Black DarkStar

The DarkStar was a great stealth reconaissance uav that was cancelled because of congressional budget cuts (www.wpafb.af.mil...) my question is, do you hope/feel/ or know if it was resurrected as a black program, because it was terrific but was only cancelled because of budgetary concerns (the first crashed, but the plane was fixed)

Yes. AWST has reported a few times that a stealth high altitude drone was used in GWII. No details on this UAV are avalible. In one of my Lockheed books, there is also a reference to a "BrightStar" UAV again with little details. The Tier III minus no doubt has lived on, but details are really sketchy

I'll go along with FredT on this one...

If there is a follow on, It would be the third generation of the plane. There originally was going to be a plane called quartz, but the program was split in two and eventually resulted in the Darkstar and the Global Hawk. I expect that the new plane wont look too different from Darkstar, but I would have added a laser designator/Gps designator. It would be a perfect combonation with a raptro

I doubt that the Darkstar has gone black, or any spin-off black design.

It was made for recon only, it had no wing hardpoints or internal bomb bay. The global hawk can do everything it could, and also had better range, and could carry heavier recon equiptment.

Grant it, the Darkstar did have stealth, but when you compare the 2 planes, you relize that the right one was picked.

UCAVs will be here in a few years, so I dont see the need to build a black armed version.

No one said anything about an armed version...
There is open source documentation of a very large version of Dark Star being used during the Iraq War...

I would actually consider this an unacknowledged aircraft as opposed to a "black" project which to me equates to a "Special Access Project" (SAP).

The enlarged variant isn't much of a secret, they have 2 airframes and wanted an operational test in the theater of operations. A poor U-2S pilot didn't even know about it when he saw it during an overflight.

Just to bring everyone up to speed on this, here is a link to a AW&ST article about the large Dark Star UAV being used in Iraq:

Link

Enjoy...
Natalie~

Yeah! Boredom, an overreactive imagination and mindless speculation have finally gotten me somewhere, or something. now if I could only figure out hte deal with the lockheed version of the ATB concept.....

Chicken or the Egg:

Was some of the advances learned with the RQ-1 applied to the Tier III minus (advanced) or was it vice versa?

=-Rich