You know, the one that supposedly has the pulse-jet engine? Also I seem to recall an article in Popular science a few years back which said that the Air Force had moved it’s “black budget projects,” ie; Stealth Fighter, Stealth Bomber from Groom Lake/Area 51 to a base in Colorado. Any truth to this or is it yet another govenrnment misdirectional ploy?
What spy plane? There is no spy plane. Those sonic booms that were recorded were just thunder. Those fast moving lights seen at night in the desert are reflections from Venus. Those high-altitude contrails are just strangely shaped clouds.
The military did move testing of “secure” aircraft from “Area 51” because any further attempt to deny the existance of the test site was just a waste of time. There were too many people taking pictures of the area (including private-industry satelite photos) for denial to work. The signs saying trespassers may be shot are still up but the unmarked/non-uniformed security force has apparently left the area. Obviously there has been no official announcement made about where the testing site moved to. It’ll take a while for the investigators, conspiracy theorists, or the just plain curious to find where they moved to (assuming the testing site was moved to one new location as opposed to spitting it up into smaller units located in different areas).
On a cross-country road trip a few years back, I drove two hours north of Las Vegas, then took an unmarked dirt road to approach “Area 51” from the east. I got as far as the “Trespassers” sign and snapped a few photos for posterity, while noticing a couple of monitoring devices on some hills nearby.
I then returned to the main road and started to make my way back to Las Vegas. As I did, I passed a Nevada Highway patrol car going on a tear headed in the opposite direction. Makes me wonder if he was headed out to check on me…
The U2 was designed, built, and tested there in the 50s.
Ditto for the SR-71 Blackbird in the 60s.
Tacit Blue and Have Blue, the prototypes and technology testbeds for the Stealth Bomber and Stealth Fighter programs, during the 70s and early 80s.
I’m certain that truly far-out aircraft have been tested since then.
AFAIK, the Aurora posesses a hypersonic version of the pulse-jet, the powerplant the Nazis used on the V-1 “Buzz Bombs” of WW2.
The Fuel is liquid hydrogen, liquid methane, or some combination of the two. The cryogenic liquid also cools the red hot skin of the airframe due to atmospheric friction.
Another possible technology of the Aurora is an electromagnetic shield. During supersonic flight, the nose cone ignites a plasma torch, ionizing the supersonic shockwave. Polarizing this ionized shockwave…with a negative electrode in the plasma torch and a positive electrode in the jet exhaust… causes the shockwave to bend around the airframe and converges into the exhaust, thus eliminating the sonic boom, and possibly augmenting the jet thrust with the shockwave acting as a kind of electric “warp drive”.
Here’s the Federation of American Scientists article on Aurora.
I just scanned the article, but it looks like FAS is saying that Aurora might exist in an experimental or prototype form.
I read somewhere that it was thought that the work being done in Area 51 was being moved to a sight in Eastern Central Utah. The government owns much of the land there and apparently there was some language buried in some legislation that seemed to indicate that money was being appropriated for such a project.
Sorry I can’t be more specific but it may help you locate the place if you are so inclined.
It’s my understanding that “Aurora” is just a classified project whose name appeared on a non-classified portion of the budget (oops). From there, everything else about what Aurora is seems to be pure speculation. The consensus seems to be that its an aircraft based soley on the fact that lots of folks said we need a replacement for the SR-71 and the air force said no we don’t then this Aurora thing shows up on the budget so that’s what it must be. Once we all decided it was an aircraft then we started to figure out what kind of aircraft it is. We know they are experimenting with engines that leave cute little puff trails in the sky because we’ve seen the cute little puff trails. Somehow this means that Aurora has a pulse jet engine. As more and more little bits of speculation about what the air force is up to creep into popular mythology, the neater stuff all somehow gets morphed onto Aurora.
I’ve never seen anything that indicates that any characteristic of Aurora, including the fact that it’s an aircraft, has any basis at all in reality.
The government has secret bases all over the place. I have heard that they moved a lot of stuff from “Area 51” because it has received so much attention in the past few years. They’ve also pushed the boundaries out from it a bit so the UFO watchers can’t see the facility so easily from where they are allowed to sit and watch.
From the link by Kamandi “Circumstantial evidence suggests that this project has been underway since 1987 and that a first flight occurred in 1989.” Two years for a hyper-modern airplane to go from project onset to first flight? I don’t think so. At best there may be some proof-of-concept test planes to test shapes, alloys, engines, fuel systems, etc. Everything else looks like just initial proposals of what the aerospace industry thinks they could make (if the funding were to be provided).
I don’t have anything to add about the Aurora, except to point out that previous “superweapons”, like the B2 bomber and anti-missle lasers, haven’t lived up to the hype, so don’t expect anything too revolutionary.
About Area 51 being closed down: I heard that they moved the secret aircraft testing to the White Sands Missle Range. Supposedly, people have gone out to the Groom Lake base and found it to be deserted.
I know that Sagan referred to the Aurora in “Demon Haunted World” as a phenomena that is worthy of some serious investigation. That’s about all I know, too.
I suspect that the US government think Area 51 is a wonderful place. Guard it, put up a few “Trespass and be shot” signs, move some stuff around at random to create a bit of interest and Bingo! All the nutters concentrate on Area 51 while the real secrets are somewhere else. Area 51 is flypaper for UFO believers, conspiracy theorists and other assorted flakes.
