Author Topic: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane  (Read 77070 times)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #60 on: 03/14/2017 08:36 pm »
Something new.

Offline Star One

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #61 on: 03/14/2017 09:00 pm »
Thanks for that. Shame there's no illustrations in the paperwork.

Offline Herb Schaltegger

Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #62 on: 03/14/2017 10:11 pm »
Some interesting details of the development work planned there in the second half of that document, especially with regard to plans for structural test section of fuselage and camera window elements, and the work planned to evaluate several types of metallic shingles to TPS.
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Offline HMXHMX

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #63 on: 03/14/2017 10:15 pm »
Something new.

The powerplant for ISINGLASS was the P&W XLR-129, by the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_XLR-129

Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #64 on: 01/26/2021 01:20 pm »
I cleaned up the last page from the document posted by Blackstar on top of this page, in 2017.

Lot of interesting stuff.  Not least that the date is 1966, quite late for some of the concepts listed in the many columns.

TAGBOARD (on the left column) is well known.

ISINGLASS (second column) is also recognizable: B-52, LOX/LH-2 (= XLR-129 although not mentionned), Mach 21

The other columns by contrast are a little more confusing.

S-105 looks like Convair FISH / KINGFISH of 1958 which led to the first ISINGLASS of 1963-64.
That is
a) B-58 mothership
b) Ramjets
c) Mach 4

S-103 looks like the TOWN HALL varied studies of 1962 using B-58 or A-12 with expendable rocket stages and spysat cameras. Polaris SLBM was a favorite.
Except
- This one uses a B-52 + Minuteman + AJ10 (= Transtage, Apollo engine)
- The document is from 1966, four years after TOWN HALL ! So this mean that "air launched spysats" were still considered, that late ?

And the three S-104 columns - never heard of these combinations before.

- B-52 + J-2 + Centaur + Boost-Glide-Vehicle BG-1A, orbital

- B-52 + J-2 + "Integral Agena" + Boost-Glide-Vehicle BG-2A
25500 feet per second = 7772 m/s > short of orbital speed with all the losses, 9100 m/s = 30 000 fps.

- Titan II + Boost-Glide-Vehicle, orbital
(DynaSoar ? is that you ?! nah, it was killed in December 1963. An ASSET-related unmanned system ?)




Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #65 on: 01/26/2021 05:48 pm »
I've probably posted this story before, but back in the 1990s when I was researching CORONA, I met up with retired CIA Director of Science and Technology Bud Wheelon, who lived in Montecito, a suburb of Santa Monica. Wheelon was a really nice guy and we had a great interview. I probably have a tape recording of that somewhere. Anyway, he took me to lunch and over lunch he casually mentioned "Isinglass" and "Rheinberry." This was long before they were declassified. He just said that they were supposed to be very fast successors to the SR-71 and that Air Force General Bernie Schriever had made them (or at least Isinglass) his pet project. I'm sitting there at a restaurant practically vibrating in my seat. There had been NOTHING ever written or reported on these programs before, and he just dropped that into conversation.

If you're wondering, there was only one thing that he told me about that he made me turn off the tape recorder and told me I could not write about, and that was the program to drop sensors into China. That has been reported on in various places, and is now partially declassified.

Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #66 on: 01/26/2021 06:29 pm »
I red about this recently. The CIA send ROCAF pilots into the Chinese SA-2 meatgrinder. First time, they dropped the sensors from a U-2. Did not worked. Second try: they send a ROCAF C-130 Hercules at low level - 5000 miles ! - from Thailand to Lop Nor and back. Ten or twelve hours spent hugging the Chinese ground... and they dropped the sensors and made it back alive.  :o

The CIA also tried to spy Lop Nor from an Indian, himalayan mountain 25000 ft high and 1500 miles away. With a RTG powered sensor. That was swept by a snow avalanche... or perhaps stolen by the Indians. They never knew.

...

... sometimes it makes a fun read, excellent food for one's imagination; and sometimes you're left shaking your head in disbelief and wondering "wow, they did THAT ?"

Offline leovinus

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #67 on: 01/26/2021 06:35 pm »
I cleaned up the last page from the document posted by Blackstar on top of this page, in 2017.

Lot of interesting stuff.  Not least that the date is 1966, quite late for some of the concepts listed in the many columns.

TAGBOARD (on the left column) is well known.

