The… the thing is constantly leaking, when it is on the runway, prior to take off.
Because its cruise speed and altitude are such that the surface of it is so heated, that it expands the metal, and stops the leaking.
That is how fucking extreme this thing is.
Now if you want might vote for even more scifi than that?
Behold, the SSTO we could have been building for the last 20 years, if we’d just used the construction method for the fuel tanks that the engineers argued should be used, but couldn’t be, because we needed to do all the experimental processes on a single craft, and if they didn’t all work, Dick Cheney will cancel the program…
And the summary that I gave earlier is basically the tl:dr of it.
We could have been working on making these things to replace shuttle. A reusable, heavy lift, single stage to orbit craft.
But nope!
Nope, instead we get… what are at now, 13, 14 attempts by Elon Musk to even achieve actual orbit with his Starship? Still haven’t managed that yet.
So now the ISS is slated to get deorbited, China will have the only major space station, and we will have a … Kessler Syndrome generation program, in the expansion of StarLink into ‘StarMind’, those million orbital AI datacenters Musk has recently had CGI made for, and will never happen.
1 crashed in California in 1971. Another was given to NASA for testing until 1978. The surviving 2 are in museums. Couldn’t find any information on whether they saw actual active duty, but they were technically in service in the 1970s.
‘Y’ means it was the second prototype batch after ‘X’. Sometimes the Ys would be modified with the final spec and enter service but typically they would lose the Y designation at that time. For instance the prototype YB-36 entered service as a reconnaissance RB-36A after modifications.
They made an interceptor version of the SR-71 called the YF-12. I don’t know if it ever entered service though.
The also made one with … a parasite, mini me version of itself.
https://www.museumofflight.org/Exhibits-and-Events/Aircraft/lockheed-m-21-blackbird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_D-21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12#M-21
Two, actually.
They made two pairs of the M-21 and D-21.
And yes, that’s D for Drone, in 1963.
A nearly hypersonic drone, launched from a Mach 3+ capable mothership, in 1963.
That is possibly the most sci Fi ass looking thing I’ve seen outside of an 80s b-movie. You know some hyper nerd designer was extremely proud of that
It is quite literally fantastic.
The… the thing is constantly leaking, when it is on the runway, prior to take off.
Because its cruise speed and altitude are such that the surface of it is so heated, that it expands the metal, and stops the leaking.
That is how fucking extreme this thing is.
Now if you want might vote for even more scifi than that?
Behold, the SSTO we could have been building for the last 20 years, if we’d just used the construction method for the fuel tanks that the engineers argued should be used, but couldn’t be, because we needed to do all the experimental processes on a single craft, and if they didn’t all work, Dick Cheney will cancel the program…
The VentureStar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
Yep, we built the scaled down mockup of this, the X-33.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-33
And the summary that I gave earlier is basically the tl:dr of it.
We could have been working on making these things to replace shuttle. A reusable, heavy lift, single stage to orbit craft.
But nope!
Nope, instead we get… what are at now, 13, 14 attempts by Elon Musk to even achieve actual orbit with his Starship? Still haven’t managed that yet.
So now the ISS is slated to get deorbited, China will have the only major space station, and we will have a … Kessler Syndrome generation program, in the expansion of StarLink into ‘StarMind’, those million orbital AI datacenters Musk has recently had CGI made for, and will never happen.
Nope, I’m not mad, definitely not mad, nope.
I was always a fan of the YF-19
They only built 3 of them.
1 crashed in California in 1971. Another was given to NASA for testing until 1978. The surviving 2 are in museums. Couldn’t find any information on whether they saw actual active duty, but they were technically in service in the 1970s.
‘Y’ means it was the second prototype batch after ‘X’. Sometimes the Ys would be modified with the final spec and enter service but typically they would lose the Y designation at that time. For instance the prototype YB-36 entered service as a reconnaissance RB-36A after modifications.