Air Force is way ahead of the curve on experimental air craft, and that the ones we know about are several years behind where the current research is today. A mach 10 fighter though…how practical would such a beast be? Unless it were unmanned of course.
-XT
I don’t know about area 51, but you seem to be talking about the successor to the X-43a program, the news of which is already out.
One of my brothers is (or was anyway) a physicist who worked on various government projects. He told me the secrecy agreements he signed were truly scary things. A friend of his who is an attorney was looking it over for fun one day and mentioned that it read as if the government could come after him after he was dead for revealing secrets. I’m not sure what the government thinks it can do to a dead person and suspect it is just how the thing is written but nevertheless he said the secrecy agreements are truly ironclad and deeply serious. If you worked under one of these and decided to blab I think you could expect some very serious repercussions to yourself. The government does not seem to have any sense of humor in this regard.
There are photos of the Aurora’s vapor trail (or at least that is what people are saying it is…I doubt anyone knows). Here’s one such: http://www.aemann.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/aircraft/black/aurora/donut1.htm
I’m not sure what a hypersonic jet would get the military. Certainly it will get where it is going very quickly but it doesn’t seem as if that is much of an issue today with modern jets. Of course nothing would catch one of these (missile or normal plane) but again one would suppose it’d have to slow down to drop bombs or otherwise fight at which point it’d become vulnerable (I cannot imagine what opening bomb bay doors would do to a plane going that fast but doubt it’d be wise). As I understand it the issue with hypersonic planes is not so much that we can’t make engines to push one fast enough but that they get extremely hot (think of the space shuttle on re-entry). As a result they must fly at the edge of space to minimize this issue so again, not sure what a plane would do all the way up there except drop bombs or take pictures…an awful lot of trouble to drop a bomb that BUFFs still do just fine with today (or B1s or B2s).
The secrets will last forever. Oh, they might become public knowledge, a la Aurora (whatever Aurora really is) or the infamous heavy lifters/“black triangles”, but that doesn’t mean 99% of the public will believe in them, or acknowledge them.
Heck, the USAF could probably nuke a small town in the west and deny it for years to come. After all, anyone who said the govt. was lying would just be a “kook.” A tiny bit of ridicule can make anyone’s account, regardless of how convincing they are or how good their evidence is, just more UFO/conspiracy/mistaking-Venus-for-a-flying-saucer hogwash.
‘Seriously’?
You think US senators don’t want to know about where the tax dollars are spent? Or on what? Or whether it works?
OK.
I would add that the glorious nature of the Area 51 conspiracy is that if no information ever leaks, this proves the conspiracy exists.
Doesn’t a nuclear weapon leave some trace?
What about the relatives of all the inhabitants?
All this from the ‘intelligence’ community that brought you WMD’s in Iraq.
An even better method to keep a secret:
Feed the internet and UFO groups with false projects every 4 months.
Nobody will be able to pick out the real story from the noise.
From what I recall (no cite, sorry!), the government encouraged these crank tales if only to cover up whatever else was going on there-mostly your standard, run of the mill military projects. (Especially during the Cold War).
Bombs could be deployed A-5 “Vigilante” style without projecting anything into the airstream.
In any case, the idea of a Mach 10 fighter is quite unreasonable, an interceptor maybe, but a fighter flying at that speed wouldn´t have any utility.
I would agree with Ale. There is no practical use for a mach 10 fighter. It wouldn’t be fuel efficient enough to travel to a hot spot (the only need for such speed) and it would have no use in a dogfight.
A more appropriate use for such speed would be that of spy plane and it would only be needed in lieu of gaps in satellite coverage. It’s so easy now to launch a global hawk from a friendly base and let it loiter over any potential conflict. If it were truly a stealth requirement than miniaturized spy-bots would be much more useful.
The sR71 was only useful during the gap in Soviet radar technology. Remember the US and GB made a number of survey runs deep into the USSR using British bombers. At the time, the Soviets couldn’t establish a radar image useful enough to direct fighter jets. Once radar technology caught up, it was easy to launch a Mach 2+ fighter with missiles capable of hitting a Mach-3 aircraft.
I was under the impression the SR 71 flew higher and faster than any other aircraft.
That doesn’t make it invulnerable to missiles.