> It’s also not clear from the available records how much [cesium] was necessary per gallon of [jet fuel]
Come on, you lazy reporter! Go find a jet engine and some cesium and a radar reflectometer and make a graph of reflectance vs. cesium content.
Presumably, some engineer at Lockheed in the late 50s got exactly that assignment, with a budget. There would be a notebook with a table of numbers and a hand-drawn graph. Those would be amazing to see.
I realize this is a joke, but just wanted to add that Rogoway is a consistently great and thorough writer on defense subjects. I've been reading his stuff since the Foxtrot Alpha days.
Feels like a stretch that multiple military personnel went on record and conspired to make this up for the clicks on a blog? Far easier ways to drive traffic.
Can you please point me to the terrestrial explanation for the recent spate of "snake-like" UFO sightings?
In the absence of any positive evidence for its existence, I don't believe there is extra-terrestrial life. But I haven't seen any logical explanation for some of the widely observed phenomena, either. I usually assume it involves secret government projects.
I've ready Rogoway's articles on this. He starts from real and public announcements by the U.S. military -- which is pretty newsworthy -- and then he spends a lot of time trying to come up with sensible, scientific explanations. See for example this article that compares the sightings to recent designs for radar-reflecting balloons [1]. TL;DR: the Navy made this newsworthy. Rogaway just seems to be doing reasonable investigative work from that starting point.
Best reporting on the subject out there. He was doing it before the NYTs article on hard unexplained situations. Nothing about aliens. This dude who says he is monetizing it or spreading typical ufo junk is a total troll.
I've completely missed the boat (heh); what is "Navy-UFO conspiracy"? Because at least one interpretation of that combination of words is entirely level-headed (UFOs as Naval materiel, e.g. penaids and their friends, electro-optical EW missile-countermeasure systems), while the other, not so much.
As Neil Degrasse Tyson once said, even pilots aren't astronomers or astrophysicists and often don't know what they're seeing when they look at the sky.
As I understand it, in at least some of these instances the pilots were looking down at the ground when they claim to have seen objects beneath them. /nitpick
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't astronomy the scientific study of celestial objects; and astrophysics is the branch of astronomy concerned with the physical nature of those celestial objects.
Why would either of those be the right consultants for UFOs, which are decidedly not celestial objects.
Sure, but the universe has a lot of very strange natural phenomena and astrophysicist spend a lot of time studying these and therefore can recognise when something is likely natural (or at least have the background knowledge to check before assuming its aliens -- as they say, its never aliens, until it is) where a fighter pilot might be more attuned to seeing things in the sky than the average person, they still don't have the same exposure and experience seeing, studying and working with strange sky and space phenomena. I'd rather an astrophysicist's opinion on aliens than a fighter pilot's, but I'd rather a fighter pilot's opinion than my local plumber.
Because they are used to looking at the sky and looking at weird, odd or abnormal phenomena in the sky. They are therefore better equipped to know whether something strange in the sky is just one of the many strange natural phenomena or if its something that might be of alien origin.
I agree, should probably have been meteorologists. Most astronomers and astrophysicians aren't that much more educated on weird atmospheric phenomena, either.
Most of it makes perfect sense. But there is a certain Congress critter that has got himself convinced that UFOs are real and has made it his pet project to fund these investigations. Which, quote predictably, cherrypick facts to justify their continued funding.
I would love to see some kind of web database of old engineering notebooks like this, surely there are enough now kicking around in boxes of "grandad's junk".
Would be cool to see some old notebooks from Bell Labs tho like Ritchie or Thompson. I just found some old AT&T training manuals on Perl, TCP/IP, Bash, C and Unix internals, they are really cool.
Along the same lines, my bedside-book for the last few months has been Engineering and Operations in the Bell System[1].
It is... from another time. Both the quality of the engineering and the quality of the documentation simply don't happen anymore outside of very narrow niches.
And then you look at the Death Star now, and their core competency is lobbying. Priorities certainly have changed.
