Message posted by Vahe Demirjian (Member since 04/28/2022) on August 10, 2023 at 9:47:42 PST:
The webpage "The AURORA Program, Dead or Alive?" should be taken offline for the following reasons:
1. As noted on this webpage, Ben Rich wrote in his 1994 memoir about his time at the Lockheed Skunk Works that Aurora was merely a codename for funding procurement of the B-2 Spirit. Because no funds requested under the codename Aurora were ever appropriated, it is easy to see that using the codename Aurora for requested funds for B-2 procurement in the P-1 budget document was because the cost of the B-2 program was becoming very difficult for the USAF budget to conceal.
2. The Secret Projects Forum mentions that Appendix E of "Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) Structure," DoD 7045.7-H, dated April 2004, lists Aurora as "historic" rather than active, in which case whoever suggested Aurora could be flying in a different guise as a subsonic reconnaissance platform had no idea that the Quartz/AARS program was still in the design phase when the P-1 budget document containing the name Aurora was written, but was canceled in 1992 without producing hardware.
3. Although the acronym ASTRA comes from a March 1997 issue of the Air Forces Monthly, which interpreted ASTRA as standing for "Advanced Stealth Reconnaissance Aircraft" and alleged that Northrop was the contractor the ASTRA and that the RAF Boscombe Down crash in September 1994 was of the ASTRA, it's unclear if the writer of the Air Force Monthly article mentioning ASTRA coined the ASTRA acronym or got it from an anonymous source. As recently mentioned on this forum, the 1994 crash at RAF Boscombe Down almost certainly was of a fouled towed decoy resulting in a landing mishap of an RAF Panavia Tornado.
4. Adrian Mann's computer-generated images of the supposed hypersonic spyplane with which Bill Sweetman erroneously associated the codename Aurora relied on Sweetman's conjectural drawing of the putative Mach 6 spyplane on his book "Aurora: The Pentagon's Secret Hypersonic Spyplane", which was based on the outline of the aircraft seen refueling from a KC-135 by Chris Gibson in 1989 and Sweetman's analysis of design studies for hypersonic aircraft.
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