Aurora - a Famous Speculative Project

I listened to a few seconds of Mr Schratt, when I finally got up from the floor and managed to switch him off I had to stop and ask myself if we have a much bigger need for mental health screening than even I had thought. Wow, controlling gravity and time NOW? All forms of energy redundant NOW? Whatever he is drinking, you cannot buy it in pints.
 
Somewhat tangential, rather than trad deltas, seeing that sketch of the infamous 'Flying V' brought to mind...
Floating to Space: The Airship to Orbit Program (Apogee Books Space Series) Paperback by John N Powell (Author)

IIRC, his proposed 'surface to ~140 k-feet' vehicles are helium-filled ballonets in twin 'sausages' arranged as huge 'V' by light-weight carbon-fibre trusses. Designed 'weird' propellers to provide efficient thrust...

Down-side, severe danger of giggling.
Up-side, his team do routinely build and fly instruments to edge of space...
 
nitebot said:
It's already been mentioned in this thread but I remember when I first read about the term 'Gaspipe'. I used to buy one of the Short wave radio mags back in the early 90s - I was a scanner enthusiast. Someone wrote in from the US saying that they'd picked up radio communications between an air force base and what appeared to be an aircraft at very high altitude using the call sign 'Gaspipe.' The editor was impressed and asked if anyone else had picked this up. I was pretty sceptical about it all until I read about the sonic booms in California.

The evidence does point to test flights of some sort of aircraft but I bet that the USAF plans (I'm sure they had some) of a SR-71 successor was too costly and the tech too difficult to be reliable so the flights stopped and the program put on hold until about now. I say now because I sense that with the private sector and so many nations really taking a strong interest in space now, the US will be forced to up its game if it still wants to dominate orbital and suborbital space.
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In a September 2010 article published online in the Smithsonian Magazine, William Scott argued that whatever object carried the callsign "Gaspipe" might have been the alleged XOV spaceplane component of the Blackstar system rather than a hypersonic scramjet-powered replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird.
 
Vahe Demirjian said:
nitebot said:
It's already been mentioned in this thread but I remember when I first read about the term 'Gaspipe'. I used to buy one of the Short wave radio mags back in the early 90s - I was a scanner enthusiast. Someone wrote in from the US saying that they'd picked up radio communications between an air force base and what appeared to be an aircraft at very high altitude using the call sign 'Gaspipe.' The editor was impressed and asked if anyone else had picked this up. I was pretty sceptical about it all until I read about the sonic booms in California.

The evidence does point to test flights of some sort of aircraft but I bet that the USAF plans (I'm sure they had some) of a SR-71 successor was too costly and the tech too difficult to be reliable so the flights stopped and the program put on hold until about now. I say now because I sense that with the private sector and so many nations really taking a strong interest in space now, the US will be forced to up its game if it still wants to dominate orbital and suborbital space.
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In a September 2010 article published online in the Smithsonian Magazine, William Scott argued that whatever object carried the callsign "Gaspipe" might have been the alleged XOV spaceplane component of the Blackstar system rather than a hypersonic scramjet-powered replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird.
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Except that it’s very, very unlikely Blackstar ever existed as there is not a shred of evidence that it did.
 
Q-nimbus said:
Except that it’s very, very unlikely Blackstar ever existed as there is not a shred of evidence that it did.
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Do what? There is so much related engineering, concepts, studies, on the idea of a TSTO that its not even funny. There may be no program that ever went operational, but there are probably a lot more attempts at success yet to be revealed.
 
sublight is back said:
Q-nimbus said:
Except that it’s very, very unlikely Blackstar ever existed as there is not a shred of evidence that it did.
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Do what? There is so much related engineering, concepts, studies, on the idea of a TSTO that its not even funny. There may be no program that ever went operational, but there are probably a lot more attempts at success yet to be revealed.
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The blackstar drawing is very similar to the boeing beta, beta II concepts and the xb-70 launched proposed version of the x-15. What i wonder is if the blackstar and the brilliant buzzard are different interpretatios of the same project, or both are totally different craft???
 
