Message posted by Vahe Demirjian (Member since 04/28/2022) on August 24, 2024 at 12:30:17 PST:
The FRV is described in the article as single-engine, so any reported flights of it probably were conducted in the Mach 3 to 4 flight regime (for which the unmanned D-21, X-7, or Q-5 were designed), making it slightly slower than the Boeing X-51 scramjet testbed. The Aerojet Rocketdyne subsidiary of the company L3Harris Technologies has been tight-lipped regarding whether ethylene was used for the ramjet portion of the TBCC engine it developed for the FRV, or if it built a hydrocarbon fuel production/storage facility for the fuel for the FRV. Still, this highlights one of the issues that many people (e.g. Richard Hallion, Curtis Peebles) had with rumors in the early 1990s about the "donuts-on-a-rope" contrails and the "skyquakes" heard over Los Angeles in 1991-1992 being caused by a hypersonic spyplane, which is that in the 1980s and early 1990s the US Air Force had no hydrocarbon fuel production and storage infrastructure necessary to support flight tests of a hypersonic air-breathing aircraft. Given Vago Muradian's mention on last year's podcast about Lockheed Martin delivering examples of a high-performance ISR to the USAF in secret, it is unclear if Lockheed Martin has had success in tackling issues with ISR imaging at hypersonic speeds through sensors, because when the US Air Force awarded study contracts for a hypersonic spyplane to Lockheed and a few other companies in the late 1970s and 1980s, it believed that imaging at hypersonic speeds was a solvable problem.
In Reply to: Re: Sandboxx: Evidence is mounting that Lockheed Martin’s SR-72 could be in production posted by NotTelling on August 23, 2024 at 23:45:18 PST:
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