Above Top Secret: The Aurora Project

The United States Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency would have you believe that the days of manned, airborne reconnaissance are over. They say that advanced spy satellites have rendered aircraft like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird obsolete.

Don't believe them.

Since 1986, rumors have persisted that Lockheed Skunkworks, under the direction of the U.S. intelligence community, has developed a radically evolved hypersonic spyplane called the Aurora. Its existence is denied, of course, but so were that of the SR-71, the F-117 "Wobblin' Goblin", and the B-2 Stealth Bomber. The F-117, as a matter of fact, had been in squadron service for over a decade before it was rolled out for the world's press. It has been said that the aircraft that the Air Force shows the world is always at least a generation or two behind the stuff that they are really excited about.

So what is the Aurora? Reliable facts are few and far between. Many believe it to be a 75-degree delta-winged lifting body, powered by an innovative new engine. Some contenders for propulsion include pulsejets, advanced ramjets, and Pulse Detonation Wave Engines (PDWE). It has been suggested that the fuel is probably cryogenic, possibly methane or hydrogen, and may also be used as a fuselage coolant for the extreme temperatures that are produced by hypersonic friction.

Other technical problems that Lockheed would have needed to overcome include eliminating the "boundary layer" of air that builds up in front of an aircraft in flight. At hypersonic speeds (above Mach 5.4, or 3600 mph) the boundary layer becomes an actual physical barrier, dramatically increasing drag and friction. In fact, the difficulties of producing an aircraft that can operate in such an extreme environment are so great that they have given birth to an entirely new sub-discipline of aerodynamics: "aero-thermodynamics."

The world first gained an inkling of the Aurora project in 1986, when an apparent gaffe by the Department of Defense allowed a budget request summary for FY1987 be published with the following information: "Reconnaissance, manned, air-breathers: U-2, SR-71, Aurora." The summary went on to say that the Aurora project had consumed $80 million in FY1986, but was expected to jump to $2.3 billion in FY1987.

Over the next decade and a half, inquiries on the Aurora met with stony silence and outright denials, but other clues trickled out. During the early 1990s seismic monitoring stations along the San Andreas fault picked up sonic booms on several occasions that seemed to lead straight to Edwards Air Force base in California and Groom Lake in Nevada, and which indicated an airspeed of at least Mach 6.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic