DEVELOPMENT OF THE BLACKBIRD BEGAN IN THE 1940S

THE U-2 FLEW ABOVE 100,000 FEET

The U-2 flew above 100,000 ft according to the May 31, 1960 issue of "Aviation Week." How could this be the case? How could a plane with the dimensions and weight of the U2 cruise at that altitude just using chemical means? Unless the plane is carrying oxygen on board it would not be able to fly at that height and would have a limited range. A nuclear powered plane would not have this problem and the radiation problems are solved by shadow shielding by going above 70,000 ft. Below this altitude atmospheric scattering exposed the pilots to radiation.

The plane outlined in the REPORT ON REVIEW OF MANNED AIRCRAFT NUCLEAR PROPULSION PROGRAM ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION AND DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE would be able to fly at that height because there is no need for oxygen. A nuclear powered plane could take off using only nuclear power carrying chemical fuel / reaction mass that would only be used when the atmosphere was too thin. The chemical fuel would be forced through the reactor propelling the plane forward.

NERVA APOLLO PROBABLY PUT A MAN IN ORBIT AROUND MARS IN 1968

The NERVA Saturn-V could very easily put up Skylab with both the Apollo Command and Lunar Module. There were plans to for a manned mission to Mars by 1970 (Dewar, 90). We believe that the Americans either went straight go Mars in a nuclear shuttle configuration or assembled the Integrated Manned Spacecraft at a Lagrange point and then went to Mars in 1970. 

There were five S-IVB’s in space by November 1969 which could have been configured for the missions to Mars and beyond. So, the hardware was there. This all fits very well with the timeline set out by Werner Von Braun. He told Vice-President Johnson that nuclear rocket engines would be online by 1968 (Dewar, 82). Apollo 8 flew in December of 1968. By November of 1969 there were 5 S-IVB’s in orbit. When used in conjunction with an ASPEN for refueling these vehicles become reusable.

“A Saturn-V with a first generation NERVA I (1500 MW, 825 seconds) as its third stage could boost almost 500,000 pounds to LEO.” (Dewar & Bussard, 94)

Weight of Skylab

169,950 lb 

Apollo Command Module

63,500 pounds (28,800 kg)

Lunar Module 36,200 pounds

Total 269,650

There are 230,350 pounds to spare.

1 gallon of liquid H2 weighs 0.5908 lbs

So 322,490 gallons of LH2 could be carried by Apollo Third Stage.

Bibliography:

Dewar, James A. To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket. Lexington, Ky.: U of Kentucky, 2004. Print.

Dewar, James A., and R. W. Bussard. The Nuclear Rocket: Making Our Planet Green, Peaceful and Prosperous. Burlington, Ont.: Apogee, 2009. Print.

Radioactive Waste Disposal (Stealth Planes) at AREA-51

Burial pits located to the left of Hangar-18 in the photograph below are used to dispose of radioactive waste generated from the E-MAD/Hotshop section of the hangar. 

UPDATE 18 APRIL 2018

Turley, J. (2000). SYMPOSIUM ON STATUTORY INTERPRETATION: Through a Looking Glass Darkly: National Security and Statutory Interpretation. SMU Law Review, [online] 53(1), pp.206-248. Available at: https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1764&context=smulr [Accessed 18 Apr. 2018].

On September 9, 1994, the court granted the motion and placed the identities of the workers under court protection. The workers then proceeded to file a complaint under RCRA with affidavits submitted under seal, alleging that government officials and contractors were engaging in extremely harmful hazardous waste operations under the cloak of secrecy at Area 51. In the first suit against a "black facility," the workers signed sworn statements that the military was burning large quantities of hazardous wastes in trenches the size of football fields. According to the workers, these trenches were regularly filled with 55-gallon drums, covered with combustible material, doused with jet fuel and set ablaze. It is a crime to burn hazardous wastes in an open pit or trench. n18 It is also a crime to dispose of, store, or transport hazardous wastes without a permit under RCRA. This criminal conduct also included the shipment of hazardous wastes by contractors from California to illegally burn or buy at Area 51 without permits or other basic RCRA conditions. Workers were prepared to testify under oath that federal officials openly acknowledged the criminal acts committed at the facility and the use of national security laws to prevent their detection.