I have the full set of books in this series, took me a couple months to track down.
There are no organizations left in the world like pre divesture AT&T - While I think divestiture was a net gain, it's clear that some things were not positive, and some stuff was irrevocably lost.
I've only read about the AT&T divestiture in the "pro-antitrust" light; that AT&T owned all the telephones, you weren't allowed to connect your own, etc etc. Where can I read other angles to this story?
Thinking about it, I wonder if this isn't a similar story to Eternal September.
Well, what I could find quickly comes from the 1960s, out of Avco Laboratories and the Naval Research Labs:
"Plasma Diagnostics in Supersonic Flow Containing Cesium and Potassium" [1] Burn Cs in a rocket engine, check for absorption up to 70 GHz (or cps, in those days). Looks like fun work.
If you haven't read it, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben Rich is a pretty fun read into the U2, A-12 Oxcart, SR-71, Sea Shadow and other craft. And has a lot of good stories from pilots.
But the ultimate SR-71 book would be Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet.
The sr-71 gets all the glory but go look at some of the aircraft that lost competitions. The convair kingfish that lost to the 71 was decades ahead. It lost for a number of reasons, some valid, some not. The f-22 competitor was super interesting as well.
Yeah, the YF-23 wins a lot of cool points on looks alone[1], and it was faster and stealthier than the F-22. Taking the -22 was probably the right choice given that it was lower risk and absurdly better than anything it's likely to encounter in its operational life.
Funny, the way i remember it happening: both YF-22s were lost do to mishaps, the YF-23 was faster, stealthier, and just as maneuverable without the vectored thrust. The AF wanted the -23, but the chairman of the senate armed services committee was from Georgia, where Lockheed promised to build the -22. and the history got rewritten.
Source: Dad was part of the YF-23 program at northrop and lost his gog when the project was shitcanned. yes, still bitter almost 30 years later.
Oh man, growing up I had a book of aeroplanes, with diagrams and stats for hundreds of planes that I would obsess over. But the editors did a very cruel thing which was putting a photo of the YF-23 on the cover, but the plane was not in the book. Drove me nuts!
There are a lot of political and national security concerns involved in that. The Air Force wants to maintain three aviation vendors in the industry as a matter of policy, otherwise Boeing and Lockheed are equally capable of making bombers.
Awarding the JSF to Lockheed two decades earlier had similar connotations. Boeing could maintain its aviation capabilities and expertise on the back of its commercial business. For Lockheed, losing the JSF would have meant the end of its aviation unit which the USAF deemed critical for national security.
The Convair Kingfish never actually existed and the A12 flew higher, farther, cost far less and Convair couldn’t put an aircraft in the air on time or on budget to save their lives.
The kingfish looked like something more modern than an f-117. The f-16xl that lost to the f-15e looked like a modern European design. The boeing jsf was... Ugly, but the grumman one was cool looking. Its kind of a trend, the losers are so much cooler.
You can definitely see the B2 exhaust design in the Y23. It seems the Northrop gets the bombers and Lockheed gets the fighters. Makes sense logistically.
Nothing about modern fighter procurement makes any sense logistically!
It seems the F22 was basically picked on the promise to make as many components in as many separate states as possible, in order to ensure every politician on the hill brought into it.
And the idea of servicing different parts of the F35 in different buying countries is another logistical masterstroke, not! Oh my god, servicing F35 engines in Turkey just when Turkey starts to dance with Russia, what were we thinking?
Right now we're telling Turkey you can't have the F35 because you've just brought the S400 SAMs from Russia, but we've already invested in servicing the F35 engines there...
Turkey already bought F-35s[1], but are being told both that they can't buy anymore, and the servicing of the engines will be moved out of Turkey by 2020 if they insist on buying the S-400 from Russia[2][3].
Also, even if they didn't sell the F-35 to Turkey but still serviced the engines there that would make logical sense. The reason the US is paranoid about the S-400 is because they think radar data about the F-35 and other NATO aircraft will be fed back to Russia[4]. That concern obviously doesn't apply to a stand-alone F-35 engine sitting on the ground.
