Quote from: Graham2001 on 04/13/2010 05:14 pmInteresting, if the Space Review article is correct all documentation on this engine was supposedly destroyed...That's not what the article says. It says "Pratt & Whitney employees later claimed that they were told to destroy their blueprints and test data to “avoid embarrassing NASA."
Interesting, if the Space Review article is correct all documentation on this engine was supposedly destroyed...
Even though CIA officials talked about OXCART missions over the USSR, some of them even flying missions coordinated with satellites far overhead, both politics and the perceived vulnerability of the OXCART to sophisticated defense prevented this from ever happening.
I have a vague and very possibly incorrect memory that some flights were made over the Barents Sea parallel to the coast of the Kola Peninsula to get looks inland. Beyond that, a circuit of the Barents going on past Cape Kanin Nos and up the west coast of Novaya Zemlya would have afforded opportunities to see interesting things while staying out of Soviet airspace.
As for ISINGLASS, it remains an interesting mystery. I really wonder about the performance. Somebody should be able to take those dimensions and work out how much fuel it could carry. From there they could work out performance characteristics. I assume that any first-year aerospace engineering student could do that. It's just volume and then the rocket equation. It should be easy to get maximum values.
...A search for "Convair" turned up three documents that I've requested:"ADDITIONAL TASKING OF CONVAIR FORT WORTH, FOR SIMULATION [Sanitized]," 18 Nov 63;"TASKING FOR CONVAIR," 12 Feb 64; and"TASKING FOR CONVAIR," 21 Feb 64....
Nice!
In the middle of 2001 (i.e. before 9-11) I attended an unclassified symposium at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was about historical overflight. As part of the symposium we got a tour of the DIA's imagery analysis center, which at the time was pioneering the government use of commercial remote sensing imagery. The value of such imagery was that it could be freely distributed to allies, law enforcement, etc., because it was unclassified.At the end of our tour we saw the room where they processed U-2 film. There was a light table there with some U-2 imagery on it. I took a look and saw an image of several C-17s on a ramp.* We were told that this was Open Skies imagery. The US and the Russians took imagery of either sides' installations and apparently shared their imagery. We used the U-2's film cameras (I think) because it was old technology and we didn't want to show them our current digital capabilities.Open Skies was not really about intelligence, it was a confidence-building exercise intended to get the two countries talking to each other.