Even less since there is no room whatsoever on an A-12 to stick a large rocket - not on the back, not on the belly, and even less on a non-existing pylon. Plus: not only the huge drag would kill the Mach 3.4 top speed, but even that velocity makes preciously little difference when launching things in orbit - because the rocket equation is (pardon the rude word) an exponential bastard thing.
Quote from: JosephB on 08/14/2009 03:26 pm1-There is a whole laundry list of books I'd like to get, once some of our damn bills are paid, and Shades Of Gray: National Security And The Evolution Of Space Reconnaissance by L. Parker Temple is one I was thinking about.Has anyone read it? Amazon gave it an ok rating.2-I have to say Blackstar, you get access to some pretty neat stuff.1-I suggest getting it through interlibrary loan to see if you really want it. If I remember correctly, it is very expensive. I think the material is dated now.2-Requires lots of effort.
1-There is a whole laundry list of books I'd like to get, once some of our damn bills are paid, and Shades Of Gray: National Security And The Evolution Of Space Reconnaissance by L. Parker Temple is one I was thinking about.Has anyone read it? Amazon gave it an ok rating.2-I have to say Blackstar, you get access to some pretty neat stuff.
Lockheed Martin: "The SR-71 Blackbird is still the fastest acknowledged crewed air-breathing jet aircraft."acknowledged
PS: To answer my own question, as OAC includes "The Space review" printouts, you probably knew
RHEINBERRY appears to have been a proposal around 1965 that had the same flight goals as ISINGLASS
QuoteRHEINBERRY appears to have been a proposal around 1965 that had the same flight goals as ISINGLASS Veeery interesting. Wonder who made that proposal then. Seems there is a distinction to be made between -"Second ISINGLASS"-"That RHEINBERRY that overlapped with the second ISINGLASS". As for Pratt XLR-129 it could have been either for "second ISINGLASS" or "That RHEINBERRY that overlapped with the second ISINGLASS". Wonder how these two were related...
Quote from: Harry Cover on 03/18/2023 02:31 pmQuoteRHEINBERRY appears to have been a proposal around 1965 that had the same flight goals as ISINGLASS Veeery interesting. Wonder who made that proposal then. Seems there is a distinction to be made between -"Second ISINGLASS"-"That RHEINBERRY that overlapped with the second ISINGLASS". As for Pratt XLR-129 it could have been either for "second ISINGLASS" or "That RHEINBERRY that overlapped with the second ISINGLASS". Wonder how these two were related... Wheelon told me that General Schriever was interested in a scramjet. I wonder if RHEINBERRY was a scramjet vehicle and they determined that would be too difficult to achieve, so they abandoned that program.
As I've been writing this one up I keep scratching my head about why the CIA thought it was a good idea. It had very limited utility. It would have provided a single photo pass roughly 50 nautical miles wide and 6000 nautical miles long. Okay, what is the value of that? What happens if the interesting stuff is outside of that swath? And my suspicion is that it had very little final crossrange capability, meaning that it pretty much had to be pointed at the landing location. So if the target of interest is not along that path (because the vehicle could not reach its landing spot), then you're not able to use it.
I've been wondering the same. In the mid 1960s they argued that the Aircraft Reconnaissance System system could provide a back-up in case US recon sats would be taken out by Soviet or Chinese asat weapons.
<snip>I guess this might come down to a case of what factors were driving their decision making. Were they just really enamored of a super fast rocketplane and that drove their desires more than an operational requirement? Or did they have some studies that showed that this thing might actually be valuable?(Of course, we're being very theoretical here, because they didn't build it.)
I realized that I might be misreading some of the documents and have a different interpretation now.I think that RHEINBERRY may have originally been the name for the McDonnell proposal. ISINGLASS was the name for a General Dynamics proposal. The GD proposal was then rejected, and perhaps at that point the McDonnell proposal became ISINGLASS. Considering that what is described as the McDonnell proposal here as RHEINBERRY is what essentially continued on as ISINGLASS, that seems to make the most sense.Or am I misunderstanding stuff?
Quote from: Blackstar on 03/19/2023 06:13 pmI realized that I might be misreading some of the documents and have a different interpretation now.I think that RHEINBERRY may have originally been the name for the McDonnell proposal. ISINGLASS was the name for a General Dynamics proposal. The GD proposal was then rejected, and perhaps at that point the McDonnell proposal became ISINGLASS. Considering that what is described as the McDonnell proposal here as RHEINBERRY is what essentially continued on as ISINGLASS, that seems to make the most sense.Or am I misunderstanding stuff?It's possible there was some programme name politics going on: Initially using RHEINBERY to separate the concept from ISINGLASS (which at that point was looking to be on the chopping block due to not being sufficiently performant to do the job), then with the requirements change to a Mach 20 vehicle renaming to ISINGLAS II - and later just ISINGLASS again - to give the impression of a mere iteration to an existing vehicle programme rather than development of a whole new and otherwise unrelated vehicle (in a similar attempt to the Crusader III).