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Dear moderators,

Is it possible to put the Boscombe Down posts in a new dedicated thread?
 
When i was a kid, i was kind of weird in that i listened to AM radio. One weekend in January or February, for one day all day long Reuters reported that the usaf had announced that they had begun flying test flights of a new mach 5 spy plane. I can almost remember the words exactly and they specifically said that it was announced by the air force and more details would follow. But then after hearing that initial report repeated God knows how many times it just stopped and as everyone knows, no further details ever came.

Its my bet they built a handful of demonstrators that never lived up to specifications and it lived in limbo for some kind of emergency use before being replaced by an undisclosed stealth platform in the late 90s. That's probably what the north sea sighting was... One of the 3 or 4 demonstrators.

But when people talk about cryo fuels.... Well that's crazy. If such a plane existed when it was supposed to exist then it probably used the same fuel as the sr71 which was kept thoughout the 90s when the blackbirds were flying with nasa. NASA flying blackbirds gives good cover for why the fuel was kept in production after it was retired from service. And wasn't one or two of the blackbirds tankers kept in the fleet for a long time afterwards? Again potentially indicative of a very small fleet?
 
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Q-nimbus said:
A SR-71 or F-117 seems the most plausible possibility, as it seems higly likely it involved an American airframe (if the stories of USAF C-5's etc. are true)

But then I'm reasonably sure that if that was the case, we would have known about it by now, 27 years later. There is no need to keep it secret - both airframes were declassified by then, and there have been plenty of crashes that have been declassified. So that makes me think that there might have been something strange going on back then; if not an exotic aircraft, then certainly a highly, highly sensitive and classified mission by a known aircraft.

The one big problem with this theory is that hunderds, or maybe even thousands of non-Americans must have been involved or have been a witness. That Americans can keep their secrets that long, unlikely, but well, maybe. But it's strange that not a single Brit has spilled the beans over what he or she saw that day, something I consider unlikely if an exotic highly classified aircraft was involved. People like to talk, you know.

Also, one of the big guys who dug into this story is Nick Cook, you know, the guy who thinks the Nazi's were onto anti-gravtiy propulsion, and that the Americans perfected it.... well...

So my guess is a SR-71 or F-117 at best, but quite probably something much, much more mundane and ordinary.
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There's a lot of reasons to keep things secret. For starters why reveal anything at all? For what purpose? Then there's the $$$ that has to be accounted for with Congress. If we had secretly produced 30 secret f23b to use as first in sead/dead why reveal it 25 years later that we had that capability and then probably replaced it with something else? You don't understand that the military isn't general motors that rolls out stuff to drum up the fanboys.

Sr71 isn't plausible and they are all accounted for.

Tacit blue and bird of prey seem to be the only 2 reveals that seem to be revealed for no good reason but they also don't lift the skirt on any secret capabilities
 
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robot700 said:

Revealed: US admits to existence of top secret Mach 6 RS-85 ‘Aurora’ spy-plane​

hushkit.net

Revealed: US admits to existence of top secret Mach 6 RS-85 ‘Aurora’ spy-plane

THE FOLLOWING IS AN APRIL FOOL’S HOAX AND IS NOT TRUE The United States Air Force operated a “manned strategic reconnaissance aircraft” from 1993 to 2018 according to a press rele…
hushkit.net hushkit.net

real?
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Totally, in.the three years since, it now includes a toilet, and the ability to teleport. But only on the 1 April, each year……..
 
I believe the vehicle is or was powered by Dual, Scramjet Turbo-Encabulators using clean methane fuel from the California Bovine Co-op Methane Plant, with a Tofu-based oxidizer. Hemp was also considered but the engineers were afraid that the engines would have a hefty fuel appetite affecting range and could munch the Phase Detractors.
 