ISINGLASS (second column) is also recognizable: B-52, LOX/LH-2 (= XLR-129 although not mentionned), Mach 21

[snip]


Any thoughts on ISINGLASS/McDonnell and connections to earlier hydrogen aircraft work at Lockheed by Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson? The relevant chapter in "Skunkworks", chapter 8 "Blowing up Burbank", where they were looking into LH2 planes from about 1956 to ~~1960. That included Suntan 1956-1958. ISINGLASS is later while Lockheed works on the A12 but anyway?

Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #68 on: 02/01/2021 06:33 am »
Digging this further... cleaned up file 2.0, attached.

-------

No idea what S-105 / ISINGLASS would do with a "Skybolt 2nd stage". Perhaps an auxiliary rocket engine to help accelerating the ramjets from the B-58's Mach 2 to ISINGLASS Mach 4 cruise speed ? Ramjets work better at mach 3 than Mach 2... they usually need a booster.

--------

S-103 "air launched reconnaissance satellite" the booster is a Minuteman II + Able-Star stage as described on Ed Kyle website.

AJ10-41 was Able-Star engine.

https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/thorh2.html

https://minutemanmissile.com/solidrocketboosters.html

I did some calculations for a B-52 + Minuteman II + Able-Star launcher; the overall weight and payload to orbit matches very well.

Minuteman II 63 000 pounds and Able-star is 10 000 pounds, so total 73 000 pounds.

Payload to orbit corresponds, too: 1100 pounds.

Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #69 on: 02/01/2021 06:41 am »
The three S-104 concepts looks like alternatives to RHEINBERRY. That one was to be
a) piloted b) suborbital and c) horizontal-launch from a B-52.

The three S-104 concepts are probably "tradeoff" against the basic RHEINBERRY, asking
- piloted or not ?
- orbital or suborbital ?
- B-52 or Titan II launch vehicle ? vertical or horizontal ?

Pretty interesting to think the boost-glide concept was still considered in 1966 with no less than four different concepts.

It is the usual tradeoff "air launch" versus "ground launch". In the case of RHEINBERRY B-52 would be more "responsive" and flexible.
But Titan II as of 1965 was deployed as ICBM, launching Gemini, and used as the coming Titan III core. So it wasn't too expensive either, and had its own flexibility.

(I checked the Titan II silos dimensions - just for the fun of it. While the Titan by itself was 10 feet diameter, its silo launch ducts were 26 feet in diameter. So on paper at least, it might be possible to put a "boost glide vehicle" with a span smaller than 26 feet on top of a Titan II ICBM and launch that from a silo in place of a megaton warhead. Remember that scene in Moonraker when Drax launch Shuttles from an underground amazonian base ?  ;D )

Kind of catch-22 !

And S-103 looks like an alternative to the S-104 / RHEINBERRY  boost-glide concepts. Using expendable rocket stages and perhaps film return capsules. Closer from a CORONA or a GAMBIT except without the Agena.



Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #70 on: 02/01/2021 12:48 pm »
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about this program (and RHEINBERRY). I think the biggest question is what had been done when the program was canceled? At most they were doing early hardware testing. How much and what kind? And had they settled on a basic vehicle design? Or were they still looking at multiple options?

We don't even have a good chronology of the program.

Offline darkenfast

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #71 on: 02/01/2021 05:59 pm »
I red about this recently. The CIA send ROCAF pilots into the Chinese SA-2 meatgrinder. First time, they dropped the sensors from a U-2. Did not worked. Second try: they send a ROCAF C-130 Hercules at low level - 5000 miles ! - from Thailand to Lop Nor and back. Ten or twelve hours spent hugging the Chinese ground... and they dropped the sensors and made it back alive.  :o

The CIA also tried to spy Lop Nor from an Indian, himalayan mountain 25000 ft high and 1500 miles away. With a RTG powered sensor. That was swept by a snow avalanche... or perhaps stolen by the Indians. They never knew.

...

... sometimes it makes a fun read, excellent food for one's imagination; and sometimes you're left shaking your head in disbelief and wondering "wow, they did THAT ?"

"Spy On The Roof Of The World" by Sydney Wignall in 1996, tells of an ill-fated attempt in 1955 to sneak into Communist China-occupied Tibet to climb Mt. Gurla Mandhata. He admits to also agreeing to provide information to the Indian intelligence establishment about Chinese military in the area. They were captured by the PLA. He claims to have made up a story (he was tortured), about an atomic-powered spy device. Then there are stories about a lost RTG-powered device on an Indian mountain in the mid-60's (complete with someone involved getting testicular cancer from the plutonium). The device disappeared, supposedly, in a massive avalanche, and is described as a huge environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. These stories appear to have come out after the Wignall book.

