How far has the Aurora Project progressed?

There is a lot of information out on the net about the aurora, but it all seems hypothetical. There certainly appears to be an aurora project, or some other project to create a next-generation military aircraft, and I read that a series of bangs had been heard over Nevada that indicated hypersonic flight testing, but no one really seems to know just how far the project has gone. Anyone got any info?

(Sorry if this has already been covered in other threads, but I couldn't see any relating to it).

[edit on 23-11-2006 by mulder101]

Who knows about Aurora. If all such rumors are not proved or disproved by a sighting of an actual prototype, they are most likely just plants to cover up other projects.

If any given secret project fails, in stead of being completely scrapped, a lot of times it's used to spread disinformation and deflect attention from other projects.

After billions of R&D funds are waisted, in order to avoid public scrutiny and to confuse rivaling nations, all kinds of stories are created to throw everyone off.

Aurora concept if far from being hypothetical though.

Russian did in in the 60s-70s.

Look into MiG-105 Spiral 50-50. It was actually operational, so Aurora is not at all hypothetical, it was supposed to be the next gen of MiG-105.

Anyway, it all goes back to Germans 1946 "Sanger" Orbital bomber concept. Supersonic, rocket propelled, lift assisted fuselage, the works.

Russians actually made one fly, and so far we only have Aurora rumors and Х-43A Hiper-X test program, which in fact was based entirely on the test data purchased form Russians by NASA back in 1998.

Russian program was called "Kholod".

By the way, the same German guys that worked on Sanger went on developing a ramjet fighter named Skoda Kauba SK P.14.01.

Currently Russians hold a world record for the most thrust developed by the lightest engine in history. It's a tiny scramjet that weights a mere 440 ponds and pushes out 14.7 tons of thrust to reach speeds of Mach 14.

14.7 tons is around 32.4 thousand pounds. In comparison, a traditional turbofan engine in F-16 Falcon produces between 24 to 29 thousand pounds of thrust depending on the model, and weighs around 3700 pounds.

The new F135 engine developed for the F-35 pushes out 40,000 pounds of thrust on full afterburner in lab conditions, and so far it's the most powerful turbofan in the world today.

Even though the burn time for the tiny Russian scramjet is only 50 seconds, it's only limited by the fuel supply and heat stress tolerances.

This tiny wonder powers a small hypersonic craft called "Igla" (Needle), which completely outperforms our Х-43A Hiper-X.

Even though the official purpose of Igla is reported to be as a flying laboratory, it being only 26 feet long, it kind of makes it a perfect candidate to carry a nuclear warhead.

So unlike a conventional ballistic missile, such hypersonic craft is free to maneuver in order to evade all known traditional defenses, including the upcoming orbital defense systems proposed by Bushes space colonization ambitions.

On the other side, Russians have a variable altitude X-90 Gela (AS-19 «Koala») hypersonic cruise missile with a much longer burning ramjet.

Its burn time is about an hour, and it pushes a 40 foot long cruise missile to mach 5 for a distance of 1200 miles.

So not only Aurora is not hypothetical, it should have been flying literally decades ago.

With the success of Spiral 50-50 Russians perfected ramjet/scramjet propulsion for hypersonic flight, and with further developments they worked on scaling down the technology.

Russian also have other modern hypersonic Mach 14 craft. GGL-8 pops into mind, but there are more.

Theoretically scramjet propulsion is capable of producing speeds up to Mach 25, but such speeds have never been officially reported or acknowledged.

So as it stands, the traditional lead the Russians had in orbital lift capacity and raw speed still remains unchallenged, and I sure hope that all the tax dollars being dumped in our own scramjet projects will eventually materialize into something that actually flies and something we can actually see.

All that top secret Area 51 Skunk Works type hype just doesn't fly any more, literally, because all the Russians have to do is bring more working designs and openly show then on all kinds of Arms Shows, MAKS being one of many.

One more thing for you to consider.

Since you're interested in Aurora, naturally at one point you'll come up on Area 51.

As we all know the kinds of conspiracy theories that are circulating around the nature of area 51.

All kinds of stuff from alien experimentation to anti-gravity drives, and all other kinds of nonsense.

Area 51 is indeed a high priority installation, and while I won't go into other aspects, their main priority is test data collection.

While most people think that it's a place where the best scientists work on the next generation of weapons, (kind of like "Eureka" on Sci-Fi), it's more of a testing facility.

Think about it, what is the biggest secret any power has?

That nature of such weaknesses must be protected at all costs, because it their get out, it'll quickly turn into a domino effect, resulting in a fatal loss of credibility all around.

Kind of like the Achilles heel.

Those are the secrets that have to be kept away from the public and the enemy at all costs, and that's why the best way to divert attention is to create all kinds of conspiracy theories, folk tales, and other means of deception.

All in all, Area 51 is where reality hits the fan, and the public image of our invincibility simply has no place to exist.

For example, numerous flights over Area 51 are witnessed to this day in which a Soviet MiG-29 is stalking a B-2 bomber.

The answer is simple. Do to losses of F-117s, B-2 upgrades are necessary in order to avoid a loss of a machine which costs as much as an aircraft carrier. Political costs are even greater, not to mention the loss of the biggest strength B-2 has, credibility.

MG-29s IRST can track a B-2, from what distance the public will never know, and with aid by active and passive GCI data, it can close with in IR engagement range for a successfull intercept, so B-2s IR masking upgrades are absolutely essential in order to preserve that credibility.

Same thing with Aurora.

For the lack of an actual system that can be publicly presented, all sorts of stories are created in order to divert the question like "Where did all that tax money go?"

So far that's it.

In all honesty, we don't really know! Aurora was only seen once in a budget request that was accidently released by a censor not doing their job correctly. We have many theories about the Aurora Project, but noone knows for sure what exactly it is!

Tim

In all honesty, we don't really know!

It's true.

In any case, since so far we don't have any type of hypersonic weapon/aircraft that was officially released, we can only look at what Russians are doing.

Here's one of my previous posts on hypersonic weapons/aircraft;

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Area 51 is indeed a high priority installation, and while I won't go into other aspects, their main priority is test data collection.

In that case, it certainly makes sense to encourage UFO conspiracy theories. If the public think it was an alien that flew over their heads, everyone will be too caught up in that to look for evidence of testing by the US government.