From my reading, I don't think any of the F35s had been delivered, but some Turkish pilots had started training in the US in '18. That is now stopped.
Over 900 parts in the F35 were made by Turkish companies, and they have to now be re-sourced.
Now, I don't think the F35 operators want F35 engines sitting around in a country now receiving Russian military advisers. The idea that the engine isn't classified is crazy.
Russia has similar engines at their disposal as in the F35. The F22 engines however are extremely classified because of their ability to supercruise without afterburners.
The parts we keep secret are the stealth coatings which we do domestically and the sensor fusion which is mostly software based
I believe Turkey owns those F-35s operating in the US, they're used for training. On that Wikipedia page you can see there's dozens of F-35s in the US owned by foreign air forces.
Can they just fly them out of the US at this point? No idea, but it's interesting to see what'll happen with that.
Just because Russia has S-400 advisors in Turkey doesn't mean they get to walk around wherever they want, including wherever the F-35's engines are serviced.
The concern was specifically that they'd have access to detailed radar data on the F-35, which they'd have access to in their roles as advisors for the S-400 missile system.
Funny story: decades ago I bought a copy of Sled Driver. I think it was in that remainder/coffee book section of the book store near the front, so it was probably $10.
Today they sell for $200-$350 used.
Due losing track of the first copy, buying a second one (when they were available new), then finding the first copy, I have two copies and high hopes of them funding my retirement..
I've got a copy of one of the first print runs that a friend gave me decades ago. About 10 years ago, I use to see them on eBay for up to $3000, but the prices have dropped recently as I believe they had another print run done.
My experience with cesium is that everyone thinks its radioactive. It isn't-- like many common elements there is a radioactive isotope, but that is not what would have been used here.
I speculate this worked by the highly reactive cesium ionizing the air. Similar things have been done with doping rocket fuels with metals to stimulate lightning strikes.
Presumably most of the cesium would end up reacted very quickly, I don't know what the products would be but plenty of obvious candidates like cesium carbonate appear to be non-toxic.
Well, you are correct in just some cases. Caesium has only one stable isotope, so beside the actual Caesium and Caesium-133 everything else has ß-decay. Unless you are burning 100% refined Caesium, there is always a chance that you are also burning its radioactive isotopes.
All the isotopes of Cs other than 133 exist only in negligible amounts in nature. So sure, perhaps there would be a trace amount of something else-- but that is true of anything.
I would love to know the thinking behind this method.
Off the top of my head: They are adding Cesium ("screw the environment, I have to escape my pursuer") to the engine in order to leave a plasmonic plume. The plasma, which occurs because the electrons in Cesium are stripped off in the heat of the engine, absorbs microwaves (ie, radar) because of the expected cyclotron physics of a free-electron gas.
However as an electronic countermeasure, I do not see the point. The plasmonic plume will absorb the microwaves where the rest of the plane will continue to reflect it. To my thinking, the is exactly what you do not want to do: You've reduced the microwave signal where the plane is not present, and done nothing to the signal where the plane is present. So you've improved the signal-to-noise for the enemy, which are providing guidance for anti-aircraft missiles.
Considering how many years this program went on for, my thinking must be wrong. Maybe anti-aircraft missiles of the era did not intercept from oblique angles (which takes serious computation and sensors) but could only hit from behind (where the plume would attenuate a signal)?
For these kinds of radars, there won't really be any signal against the sky and, lets be honest here, nothing is going to be looking at the SR-71 from a top down aspect. In a tail chase situation though, a missile would have to fly straight at the exhaust which would give the aircraft some cover.
There's a bit of reading between the lines that needs to be done here though. The aircraft is already shaped to deflect radar waves from a tail or nose on aspect but the part that's very hard to 'stealth' is the insides of the engines, especially from the rear aspect. Turbine blades and all the other geometry inside tends to act like a radar disco-ball and leaves even many modern aircraft vulnerable. By making the exhaust radar absorbent you fix this issue.