I'm not even going to try to guess how much of the above is true.
« Last Edit: 02/01/2021 06:01 pm by darkenfast »
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Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #72 on: 02/01/2021 06:05 pm »
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about this program (and RHEINBERRY). I think the biggest question is what had been done when the program was canceled? At most they were doing early hardware testing. How much and what kind? And had they settled on a basic vehicle design? Or were they still looking at multiple options?

We don't even have a good chronology of the program.

A good reading here. http://codeonemagazine.net/c5_article.html?item_id=92

The last part has a lot of interesting stuff. Alas, it certainly adds more confusion to the whole affair !

Quote
The results of this work were presented to Air Force Systems Command in March 1965 in a report titled Manned Hypersonic Vehicle Study.

Manned Hypersonic Vehicle Study

The Manned Hypersonic Vehicle study summarized the work done in the previous phases for Mach 4 to 6 designs and then addressed two classes of Mach 6 to 12 hydrogen-powered designs. The first class, called Early Availability, consisted of vehicles with conventional propulsion systems, including currently available turbojets and subsonic combustion ramjets. The second class, called Later Availability, consisted of vehicles with advanced propulsion systems, including advanced turbojets and supersonic combustion ramjets.

None of the designs were B-58 parasites, which is not surprising since Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara formally announced the retirement of the B-58 program in late 1965.

Three design approaches were presented for the Early Availability category. They were based on three variations of the same reconnaissance mission concept—a pre-zone leg at subsonic speeds and medium altitudes that covered at least 2,000 nautical miles from the area to be reconnoitered; a zone leg at maximum altitude and super- or hypersonic cruising speed that covered 4,000 nautical miles; and a post-zone leg at subsonic speed that returned the vehicle to the home base or a safe base in another location.

The first design approached the mission with a boost-glide vehicle. This design, called Configuration R-3, had a maximum speed of Mach 9 and a maximum altitude of 130,000 feet. Powered to max speed and altitude by a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket booster with thrust of 190,000 pounds, it then glided for the remainder of the time in the reconnaissance zone. Subsonic propulsion for pre- and post-zone operations was provided by a single Bristol Siddeley 100/8 turbojet engine.

R-3 had a gross weight of 146,000 pounds and a zone range of 1,100 nautical miles. The variable sweep wings, when extended, gave the aircraft a wingspan of eighty feet. The overall length of the aircraft was 141.8 feet. The sweep angle of the leading edge when not extended was eighty-two degrees.

The second design, called Configuration B-2, approached the mission by air-launching a satellite payload from a rocket-propelled missile pod attached to the underside of a hypersonic carrier. The carrier vehicle had a maximum speed of Mach 8. It was powered by four General Electric J93 engines and one liquid oxygen/JP-fueled rocket motor. The rocket had a thrust of 250,000 pounds. The aircraft was 134.7 feet long with a fixed wing span of 77.8 feet and a sweep angle of sixty degrees. It weighed 299,000 pounds without the pod.

The satellite pod in B-2 was powered by two rockets.

The first rocket, which ignited after the pod separated from the carrier at Mach 8, consisted of a two-stage UGM-27 Polaris A2 sea-launched ballistic missile.

The second rocket was a forty-inch diameter Thiokol rocket. The combination satellite/missile pod weighed 25,000 pounds.

The third design approached the mission with a cruise vehicle. Called Configuration C-3, this design had a maximum speed of Mach 8 and a zone altitude of 115,000 feet. The twin-tail, fixed-wing aircraft was powered by four Pratt & Whitney advanced TF30 turbofan engines and one Marquardt dual fuel ramjet.

The turbojets would power the aircraft to Mach 3 at which point the ramjets would be ignited and powered by JP-4 fuel, the same fuel used to power the turbojets. Once the aircraft reached 115,000 feet and Mach 8, the ramjets would switch to liquid hydrogen for the duration of the zone leg. The dual-fuel approach allowed the aircraft to be sized smaller than a single-fuel design and to be refueled by existing KC-135 tanker aircraft.

C-3 had a gross weight of 170,000 pounds. It was 158.4 feet long and had a wingspan of 68.4 feet. An alternate configuration, which placed all four turbojets between the twin tails, had a length of 147.9 feet and a wingspan of 68.5 feet.

The Later Availability vehicles were based on engine and structural advances as applied to Configuration C-3. These advances included supersonic combustion ramjets and advanced turbojets. These designs, which were not detailed and not pursued, according to Kent, would be capable of reaching orbital velocities.

Just like the NRO document, there are a) boost-glide vehicles and b) air launched satellites there.

