Spike Jones wrote:
> GBurch1@aol.com wrote: Aurora "evidence" -- I sense you're a skeptic, too...
>
> greg, i have an explanation for that sighting by the av week editor: here
> was a very credible witness, an airplane expert, not easily fooled, who
> saw this totally unfamiliar aircraft traverse from horizon to horizon
> in 35 seconds. other witnesses reported a buzzing sound, as one
> might expect from a pulse detonation engine.
> snip
>
> a radar scattering drone could be flown over tonopah range, there are
> receivers and transmitters all over the place out there. the pilotless
> vehicle would not need to be large, so it would be a good candidate
> for pulse det propulsion. on the other hand, pulse det is highly unlikely
> to push any aircraft supersonic, so this is why i suspect the observer
> must have underestimated the size and distance to the aircraft.
> snip
>
> have you any ideas?
yeah. Its called an aerospike engine. Heard of it? Yeah, you work at Lockheed, so of course you would, as its the engine that will be used on the VentureStar vehicle. Come to think of it, Lockheed also builds all of the classified planes that are flown at Tonapah as well ....hmmmmm.....
Now, it is possible to build a ramjet system which uses the rearward surface of the vehicle and the shockwave that is captured at a crease in the airframe surface, thus acting as an aerospike.
The thing that makes me think that such technologies ARE infact in use by Lockheed vehicles, is that I find it HIGHLY unlikely that NASA would agree to invest several billion dollars in building a vehicle which will be commercial from the get go but will be dependent on an engine technology which supposedly has never been used on another vehicle. The fact that Lockheed already had testbed engines running on the test stand immediately after the first public announcement of the VentureStar program indicates to me that the technology is already developed, and possibly already proven on another vehicle, possibly one nicknamed 'Aurora' either accurately or inaccurately.....
But you never know with black project people. I remember that the stealth fighter program was publicly called the F-19 program by people who claimed to be in the know, and this was the program the soviets tried so hard to find info about, when the real program was the F-117 program which supposedly was just a research project using mothballed century series jets as remotely piloted drones. When the public was being fed the tripe that the Stealth Fighter was called the 'Wobblin Goblin', and Tom Clancy called it the 'Frisbee' in Red Storm Rising, its actual name was the Nighthawk.
Mike