Rogers, K. (25 March 2001). Secret planes that helped America win the Cold War lie buried at Area 51. Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Secret planes that helped America win the Cold War lie buried at Area 51
By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
As big as football fields and deep enough to bury airplanes, the graves at Groom Lake lie scattered around the government's secret installation, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
There are no headstones or markers to denote the final resting place for such high-tech aircraft as the predecessors to the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter jet and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.
But people who worked there and researchers who track aviation history and the government's so-called "black budget" programs say some planes that crashed and other experiments that failed were hauled to the bottom of 40-foot-deep holes and covered overnight with mounds of dirt.
One former Groom Lake worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he watched while an earthmover spent a day in 1982 scraping out a burial site.
It was a massive excavation, he said. "They didn't dig that hole and put Martians or moon men in it."
He said the wreckage of a classified plane that was buried on the base was for months in what's called the "Scoot-N-Hide," a shed off a taxiway where secret planes are kept out of view of orbiting satellites.
"They put it on a flatbed truck and put it in a hangar. Then one day they scraped it off the flatbed into the hole and buried it," he said. "They attached a cable to the aircraft and just pulled it off. The thing was shattered like an egg."
According to aviation writer and historian Peter Merlin -- who has obtained declassified flight documents and interviewed personnel involved with Groom Lake programs spanning a period since 1955 -- more than a dozen aircraft are buried around the installation. Combined, the craft were worth at least $600 million and might be valued as much as $1 billion.
This practice of disposing secret, high-tech equipment continues today, he said. "We have no reason to believe it has stopped."
Because it is cloaked in secrecy by a presidential order, Air Force officials will not discuss what it acknowledges only as "the operating location near Groom Lake," which is widely known as Area 51, a 38,400-acre swath of desert along the dry lake bed.
Merlin said the equipment that now lies 40 feet beneath the surface represents cutting-edge technology that in its time kept the U.S. military and the nation's intelligence community ahead of foreign adversaries.
For example, three generations of high-flying spy planes -- U-2s, A-12s, and SR-71s -- have been demonstrated at Groom Lake, each becoming progressively superior to foreign forces. "Nobody ever shot down an A-12," he noted.
Even former Soviet bloc aircraft, such as the 1970s-vintage MiG-23, have been obtained by the U.S. intelligence community and tested at Groom Lake to see how U.S. planes and radar stack up against it, said Merlin, who writes for several aeronautical trade publications, including a newspaper for the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.
The 1982 burial site described by the former Groom Lake worker was near a gravel-pit road and system of trenches where secret documents and materials including drums of toxic coatings for stealth fighter jets were routinely burned for years. A lawsuit by former base workers alleged they had developed illnesses from toxic fumes, but the Air Force has declined to release documents regarding the disposal practice, citing national security concerns.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org -- a Washington, D.C.-area defense-policy organization, said "the notion that the Air Force is burying its mistakes at Groom Lake makes sense." It is patrolled by helicopters carrying doorgunners manning machine guns.
The Groom Lake graveyard, according to Merlin, includes:
• Several 1960s-vintage A-12s, predecessors of the fast, high-flying SR-71 Blackbird spy planes.
• Four U2s from the 1950s.
• An F-101 chase plane that crashed in 1965.
• Two Have Blue airframes that were used to demonstrate technology for the F-117A.
• Wreckage of a MiG-23 that crashed in 1984.
Merlin and three other sources who worked at the base said base officials wanted to retrieve one of the Have Blue airframes buried somewhere near the Groom Lake installation but were unable to find it.
He said there was a plan to bury a unique surveillance aircraft, Tacit Blue -- a white plane equipped with sensors and radar that could survive flying close to war zones -- but it was rescued and placed in the U.S. Air Force Museum in Ohio instead. Tacit Blue was tested at Groom Lake from 1982 to 1985, he said.
Not all once-secret planes from Groom Lake that crashed have been buried there, including the first production F-117A, tail No. 785, according to Merlin and others who worked at the base at the time.
On April 20, 1982, Lockheed test pilot Robert Riedenauer was at the controls of that plane when it cartwheeled wing over wing attempting to take off from a Groom Lake runway.
To this day neither Riedenauer nor Air Force officials can say where the ill-fated takeoff occurred -- but other sources who worked at the base as well as Merlin say that crash was indeed at the Groom Lake installation.
While Riedenauer can't talk about the crash location he spoke openly about how he escaped death that day, when miswired controls caused the craft to go down instead of up.
"I had four seconds to think about it," Riedenauer explained in an interview about his ride aboard the jet.
He said he spent the first two seconds trying to get the craft under control. "The third was reaching for handles to bail out, and the fourth was I realized the aircraft was inverted so it didn't make sense to bail out, so I started shutting down the engine and throttle."
Rescuers managed to save Riedenauer from a fire that flared up. They spent 20 minutes cutting him out of the cockpit. He would spend months in the hospital.
The wings of the $46 million plane were shattered. The plane was to have been the first of 59 stealth F-117As delivered to the Air Force.
Much of it, however, was salvaged and spared from burial, according to Merlin.
The damaged aircraft was returned to Palmdale, Calif., where it now sits on a pylon on display. The first preproduction F-117s have also been converted to displays. One of them, tail No. 780 is at Freedom Park at Nellis Air Force Base.
Bob Pepper, a spokesman for the F-117A stealth fighter jet unit at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, said the policy for disposing of wrecked stealths is to store them temporarily at Holloman and then to follow the procedure for disposing other military aircraft.
The current procedure for disposing of Air Force planes developed from unclassified technology, according to Pike, is to take them to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz., where they are kept for parts, chopped up and melted down to recycle their aluminum and other metals.
"A stealth composite airplane is not the sort of thing that can be melted down to make pots and pans. You would want to dispose of them so they don't come back to haunt you," he said, explaining that the government's intention is to keep secret materials and components in a secure location so they can't be obtained by other countries.
One former base worker described the 1984 crash of a MiG-23 that ultimately ended up in the Groom Lake graveyard.
"I saw that thing explode," he said. "I was looking up at the sky. I thought, `God, these guys are going fast.'
"Then it was just like it disappeared. The plane came apart. The wings came off it and he punched out," he said, referring to the pilot's fatal bail-out.

