Aurora has been and continues to be one of the guarded secrets of our government. It is the hypersonic (greater than Mach 5 and some say up to Mach 10) aircraft to replace F-117 and XR-71. See this link for more background:
From a technological standpoint this would be a great accomplishment, however, I do not understand the secrecy involved in all of this.
Back in the days of the Cold War the need for spy planes (the U-2 and the Stealth F-117) was understood. Now, what are we going to do - find terrorists while streaking across the sky at 6,000-mph and altitudes in excess of 115,000 feet?
I’ve seen the “donuts on a rope” contrail here. We do have many airbases, an international airport and various airstrips in the area. I even went so far as to contact one of the Aurora sites. I was surprised at how they dismissed my account so readily. I did ask if perhaps any conventional aircraft produce that distinctive contrail and they evaded that question.
Here’s the clincher. Right about the time I contacted them, I had seen a shot of the Pyramid of the Sun a co-worker took in Mexico that he installed on his desktop. I liked it so much I asked for a copy. One day while looking really closely at the pic, I noticed something in the sky that ran from left to right.
“Donuts on a Rope!!!”
There is, or was, a project named Aurora, for at least one year, because it accidentally showed up as a single line entry on a non-classified budget proposal (oops).
We were possibly going to be spending oodles of money on Aurora for that year, whatever Aurora was. Of course we don’t know for sure if we actually spent that much money because as soon as they realized their oops Aurora went right back into the black.
It’s classified.
And that’s about it.
We don’t know if it’s a plane. Even if it is a plane, we don’t know that it’s a replacement for the SR-71. Right now, I could tell you that it’s a secret probe to get us to the bottom of the ocean (because once in 1960 just wasn’t enough), and I’d have just as much to back up my claim as you do that it’s a plane.
Finding terrorists seems to be the ideal job for some nifty keen un-classified projects like the predator and the global hawk. UAVs seem to be the future for this type of work.
Nitpicks: It’s the SR-71, and while it and the U-2 are properly characterized as spy planes, the F-117A is a stealthy bomber, not a spy plane. AFAIK, it has no reconaissance capabilities.
Umm, the standard ansewer is that for advanced countries , or lesser ones with advanced friends , you can plot the orbit of spy sattelites , and hide or cammo stuff ,while they fly over you.
Any type of spy plane can appear at anytime ,and make the fiends dastardly plot public, as well as there are some places that get minimal spy sat coverage or just were not on the radar ,until doing something, I would imagine that the falklands had almost no spy sat coverage , (maybe landsat) until the argies invaded.
What military advantage is there in hypersonic ultra-high-altitude spyplanes? Hard to say, really, but the current trend toward smaller, lower-flying UAVs probably more accurately represents the future of strategic reconnaissance. Satellites were hearalded in 1990 as the primary reason for the retirement of the SR-71 but as soon as it was withdrawn, limitations of orbital reconnaissance platforms prompted the USAF to recommision SR-71s on a limited basis. What limitations? Satellites have known and predictable courses making it simple to spoof them or avoid being visible when they are overhead. The U-2 is capable but cannot deploy as fast as the SR-71 or the mythical Aurora. OTOH, the real-time capability offered by UAVs and the low cost and risk associated with their employment makes them the wise bet for planners of future USAF operational capability.
It is also important to realize that the USAF is very guilty of acting under the influence of “institutional inertia”. If it don’t go faster, higher, and further, the boys in the blue suits have a hard time getting interested. No armed service is as enamored of bright shiny objects as the USAF.
First of all, you need to plan your military capabilities not just in terms of what the current threat is, but what potential future threats may be 15-20 years down the road, that being roughly the time it takes (now) to develop a nascent technology into a operational vessel/weapon. Today, the threat is “the terrorists”; tomorrow, it may be some of our friends over in Asia, or some of the gentlemen on the Subcontinent, or for all we know, Canada. (They’re insidious, I tells ya’!)
Second, having retired the prohibitively expensive and logistically complex SR-71 fleet (except for some test articles in use by NASA), we need a spy plane. Why, in the era of surveillance satellites, do we need planes? 'Cause satellites can only see where and when they pass, and they can’t see (well) through cloud cover. Aircraft allow dedicated surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Right now, we still have and use the TR-1, which is an updated version of the venerable U-2 spy plane, but it is neither invalunerable nor especially stealthy; a high altitude, round-the-earth spyplane would be just the thing to supplement existing capabilities for decades to come.
It can also serve as a testbed for technologies to be used in a Falcon-type attack or strategic bomber. This actually makes a lot more sense than, say, using Peacekeeper or restarting the Midgetman program in order to deliver conventional bombs around the globe, as has been suggested by some. (The drawback of this plan is obvious to anybody concerned with nuclear and ICBM proliferation.)
“The terrorists” will disappear off the map in a few years; not that they won’t exist–we’ll always have terrorists–but we’ll have new boogiemen, most likely North Korea, China, or India, and we’ll need the capability to deal with those threats. Of course, we’ll probably have outsourced all of our defense manufacturing to these countries, so they’ll already have our technology, as well as provide technical support. :eek:
Wouldn’t the same conditions that made the SR-71 prohibitively expensive also make any technology like “Aurora” the same? Is “Aurora” a spy plane or reconaissance plane (previous posts haven’t made it real clear to me what the difference is)?
Nothing I have read implies that the Aurora is unmanned; the SR-71, U-2, and TR-1 are also likewise manned programs. However, there are multiple tactical and strategic UAV reconaissance platforms (Predator and Global Hawk are probably the two best known) either in current operational use or nearing operational capability. This is the current trend in reconaissance aircraft. The Aurora, SR-71, F-14 TARPS, RF-101, and A-5 Vigilante represent the previous trend in reconaissance aircraft of “higher, farther, faster”.
I should also add that the U-2 bucked that “higher, farther, faster” trend. The current crop of UAVs owe much to the principle employed by the U-2 and RB-57 Canberra in that they can operate at extreme altitudes. The UAVs have an additional advantage in being small and made of composite materials. This helps them to operate without the bad guys knowing they are there.
I’ve never heard this term but I can guess that you mean evidence of several sonic booms in a row, therefore evidence of a mach-whatever airplane (please correct me if I’m wrong.) Would it be wise, however, or even practical to accelerate that fast?
“Donuts on a rope” refers to the appearance of contrails supposedly left by the Aurora.
As for sonic booms, they are not the aftereffect of acceleration but of velocity. Multiple successive booms are caused by multiple shock waves or reflections off terrain, not the Mach number. Flying at higher speeds means reduced time for an adversary to detect your approach and take action. Intercept solutions are not as simple as pointing a rifle at a bullseye.