One thing is sure: after the A-12 & SR-71 flew in 1962-64 speed did not surrendered immediately. There was a multi-prongued effort until 1966 at least - Schriever retirement ? - to get some kind of hypersonic / suborbital strategic reconnaissance system.

They probably tried to get a system to bridge the gap between Mach 3.5 OXCART and orbital speed (Mach 27). And they really explored all the solutions they could think off, even the weirdest ones.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #73 on: 02/01/2021 07:43 pm »
atomic-powered spy device. Then there are stories about a lost RTG-powered device on an Indian mountain in the mid-60's (complete with someone involved getting testicular cancer from the plutonium). The device disappeared, supposedly, in a massive avalanche, and is described as a huge environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. These stories appear to have come out after the Wignall book.

I'm not even going to try to guess how much of the above is true.

So I don't think that the environmental catastrophe thing is true. Plutonium is predictable, and this stuff was an oxide form and would not dissolve in water. It doesn't give off gamma radiation. It's really only dangerous if it is pulverized and inhaled. Sitting buried under rock and snow, it's not going to make it into the groundwater. (I think.) It also has a fairly short half-life, and so a lot of it is already gone. There are actually more dangerous radio-isotopes--the Soviets used polonium a lot, which is nasty, and americium is not all the nice either. Pu-238 is not horrible if it is out there.
« Last Edit: 02/01/2021 07:47 pm by Blackstar »

Offline libra

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #74 on: 08/02/2021 05:38 am »
http://codeonemagazine.net/c5_article.html?item_id=92

Quote
Those working on the A-12 replacement project initially referred to it by an internal billing designation—Work Order 540. The initial studies were divided into four two-month phases that spanned November 1963 through June 1964.

A budget status chart at the end of the report for Phase 3 indicated that Work Order 540 would run through July 1965 with an overall budget of $165,000, and approximately $110,000 had been spent for the first three phases. However, no status reports beyond Phase 3 were found in researching this article. The gap, however, is covered by follow-on design work that was initiated in August 1964. The results of this work were presented to Air Force Systems Command in March 1965 in a report titled Manned Hypersonic Vehicle Study.


Quote

The Manned Hypersonic Vehicle study summarized the work done in the previous phases for Mach 4 to 6 designs and then addressed two classes of Mach 6 to 12 hydrogen-powered designs. The first class, called Early Availability, consisted of vehicles with conventional propulsion systems, including currently available turbojets and subsonic combustion ramjets. The second class, called Later Availability, consisted of vehicles with advanced propulsion systems, including advanced turbojets and supersonic combustion ramjets.

None of the designs were B-58 parasites, which is not surprising since Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara formally announced the retirement of the B-58 program in late 1965.

Three design approaches were presented for the Early Availability category.

The first design approached the mission with a boost-glide vehicle. This design, called Configuration R-3, had a maximum speed of Mach 9 and a maximum altitude of 130,000 feet. Powered to max speed and altitude by a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket booster with thrust of 190,000 pounds, it then glided for the remainder of the time in the reconnaissance zone. Subsonic propulsion for pre- and post-zone operations was provided by a single Bristol Siddeley 100/8 turbojet engine.


Quote
The Later Availability vehicles were based on engine and structural advances as applied to Configuration C-3. These advances included supersonic combustion ramjets and advanced turbojets. These designs, which were not detailed and not pursued, according to Kent, would be capable of reaching orbital velocities.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1602/1

Quote
Cunningham said that he and CIA officials Jack Ledford and John Parangosky met with Jim McDonnell and his son to discuss the project. This was most likely in early 1965.

McDonnell Douglas worked on the project for approximately 14 months (May 1966 aprox.)

All these quotes to highlight that Convair final work on ISINGLASS stretched from 1964 into summer 1965. And it involved hydrolox rocket vehicles pushing to Mach 9 at 130 000 feet. They also considered near orbital vehicles so mach 20+ (ascent to orbit = Mach 26).

Meanwhile come McDonnell Douglas, from early 1965 to 1966 so overlaping in time. Proposing an hydrolox rocket vehicle flying at 125 000 feet except much faster: to Mach 22.

So the dates and basic concepts match: by the first-half of the year 1965 Convair - with MDD on their heels ! - had switched from airbreathing (top speed Mach 4.5, not enough against nuclear SA-5s) to LOX/LH2 rockets.

I often think this explains the name shift from ISINGLASS to RHEINBERRY, but it's only my gut feeling there.
« Last Edit: 08/02/2021 11:53 am by libra »

Offline Harry Cover

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #75 on: 03/06/2023 03:38 pm »
Document attached is a 1961 study about technical issues related to boost-glide reconnaissance. "1961" means DynaSoar (obviously) but it may be of interest for ISINGLASS and RHEINBERRY too.

Offline Vahe231991

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #76 on: 03/06/2023 07:16 pm »
I cleaned up the last page from the document posted by Blackstar on top of this page, in 2017.

Lot of interesting stuff.  Not least that the date is 1966, quite late for some of the concepts listed in the many columns.

TAGBOARD (on the left column) is well known.

ISINGLASS (second column) is also recognizable: B-52, LOX/LH-2 (= XLR-129 although not mentionned), Mach 21

[snip]


Any thoughts on ISINGLASS/McDonnell and connections to earlier hydrogen aircraft work at Lockheed by Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson? The relevant chapter in "Skunkworks", chapter 8 "Blowing up Burbank", where they were looking into LH2 planes from about 1956 to ~~1960. That included Suntan 1956-1958. ISINGLASS is later while Lockheed works on the A12 but anyway?
The CL-400 was abandoned in favor of the Archangel design series when Kelly Johnson realized that any full-scale development and operational use of the CL-400 Suntan required building an infrastructure for supplying LH2 to fuel the CL-400's engines. ISINGLASS was designed to take pictures of Soviet territory at speeds greater than Mach 10, so it needed an engine and a carrier aircraft to perform a reconnaissance mission, and McDonnell found the B-52 the most appropriate launch platform for the Model 192. The LR129 rocket engine would have allowed the Model 192 to tune performance over a wide range of altitudes over hostile territory by relying on an expanded nozzle. Like ISINGLASS, the Suntan program was kept secret even after cancellation for a generation, and it was publicly disclosed by Lockheed until the 1970s.
« Last Edit: 03/22/2023 02:35 pm by Vahe231991 »

Offline LittleBird

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #77 on: 03/07/2023 06:03 am »
Document attached is a 1961 study about technical issues related to boost-glide reconnaissance. "1961" means DynaSoar (obviously) but it may be of interest for ISINGLASS and RHEINBERRY too.

Thanks for that. I like the shimmy factor, page viii.

"we got a wicked shimmy" --- "Apollo 13"

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #78 on: 03/07/2023 10:20 pm »
Digging this further... cleaned up file 2.0, attached.

-------

No idea what S-105 / ISINGLASS would do with a "Skybolt 2nd stage". Perhaps an auxiliary rocket engine to help accelerating the ramjets from the B-58's Mach 2 to ISINGLASS Mach 4 cruise speed ? Ramjets work better at mach 3 than Mach 2... they usually need a booster.

--------

S-103 "air launched reconnaissance satellite" the booster is a Minuteman II + Able-Star stage as described on Ed Kyle website.

AJ10-41 was Able-Star engine.

https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/thorh2.html

https://minutemanmissile.com/solidrocketboosters.html

I did some calculations for a B-52 + Minuteman II + Able-Star launcher; the overall weight and payload to orbit matches very well.

Minuteman II 63 000 pounds and Able-star is 10 000 pounds, so total 73 000 pounds.

Payload to orbit corresponds, too: 1100 pounds.

I don't know if I paid attention to this when you posted it a couple of years ago, but why did you switch the names? The table in the original document has ISINGLASS as the second column, but you renamed it. What is the justification for that?

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ISINGLASS reconnaissance spaceplane
« Reply #79 on: 03/07/2023 10:30 pm »
Something that I am starting to appreciate in another context is that if the payload (camera system) is closely tied to the rocket--meaning that it maxes out the rocket--and if the rocket has little room for growth, then the payload has no room for growth either.

Put another way, you're stuck with what you have and it's not going to get much better. That's one of the big limitations of air-launched rockets. They are going to be designed to take maximum advantage of the aircraft payload capability. So the program starts at maximum capability and is not going to get much better and therefore your payload cannot grow.

Contrast that to ground-launched rockets, particularly at this time. Thor was improved by adding a longer Agena, then stretching the first stage, then adding SRBs (not necessarily in that order). Atlas got a bit of an increase in performance over its lifetime too. And Titan also got bigger and more capable. If you look at the Thor example, the first CORONA was a single camera. Then it grew to two cameras. Then it added a second reentry vehicle. Then it added more film. The final version of CORONA was a lot bigger and more capable than the early version, and that was possible because the Thor was improved a lot.

ISINGLASS was going to start out with little growth capability.

 

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