X-51 achieves goals at last

reply to post by Zaphod58


makes sense... I... somehow didnt think of that... small detail... I do remember seeing it and yes... it did break stuff around

reply to post by FraternitasSaturni


If I'm remembering this paper correctly, a Shockwave rated at 1(I think it was psi), is capable of rattling shelves and possibly causing very minor damage. A Shockwave of 1.5 could potentially break windows. The SR-71 at 80,000 feet was rated at 0.98. The Concorde at 50,000 feet was a 1.2.

reply to post by Zaphod58


I also recall, I believe, 90's? early 2000's, there would be multiple earthquake reports east of L.A. around 7:30 A.M. every other Thursday.LOL.( a clear satellite day)
When the geological guys were consulted, they'd say it wasn't an earthquake, it was a "hypersonic shock wave".
"Oh, a shuttle?" "Nope, different shock wave signature/pattern."
That led to the Aurora speculation......


(This is from memory, not a strong point for me any more.

reply to post by nwtrucker


Yes that's correct, they called them the Los Angeles skyquakes. It was said to be a hornet breaking the sound barrier I'm pretty sure but I think it was a black project out of Edwards AFB. I believe Steve Douglass monitored some traffic on a military frequency after one of these skyquakes and heard an aircraft with the call sign dark star mike and darkstar November. But there also an AWACS unit that uses the darkstar callsign or something similar I'm pretty sure.

Sonic boom were a common thing when I was a kid. I lived very close to both an Air Force base that closed in the late 60's, I believe, and Point Mugu Naval Air Station which headquarters the Pacific missile test range where I made my career and where the X-51A made its test flight. They had later passed all those ordinances putting an end to the noise for the most part, the only sonic booms I would hear in later years would be the double boom of the Space Shuttle and its chase plane as it passed overhead on its way to land at Edwards AFB in the high desert of California or when far from land while on board a ship during missile testing on my job.

OK, just reminiscing for a moment, I am retired now. I am happy they finally got a successful flight. The cool thing about the X-51A was that it was using a more or less standard jet fuel. Our earlier X-43A flights used special fuels that would be considered too dangerous for commercial use. Of three flights with that platform had a key role in two of those flight tests, the two later and successful flights. Due to that fuel we were able to see flights achieving mach 7 and later mach 10! Since retiring I had to read about two unsuccessful tests before this success just a few days ago.

I posted about all that here on ATS when those flights failed. I threw in my comments about what I did to be able to maintain track on those craft despite the engineers and test conductors' misguided efforts that I believed might be behind those failures. Hint: lose track and Safety has to hit the Command Destruct button. Nobody listens to the flunkie on the console when all those "experts" are so cocksure they truly are the experts they think they are. I witnessed the first test flight and saw the failure, then for the next two I had the hot seat and wasn't going to let that happen to. Because ATS posts always show up on web searches I might suspect, and hope a little bit, someone read when I posted about my unorthodox method I used to stay on track with it. No kidding about all this. Glad they had a success again, first one since I retired in 2006, and I still had the hot seat for the two fastest successes so far - wish I could get a bonus though.

This is good stuff. A ramjet is a great concept but had a problem going hyper-sonic, like smoking a cigarette in a hurricane. This platform is a scramjet, a super-sonic combustion ramjet. They managed to learn how to light that ciggy in a hurricane, and now we be smokin'!

I was onboard to test some of the latest and greatest over the past few decades that we can talk about. It may actually be the best we have. I never saw any anti-grav reverse-engineered Zeta-Reticuli ET kind of craft. Being in middle of the testing of super-secret military goodies I never even heard stories about the kind of stuff many people think we have stashed away in super-secret underground hangars and labs. All I ever saw was the kind of skunkworks goodies that eventually make itinto the public eye. I never seen a UFO - at least not the kind that didn't have a good explanation. This flight here may be the best indicator of where our future really is going. This may indeed be the best we got.

That other stuff may exist but I never saw it. As long as we all have been talking and speculating about that ET kind of stuff it seems we may have seen more of it by now. In my time the sound barrier was broken about five years before I was born. I saw solid-state electronics replace tubes and a hand-carried transistor radio was really a cool thing when I was a kid. A computer like I have here on my desk couldn't be fit in a large warehouse back then. Maybe reverse engineering got us from there to where we are today. I believe we captured some crashed "alien" technology - though I am no convinced it wasn't just "ultra-"terrestrial in origin. It is suggested it was our radars that took down those "saucers." Those were probably the forerunners to the kind of super radar I used to track those X-43A platforms. And now, the best of it all - the rest of my life is all about señoritas and tequila shots.

S&F for the memories.