THE DOWNING OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA WAS REVENGE FOR THE MOSCOW THEATER HOSTAGE CRISIS

The Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis took place under the cover of the return of Apollo-12. The return of Apollo-12, made public in a 11 September 2002 article in the Guardian Newspaper was timed in an manner to let the Russians know it was there about a month before the attack on the theater. The attack was timed to coincide with the APEC summit meeting in Mexico. It was meant to embarrass Putin before the meeting.

Apollo 12 was there as a veiled threat or not so veiled threat aimed at the Russians. The downing of the Space Shuttle Columbia shows that the doomsday plan of escaping into space to fight WW3 might not work.  

There were secret payloads in the Apollo Missions. The American Military used the S-IVB's to build the Integrated Manned nuclear shuttle and spaceship system. The Apollo Program was a cover to build the Integrated Manned System.    

"In America, a 'super shuttle' has been designed that could take off like a conventional plane, fly to a high altitude and then, if necessary, boost itself into orbit - on board would be the Commander-in-Chief, the President." (Lee 10-11) 

SOURCES:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2002/sep/11/spaceexploration.research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster

Lee, Christopher. War In Space. Hamilton, 1986, pp. 10-11.

https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_ET.html

https://www.aviationtoday.com/1999/11/01/the-space-shuttle-modernized/

http://www.cctv.com/special/796/2/60784.html

THE CHEMICALLY FUELED BLACKBIRD WAS A RIDICULOUS PLANE.

The dangers of in-air-refueling, operating costs, range and mission limitations of a chemically fueled Blackbird are utterly absurd. So, absurd that a nuclear powered bird is the only thing makes sense. 

JP-7 cost as much as an expensive single malt whisky (Darling) [1] [2].  Single malt whisky prices run from $100 to $100,000 a fifth [3]. If one conservatively assumes a price of $200 for a fifth, then the price per gallon is $1000 in 2019 dollars. Using the CPI the cost of JP-7 in 1965 would have been about $123.18 per gallon [5]. I could not find 1965 price information for single malt scotch whisky. This reverse approximation is reasonable.     

A Blackbird tank held 12,219.2 gallons of JP-7 and, in 1965 dollars cost approximately $1,505,161. Without aerial refueling the Blackbird had a range of 2000 nautical miles. Missions often went over 12,000 nautical miles (Graham 38). Therefore based on a lower bound cost assumption for JP-7, a Blackbird mission of this length would have cost $9,030,966 in 1965 dollars. Or approximately the cost of 5 F-4 Phantom II's [4]. Or ten times the amount it cost to fill the 3 million gallon tank of a Nimitz class carrier. 

The supposed per unit airframe cost of the program was 34 million dollars. So, in as little as 3 missions the cost of the airframe would have been exceeded. If a Blackbird ran two missions per month then the yearly fuel cost of a single Blackbird was $216,743,192.06 or six times the cost of the airframe. The fuel cost for all 32 SR-71's was roughly 7 BILLION dollars per year in 1965 dollars. That's roughly 2% of the U.S. Defense Budget for 1965 [7] going to fuel the Blackbird. The 7 BILLION dollar figure is close to the 8 BILLION dollar cost given for Project PLUTO (Dewar 65) [8]. 



SOURCES:

1. https://www.456fis.org/BLACKBIRD_DETAILS.htm
2. Mayday!: A History of Flight through its Martyrs, Oddballs and Daredevils (Darling)
3. https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/whisky/age/20-year-old-whisky?filter=true&rnd=2017168149#productlist-filter
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II
5. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
7. https://www.infoplease.com/us/military-personnel/us-military-spending-1946-2009
8. Dewar, James A. To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket. Lexington, Ky.: U of Kentucky, 2004. Print.

NOTES:
From source 1.
The JP-7 jet fuel is interesting in its own right: originally developed for the A-12 Oxcart plane in the late 1950s, it has an extremely high flashpoint to cope with the heat, to the extent that a match dropped in a bucket of JP-7 does not ignite it. The fuel also contains fluorocarbons to increase its lubricity, an oxidizing agent to enable it to burn in the engines, and even a cesium compound, A-50, which disguises the exhaust's radar signature. As a result, JP-7 is said to be more expensive than malt Scotch whisky, which gives some idea of how much a single SR-71 mission would have cost.

With only a 2000NMI or 2300 mile range the Blackbird that means the Blackbird only had an hour of useful flying time. The chemically powered plane is useless.