I know it's toxic but from a technical aspect, that is really cool. I remember reading that the Apache Helicopter (I think?) can redirect it's exhaust internally temporarily to become invisible to heat seekers. Some of these technologies are super fun to read about.
The Comanche vented its turbine exhaust into the wash from the tail rotor, iirc, to make it harder to spot. It also used a 5-blade rotor instead of the traditional 2-blade rotor in order to make it quieter. There's a bunch of cool things we could do to make helicopters more stealthy if we cared enough.
My recollection is that the contemporary reporting was pretty specific about what it was: an existing chopper with stealth tech grafted on. Something about that (the weight or shape) reduced lift and led to a crash landing during the mission.
Some Google around NYTimes would probably turn up the details.
The story I heard at the time was that it was a combination of the stealth helicopters having lousy low-hover performance, and that during training they'd mocked a nearby solid wall up with a chain-link fence, which led to picking a poor landing zone.
And if you look at the US Army's Future Vertical Lift competition, [0] you can see some indications that those techs might make it into our future helicopters.
JP-7 has a very high ignition temperature (it was actually used as a coolant/heat sink for the rest of the aircraft), so TEB combusting once it hit the air is used to light the engines.
SR-71s only had a limited amount of TEB to use each flight. I believe it was 13 shots per engine. TEB was used each time the engines were lit and also when afterburners were lit. While the SR-71's routes were built around refueling, the number of TEB shots remaining were the true limiting factor of the SR-71's flight time.
> I always assumed afterburners just meant opening the throttle up but there must be more to it
No, as the name implies it's literally pouring in fuel after the turbine, in the exhaust. The exhaust is hot, yes, but cooler than the combustion chambers (which reside in between the turbine and compressor). So if you have some special fuel that's very hard to ignite then maybe you need some help to get the afterburning started.
Your comment went so far over my head I knew none of it, only the faintest settling of toxic caesium particulates in my lungs gave me any clue it was ever there.
We need to give a proper credit to the Soviet physicist Petr Ufimtsev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev) who's published papers in 60's on reflection of electromagnetic waves were read by Lockheed Martin engineers and that started the stealth program.
> He gained permission to publish his research results internationally because they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value.
A decision I'm sure the Soviet Union would quickly come to regret.
If you're curious about the development of Oxcart as well as Area-51, check out Amy Jacobson's Area 51 book[1]. Appears like a solid detail of Skunkworks and spy plane history.
> Though there is no indication that A-50 used a radioactive cesium isotope, the compound is toxic and it's unclear how hazardous the complete mixture may have been
The original source of this additive (or the raw materials for it) was a waste product from detergent manufacture. When that method of detergent production was discontinued, they needed to set up an alternative source, which no doubt raised the cost, but everything about the A12 / SR71 was hugely expensive.
The capabilities actually used were and are a real overkill, for many orders of magnitude.
The whole think tanks and whole branches of military from the start worked on many order of magnitudes multiplied assumptions of the military capability of the opponents. Only now you can read their acknowledgment that the estimates were hugely overblown (1). So they did produce overkill from the start as they produced "enough" rockets and planes. Then they replaced the plain nuclear warheads with the thermonuclear warheads, again many orders of magnitude overkill. And the "victory" is defined as destroying more than the opponent, no matter if anybody would be able to live in the world afterwards. Against the fact that the world was never so interdependent as it is now -- if you would remove all the stuff from your possession where at least some parts were produced in e.g. Asia, you would not have almost anything useful.
We're still in the world that can lose the form as we know it in just one erroneous decision, even if some humans in some caves/shelters manage to survive, what's left will be worse than the most pessimistic movies. And in that world, just the cost of a single type of the plane (F-35) is projected (that means lower than what will be) to 1.508 trillion dollars. And the US just exited one nuclear arm control treaty.