Per a careful reading of the FAS site and years’ worth of Aviation Leak & Space Mythology: The propulsion system hypothesized in this thread for the “Aurora” has been tested occasionally but isn’t anything like in an operational state of readiness. The aircraft itself doesn’t exist and never did, especially as a next-generation “spy plane”. A hypersonic stealth aircraft is well beyond the current practical state of the art. (The FAS site discusses this at length.)
The big driver in all of this is MONEY. The SR-71 was obscenely expensive ($400 million+ per anum to operate one small squadron) , and when those costs were balanced against the little bit of extra flexibility in strategic recon that the aircraft supposedly permitted, even the USAF decided that it wasn’t worth it.
Go Alien: Close to true. Because of the loonies, most of what goes on at what’s popularly called Area 51 is support and materials research. Flight testing of prototypes goes on elsewhere.
You all might want to look into what’s been reported and conceptually presented in the past on aircraft, etc. which were later revealed publicly. Look at the “F-119” and the various “on a good source” artist’s depictions of the “Stealth bomber”, and the whole plethora of renditions of various aricraft presented in the supposedly authoratative Aviation Week (referred to above). Most never existed, some do but in a form very diferent from what’s been “reliably reported” (and with lower performance to boot), and then there are the ones that never were reported/speculated on but were just total duds (like the thing that was supposed to be a stealth J-STARS, but ended up looking like a flying Oscar Meyer Weenie Wagon).
I remember a Popular Science article a number of years back that said the ‘New Area 51’ (i.e. for serious secret research on ‘Black’ programs) was a (even more) remote base in Utah.
Wasn’t there a lawsuit brought by Area 51 employees recently about contamination from some material they were working on there? IIRC, it was tossed because of some waiver they require everyone there to sign.
And aren’t spy aircraft mostly useless now thanks to satellites and unmanned drones such as the Predator? I doubt the government would feel the need to develop a super-advanced version of a U2 or SR71 (kinda amusing how they are both band names now).
In response to my own post, I found a site which disagrees that Area 51 moved (and the article was in Popular Mechanics, not Popular Science)
One of the pretty good pieces of evidence for hypersonic tests of some sort are the records of the Geologic Survey folks.
- Every aircraft shape make a lightly different sonic boom. These show up on their seismic recording equipment. For example, they can look at the trace after the fact and recognize booms made by the space shuttle, sr-71, and fighters. Something has been making a sonic boom that they can’t put a name on.
- They can roughly track the souce of the sonic booms by triangulation of multiple stations the same way they do to locate the epicenter of an earth quake. Tracks have come in from over the Pacific and very high speed.
- The track of the mystery plane was heading toward Nevada, a number of years ago, when I read it.
Groom Lake was one location I had in mind when I said: “Because of the loonies, most of what goes on at what’s popularly called Area 51 is support and materials research. Flight testing of prototypes goes on elsewhere.”
AFAIK, Groom Lake is not the same place as the so-called Area 51. Same state, possibly same county, but not all that close. Granted, they might be managed as a part of the same giant group of complexes.
I don’t know for a fact, but I think the Groom Lake airstrip is much longer.
I am aware of what Scott H is referring to, but the phenomena do not necessarily indicate that they come from a fully developed and operational aircraft, especially one like a next-generation SR-71.
While such an aircraft could be nice to have from the viewpoint of a minority of people in the recon community, it doesn’t square at all with the military’s priorities of improving its main-force bread-and-butter capabilities like fighters. Selling the need and securing funding for the F-22 and F-24 (? I mean the JSF) is hard enough without undermining the effort by siphoning off funds for something with indisputably less utility like this “Aurora”.
For the record, I just find it interesting to guess what may be going on out there, BUT I am not concerned about it. I am sure there are always some black research projects going on somewhere. And I feel that is just how it should be. I feel like the government has some responsibility to push the state of the art in weapons and aircraft design and be relatively quiet about what they are up to.
Historically, the government has done a pretty good and responsible job with this type of stuff in the past. I am satisfied to let them continue.
Satellites are great, but they have limitations:
[ul][li]It’s too easy for people at the target to predict when they’ll be overhead (and camoflauge what they’re doing)[/li][li]They have little or no short-notice tasking ability (if you need to image a particular target ASAP, you may not be able to get a satellite over that location for quite some time)[/li][li]They can’t loiter (you get a quick glimpse of a target as the satellite zips by, but no ability to hang around and watch what’s going on).[/ul][/li]
Aircraft can fill those gaps by providing short-notice, unpredictable, long-endurance surveillance.
As for Predator, that’s more of a short-range, medium altitude tactical drone. It can loiter up to 26,000 ft for 24 hours up to 500 miles from its base. Not too shabby, but it’s no U2.
Global Hawk, however, looks to be the wave of the future:
The Air Force is operating a couple of them right now under an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program, and Northrop Grumman is trying to churn them out as fast as they can (which ain’t too fast - last I heard they could only build about four per year).
In any case, if Global Hawk lives up to its specifications, why would the Air Force need an Aurora?
Maybe because the Aurora, Like Have Blue and Tacit Blue, is merely a test bed for a new generation of aircraft:
Hypersonic, trans-atmospheric/sub-orbital craft.
Also, since the fuel for the SR-71 is an ultra-expensive jet fuel with a high boiling point (to cool the airframe’s skin), relatively cheap liquid hydrogen and/or liquid methane is an economically sound replacement.
BTW, if the Area 51/Groom Lake facility has the longest airstrip in the world, maybe its an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle.