Message posted by quellish (Member since 06/26/2008) on August 06, 2023 at 17:18:47 PST:
That would be like abandoning the SR-71 in favor of the U-2 (in the 1960s). They had very different capabilities and purpose. Instead, in the early 1980s Lockheed was proposing a high endurance UAV and a hypersonic aircraft as complimentary systems. > The mention of a top-secret B-1 sized Mach 5 aircraft in the early 1993 issue Aerospace Daily newsletter seems to have been a reference to the Lockheed Mach 5 Penetrator design because existing artwork and drawings of this aircraft (including an artist's rendering from 1981) show that the Mach 5 penetrator would have almost as big as the B-1B If you are using methane or hydrogen your airplane is going to be about the size of a B-1 regardless. That the "cancelled" aircraft and the "Penetrator" were both the size of the B-1 does not mean they were one and the same. > Sweetman's claims about the USAF deploying a hypersonic spyplane in the early 1990s were eventually debunked. Were they?
> I now know that Lockheed proposed the Mach 5 Penetrator in the early 1980s as a hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 even though it was eventually abandoned by Lockheed in favor of the strategic reconnaissance flying wing UAV proposed for the Quartz/AARS program.
In Reply to: Lockheed Mach 5 Penetrator posted by Vahe Demirjian on August 04, 2023 at 20:59:44 PST:
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