Similarities between AREA-51 and other programs.

Hangar 18

The largest hangar on the base, Hangar 18 takes up approximately 51,366 square feet capable of accommodating aircraft with a wingspan of 235 feet, and a length of 190 feet. The height of Hangar 18 is estimated to be eight stories. Reports claim this high bay building is used to mate a secret hypersonic aircraft to its launch vehicle.

http://fas.org/irp/overhead/ikonos_040400_overview_04.htm

TAN Hangar 629
The scientists had made some assumptions about the dimensions and characteristics of the airframe. Each power package would need to be handled as a unit. A maximum of four engines per plane might be slung under the wing close to the fuselage. Chemical fuels would be auxiliary to the operation. The plane would weigh at least 600,000 pounds. It would extend 135 feet from wing tip to wing tip, be 52 feet wide at the tail, be 205 feet long, and be 53 feet high or higher at the tail.

http://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/id/id0200/id0269/data/id0269data.pdf

SCA Descriptions

Dimensions

• Wingspan: 195 ft. 8 in.
• Length: 231 ft. 10 in.
• Height: Top of vertical stabilizer, 63 ft. 5 in. To top of cockpit area, 32 ft. 1 in.
• Vertical tip fins on horizontal stabilizers: 20 ft. 10 in. high, 9 ft. 7 in. long.
• Weight: Basic weight, NASA 905, 318,053 lb;. NASA 911, 323,034 lb
• Maximum gross taxi weight: 713,000 lb
• Maximum gross brake release weight: 710,000 lb
• Maximum gross landing weight: 600,000 lb

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-013-DFRC.html

MDD Description

The facility consists of two 100-foot towers with stationary work platforms at the 20-, 40-, 60- and 80-foot levels on each tower and a horizontal structure mounted at the 80-foot level between the two towers. The horizontal unit cantilevers out 70 feet from the main tower units. It controlled and guided a large lift beam that attached to the orbiters to raise and lower them.