1) E.g. in my favorite book: "The Doomsday Machine -- Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" written by a former strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation.
Yes, it's rather cynical. And yet it's this very tension that keeps the peace. The world is now in the longest stretch of world-wide peacetime ever in history.
Peacetime everywhere. The post-WWII wars are all tiny by comparison. The nuclear era is historically unprecedented in the total lack of direct warfare between major industrial powers.
1898, lasted for 4 months, less then 4000 wounded and killed.
Compare that just with the US sanctions against Venezuela (again, not too major, but the US definitely is the only remaining superpower) at this very moment:
"the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory."
Check your history books about the time before WW I and between WW I and WW II. Both periods are completely comparable with this now.
It was the “common knowledge” that the big war “can’t happen”.
“Everywhere” in your answer means for you. Ask the families of dead soldiers about “everywhere” or the millions of people outside the of the US whose relatives died in wars or even only due to the US sanctions which are how the US prepares for its next war (like in Iraq).
That's both incorrect and juvenile. The world is chaotic. Order takes force and sacrifice. If you know of a perfectly peaceful utopia full of humans somewhere, please let us all know.
Cesium (in the +1 state) appears to be barely toxic at all. Wikipedia puts its LD50 around that of sodium. Cesium metal is extraordinarily dangerous, but it’s so reactive that none of it will survive long enough to get anywhere near the ground.
> Same line of thinking that results in depleted uranium tank shells.
Yeah, since neither was particularly toxic, and both offered significant performance gains over the alternatives. (Uranium is extremely dense, self-sharpens on impact instead of mushrooming, and catches fire after penetration giving you an incendiary payload for free. Supposedly, nothing else comes close for tank rounds)
The problem here is that armor piercing rounds need to be made of heavy metals in order to work and heavy metals are generally toxic. Even lead, which old fashioned bullets and shells are made of is toxic.
Uranium is more likely to distribute that toxicity in a convenient dust cloud, though. Tungsten and lead for the most part stay in one piece on impact.
Perhaps I should have said "not outrageously toxic" or something of that sort, because that does not sound worse than the stuff we make normal bullets out of - lead.
That's true! Lead does tend to stay more clumped up than uranium dust. But isn't it also easier for lead to become bioavailable and/or enter the water supply?
If you call “toxic” and non biodegradable “political”, I agree with you. I think you will find that countries that expect the fighting to be largely in their backyard selected Tungsten and the countries that fight “overseas” selected Uranium.
Ah, yes, because all lead bullets turn into a thousand degree cloud of dust, which you can later accidentally inhale or adsorb through your skin decades afterwards.
The concerns I have around the project are more in the FAA certification process than in the EPA. I don’t believe this is a partisan issue; it’s stalled under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
I think that the 737-Max issue will put so much more spotlight and brakes on anything that seems remotely risky, that the alternative fuels program (which was already struggling as you note) is unlikely to make serious near-term progress.
Almost tangentially, I believe that we have a viable fuel technically (G100UL) that is likely to be (or be the template for) the fuel ultimately selected, albeit possibly a decade or more in the future.
Apparently back in the day they were seriously considering ClF5 as the next generation oxidizer for rocket propellants. Implying that the rocket exhaust would to a large extent consist of HF and HCl. Yikes!
Equally funny is where someone thought that it would be a wonderful idea to burn mercaptans in a rocket, which wasn't quite as toxic, but caused the test site to become a no-go zone just from the unbearable stench.
As described in Clark's book, ClF3 was discovered first (before WWII actually). But sometime later someone managed to synthesize ClF5 as well, which had slightly better performance as a rocket fuel oxidizer. Although it retained all the other fun properties of ClF3.
Come on, you lazy reporter! Go find a jet engine and some cesium and a radar reflectometer and make a graph of reflectance vs. cesium content.
Presumably, some engineer at Lockheed in the late 50s got exactly that assignment, with a budget. There would be a notebook with a table of numbers and a hand-drawn graph. Those would be amazing to see.