Bush's New Space Plan Excites Russia, page 1

Originally posted by intelgurl

Originally posted by TheConservative
I can't believe that we are sending our astronauts to the Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for access to the ISS. Lockheed or Boeing needs to quickly design a replacement to the shuttle.

Originally posted by Ark-Angel
This is a political problem as much as it was technical blindness on letting the Shuttle fall into the outdated shape it is in.

TheConservative & Ark-Angel,
What do you think the possibility is of US spaceplanes (shuttle type "orbital re-entry vehicles") being operational in special access "black projects" at this present time?

Could it be that the reason NASA is so grossly underfunded is that there is something else that is meeting the same needs militarily, that is taking up the monetary assets that would certainly be available to NASA if it were more of a puppet department of the military?

The believability of this certainly does not require as far of a stretch of conventional thinking as many of the threads presented here on ATS.

Consider the history and technology available...

Shuttles & Spaceplanes

There is actually some pretty compelling evidence that something is going on in the area of "black ops" operational spaceplanes.

What about the history of spaceplanes? Is this a new concept dreamed up by forward thinking scientists of our time?
There is a little known fact that can be backed up with many links, research papers and hard copy history book; and that is the fact that the Germans in WW2 had an effort underway to build a spaceplane with which to bomb New York.

A German scientist named Saenger developed it, and it was called the "Silver Bird" or "The Amerika Bomber".
Their design was one that was not actually an orbital spaceplane like the shuttles, (I think orbit requires an escape velocity of 17,300 mph) but rather a design that skipped off layers of the upper atmosphere... (We now call that the "Waverider" design)
This was a rocket powered hypersonic vehicle, and it was on the drawingboards in 1938.(see image below)

Sanger "Silverbird", designed to bomb America

X-20 Dynasoar
After the American Operation Paperclip gathered up all the scientific data on German advanced technology research the US came out with plans to build a space plane in the late 1950's...
It was called the X-20 Dynasoar, with a rocket booster to get it in orbit, it was the first concept for an Orbital Reentry Vehicle, (ORV) that saw actual development.

The X-20 spaceplane was cancelled by JFK's defense sec, Rbt McNamara in December 1963 right before it was supposed to start in production. (Some believe that rather than being killed off it went "black".)

The X-20 Dynasoar

Conclusions?
After the Dynasoar there were numerous other spaceplane projects involving different shapes, propulsion methods, etc.

These spaceplane projects went on through the 60's, 70's.. then the Space Shuttles came out ... all the way to present day with the X-33 and Hyper-X projects.

The fact remains this is old technology that simply continues to be updated with every new spaceplane project, and there have been ample signs that something very fast and able to fly very high is lurking about out in the deserts of the western US.

Couple that with the age & history of this technology and one begins to see how naive it is to assume that there have been no spaceplanes surrepticiously developed and operational over the 66 years since Sanger drew up plans for Silverbird.

Hypersoar - space bomber platform
currently under development at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Intelgurl

( I also posted a very similar post in a thread called "spaceshuttles" in the "weapons" forum.)

[Edited on 20-1-2004 by intelgurl]

Yes. These ideas have been out for quite some time, but further development will take years...even for a test flight of a full scale model. The shuttle will be re-evaluated this year, and put back onto the launch pads in Florida - TIME magazine. Spaceplanes will be the United States' next big space project.