If you're interested, as is El Jefe in spiffy airplanes, secret bases and stuff guaranteed to cause Chinese, Russian or Iranian generals to sleep poorly at night, have a look at Bill Sweetman's Popular Science article on the interesting aircraft out at Area 51, here. Mr. Sweetman is often uncommonly well informed, and has written some interesting books, many of which inhabit El Jefe's bookshelves.
2 comments:
aurora has always been something of an enigma to my thinking.
mr. sweetman's discussion does nothing to provide anything new, other than to inform that it is still swimming around.
operationally how do you get up to speed to operate the ram jet? conventional propulsion of course.
what to do with the conventional propulsion once the ramjet takes over?
cover the intake/thrust entrances of course?
at mach 6 you can forget about control surfaces, kind of like the iranian/russian high speed torpedo.
and at that speed, anything below angels 80 you will need a heat shield.
the sr-71 leaks fuel on the tarmac that creates a fire hazard. not until it reaches operational speed do the sealing surfaces actually "contain" the fuel.
the boys in vegas must be rolling some big dice.
years ago, my vantage point for the commuter airlines was the excalibur.
Popular Science Fiction is more like it. There might be one or two valid concepts in the report. But most of those drawings in the gallery are fantasy.
I dropped my subscription to PopSci after I noticed several politically correct and dubious environmental articles during the 2004 election.
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