Careful with those idea's, a lot of very smart people will think it a going concern and you never know where it will end up. Tofu mountains lying unused in the desert getting very ripe...... Heck, the fumes from the rotting tofu could cause half the desert to get launched into orbit.
 
Foo Fighter said:
Careful with those idea's, a lot of very smart people will think it a going concern and you never know where it will end up. Tofu mountains lying unused in the desert getting very ripe...... Heck, the fumes from the rotting tofu could cause half the desert to get launched into orbit.
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I did brief my Power Point presentation involving the alternate Hemp oxidizer at the Highest Govt levels, my funding is in the final signature cycle, smoked the competition.
 
With all seriousness, I believe we did develop a high-mach vehicle (probably a demonstrator), probably similar to the recent 6th gen fighter demonstrator program. If we pulled it off, makes sense to keep it hush hush with some good levels of mis-information and confusion, only time will tell.
 
publiusr said:
If something does get built...call that Aurora. Then too...if we ever do get antigravity...all the cool names will be used up and we will have to call it "Fred" or something.
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There’s always the SR-72. Though I have not heard much about it since Steve Pace included it in his Projects of Skunk Works book back in 2016.
 
Seriously tho' (sorta), it occurred to me that after Aurora might have been built we stopped seeing serious hypersonic proposals with PDEs (helical combustion is popular now) and big expansion ramps behind the engines. I wonder if these looking promising in the design phases and turned out to be disastrous in practice?
 
archipeppe said:
X-24C ▶️ NHFRF ▶️ Aurora?
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Hmm…

The following is based on the most logical hypothesis.

I don't buy the AURORA as an hypersonic-related project identifier. AURAOA was likely an acronym which I discussed in an earlier post. I suggested AU = Advanced Unmanned, and R O R A as a mix of Reconnaissance, Observation, Research, Remotely Operated, Aircraft or anythong along these lines. Suggestions welcome as I have no real clue. If this hypothesis proves right, then nobody lied at the time. There was no such thing as a manned hypersonic something called the Aurora…

However the timeline you mentionned could be improved by a new one below, whose key points matches Francillon's book contents, uncommon sonic booms and USGS sensor captures, as everything else in the idusty could be justified by a very practical cover story: NASP.

So, to make a long timeline short, here is what I came up with, in a nutshell:

White X24C
--> White NHFRF
--> Black NHFRF (1980/1982)
--> Black manned prototype platform flown tested in around 1986
--> Black operational M=5/6 SR-71 replacement (ASTRA ?) with an IOC around 1988 (SR71 retirement)
--> Technical problems (as always) in around 1993 requiring a majore fix but notsufficient (?) leading to one or more bird loss due to technical issues (i.e. Boscombe Dawn incident, 1994) which might have been caused by PIO (Pilot Induced Oscillations).
--> Black hypersonic fleet grounded. This or these incident(s) might have grounded these new birds for awhile leading to the
--> reactivation of SR-71 up until their definitive retiement sometime around 1997-1998
--> Then I lost track of all hypothethical story.
--> 2003 The Falcon project served the same purpose as NASP in my opinion: a cover story to to mature the new generation of hypersonic projects oe of which could have recently epitomized as an SR-72 (but I'm not sure).

Back to the basics, the timelien I refer to is "old" hypersonics stuff. In 1988, a ittle known hypersonic conference was organized at Nasa Dryden in which the GHP Generic Hypersonics Program was kicked-off. GHP was some sort of a theoretical effort to mature new hypersonic designs across the entire hypersonic spectrum. It was my opinion at the time that you just don't get yourself into any such far-reaching initiative of you don't already have a sound idea and/or concrete results that something is working that you must improve.

This was so long ago. And technology can be forgotten when rookies retire.

A.
 
quellish said:
“AURORA” was an airborne reconnaissance cryptonym, not an acronym
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Any documented proof? I'm just asking for a very skeptical friend of mine that does not want to be identified...
 