Three large hoists were then used simultaneously to raise and lower the lift beam. Two of the hoists are connected to the aft portion of the lift beam and one hoist is attached to the beam's forward section. Each of the three hoists has a 100,000-pound lift capability. Operating together, the total lifting capacity of the three units is 240,000 lbs (120 tons).

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-014-DFRC.html

TAN RUNWAY

The 23,000-foot runway (4.36 miles), although partially designed, was never constructed.56 After a number of study groups evaluated the matter, the AEC decided in December 1958 that neither the NRTS nor any other AEC installation could be used for an ANP test site. "The decision not to use NRTS for the flight test base gave due regard to prior Government expenditures," but the AEC determined that "these were more than outweighed by the potential risks involved."57 Rather, the AEC decided that nuclear test flights should originate from an island or coastal station and fly only over the ocean.

Two years after the "cancellation" of the TAN runway in November of 1960 the Blackbird's runway at AREA-51 was completed. 

Area 51/Groom LakeF

United States

37°14′06″N 115°48′40″W

7,093

23,270

November 1960 Runway 14/32 was completed. The A-12 required a runway at least 8,500 feet long and 150-feet-wide. A 10,000-foot hard asphalt extension, with a concrete turnaround pad in the middle, cut diagonally across the southwest corner of the lakebed. A semicircle (called "The Hook") approximately two miles in diameter was marked on the dry lake so that an A-12 pilot approaching the end of the overrun could abort to the hard-packed playa instead of running his aircraft into the sagebrush.

http://area51specialprojects.com/area51timeline.html

Message posted by Peter Merlin on February 26, 2011 at 13:06:38 PST:

The original runway 14-32 was built for Project OXCART. According to Area 51 Standard Operating Procedures, Landing Area Rules, dated 1 December 1968, runway 14/32 included a 8,625-foot concrete strip with a 6,000 foot asphalt extension to a concrete turnaround pad followed by another 5,000 feet of asphalt. The asphalt overrun was not lighted, and therefore not considered "remaining runway" during hours of darkness. That runway was built in 1960 for the A-12.

The lakebed extension was a safety feature to prevent loss of a high-value asset. A pilot who had to abort a takeoff could land straight ahead. If he ran out of room, he could turn off onto the Abort Circle (known as "The Hook") that is marked on the lakebed surface.

In the Mid-1980s the runway was extended approximately 5,000 feet on its south end because the lakebed end became flooded during the wet months, so its total length was now about 13,625 ft plus the 11,000-foot overrun which was beginning to show the effects of age. The apparent length, as it appeared on aerial and satellite photos, led to the myth that it was the "world's longest runway." It was, in fact, a very average runway with the world's longest overrun.

Runway maintenance costs began to outweigh the benefits of building a new airstrip. Construction of Runway 14L/32R began in 1991. The old airstrip became Runway 14R/32L. As the new airstrip approached completion, the north half of Runway 14R/32L was closed, along with the lakebed extension. At approximately 10,000 feet, the old runway was now the shortest airstrip at Area 51. Eventually it was closed altogether.

The new runway is about the same length as the main portion of the old runway, but does not have a lakebed extension. There is, however, a lead-in line to the Abort Circle marked on the lakebed.

THE BUILDING ADJACENT TO HANGAR-18 IS AN E-MAD

DID THE USA SHOOT DOWN POLYUS?

 Did the USA shoot down POLYUS?

I suspect that America shot POLYUS down. If this is true. Then in the 1980's Reagan or the Ruling Class gambled with the lives of every American Citizen. It would also mark the victory of America over the USSR. But, what a victory? American Supremacy over the USSR allowed America to exploit China. Because American Capitalists then felt secure in moving the means of production to a “communist” country. The "hollowing out" of America's Industry could only happen if America's Capitalists felt secure in moving it. In reality China's trade deficit is really China paying tribute to the USA.