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AURORA was, in fact, a secret funding channel for the Advanced Technology Bomber program. The name was created by Col. Adelbert W. “Buz” Carpenter, who managed special access Air Force programs at the Pentagon. In a 2020 interview for Science Channel’s Black Files Declassified, he explained, “AURORA looked like a reconnaissance program but, in fact, [represented] a lot of production money that was to be used for the B-2.”

A similar approach was taken with the Long Range Strike-Bomber. Before being officially designated the B-21 Raider, the name STINGRAY was used within the program when setting up the fledgling test organization. It was very nearly saddled with was more ridiculous name though, sadly, the details were not shared with me. The name Stingray was, perhaps not surprisingly, a leading contender for the official nickname but was no doubt rejected because it was already being used for the MQ-25.
 
archipeppe said:
martinbayer said:
quellish said:
“AURORA” was an airborne reconnaissance cryptonym, not an acronym
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Any documented proof? I'm just asking for a very skeptical friend of mine that does not want to be identified...
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I agree with @quellish , AURORA all capital wasn't an acronym rather a name like GUSTO, OXCART, CORONA, etc.
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I really don't hold a strong (or even semi-strong) opinion either way, I'm just asking for supporting evidence for any associated claims.
 
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Whisperstream said:
AURORA was, in fact, a secret funding channel for the Advanced Technology Bomber program.
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The AURORA program element requested money, but it was never funded. There were no reprogramming actions that put money into it or took money out of it. And if it was used for funding the ATB that would have been illegal and tainted the ATB program.

During that period DoD did use *legal* methods to fund projects using money from other programs - including a hypersonic program that got very close to flying - but those were very different. For example, a radar system for program X may have been funded through a more general 'advanced avionics" program, with the product of that effort going back into program X eventually.

To create a program element with a charter of doing / being Y, but taking that money and using it for program Z (like using funds allocated for a reconnaissance program like AURORA for the ATB) would be illegal.
 
All I have is Carpenter's testimony, which I have no reason to doubt. I haven't found any documentation specifically describing AURORA as a reconnaissance program, or any program details at all. Appendix E of "Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) Structure," DoD 7045.7-H, dated April 2004, lists AURORA (PE 0101119F) with "none" under Description and (H) following the program name to indicate that it is "historic" rather than active.
 
The funding for the competition came out of a secret stash in the Air Force budget. A young colonel working in the Air Force “black program” office at the Pentagon, named Buz Carpenter, arbitrarily assigned the funding the code name Aurora. Somehow this name leaked out during congressional appropriations hearings, the media picked up the Aurora item in the budget, and the rumor surfaced that it was a top secret project assigned to the Skunk Works—to build America’s first hypersonic airplane. That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B-2 competition funding. Although I expect few in the media to believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane, because it simply does not exist.
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Ben Rich, Skunk Works : A Personal Memoir Of My Years At Lockheed

Ben Rich specifically claimed it was ATB competition funding.
 
martinbayer said:
quellish said:
“AURORA” was an airborne reconnaissance cryptonym, not an acronym
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Any documented proof? I'm just asking for a very skeptical friend of mine that does not want to be identified...
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I hear you loud and clear. However, when you go back in time and scrutinize some very early highly graded officers interviewed in that subject, at the start of this AURORA craze, they would answer questions using an article, "the" preceeding the code word AURORA. This language slippage led me to believe that AURORA could well be a program acronym, not just a cryptonym. Which leads to another couple of questions: (1) can a cryptonym be an acronym (and of course, vice versa)? (2) case this has already been observed / documented, which past program would support any such hypothesis?

A.
 
Whisperstream said:
All I have is Carpenter's testimony, which I have no reason to doubt. I haven't found any documentation specifically describing AURORA as a reconnaissance program, or any program details at all. Appendix E of "Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) Structure," DoD 7045.7-H, dated April 2004, lists AURORA (PE 0101119F) with "none" under Description and (H) following the program name to indicate that it is "historic" rather than active.
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Thank you for this explanation.

A.
 

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