Blackstar is the reported code-name of a secret

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orbital

spaceplane A spaceplane is a vehicle that can flight, fly and gliding flight, glide as an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and function as a spacecraft in outer space. To do so, spaceplanes must incorporate features of both aircraft and spacecraft. Orbit ...

system. The possible existence of the Blackstar program was reported in March 2006 by ''

Aviation Week & Space Technology ''Aviation Week & Space Technology'', often abbreviated ''Aviation Week'' or ''AW&ST'', is the flagship magazine of the Aviation Week Network, a division of Informa. The weekly magazine is available in print and online, reporting on the aeros ...

'' (''Aviation Week'', ''AWST'') magazine; the magazine reported that the program had been underway since at least the early 1990s, and that the impetus for Blackstar was to allow the United States government to retain orbital

reconnaissance In military operations, military reconnaissance () or scouting is the exploration of an area by military forces to obtain information about enemy forces, the terrain, and civil activities in the area of operations. In military jargon, reconnai ...

capabilities jeopardized following the 1986 ''Challenger'' disaster. The article also said that the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

Space Command A space command is a military organization with responsibility for space operations and warfare. A space command is typically a Jointness, joint organization or organized within a larger military branch and is distinct from a fully independent s ...

was unaware of Blackstar, suggesting it was operated by an

intelligence agency An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, Intelligence analysis, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy obj ...

such as the

National Reconnaissance Office The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a member of the United States Intelligence Community and an agency of the United States Department of Defense which designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. f ...

. ''Aviation Week'' speculated that such a spacecraft could also have offensive military capabilities, a concept colloquially known as "The Space Bomber".Bush plans 'space bomber'
." Vulliamy, E., ''

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''. July 29, 2001.Pentagon planning for space bomber
" Windrem, R.,

MSNBC MSNBC is an American cable news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Launched on July 15, 1996, and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the channel primarily broadcasts r ...

. August 14, 2001. The magazine also stated that it was likely that Blackstar would be mothballed, although it is unclear whether this is due to cost or failure of the program. The ''Aviation Week'' report was dismissed a few days later as "almost certainly bogus" and the project termed a "technical absurdity" by Jeffrey F. Bell in an article in Space Daily.

The Blackstar system

''Aviation Week'' describes Blackstar as a

two-stage-to-orbit A two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) or two-stage rocket is a launch vehicle in which two distinct multistage rocket, stages provide propulsion consecutively in order to achieve orbital velocity. It is intermediate between a three-stage-to-orbit launcher a ...

system, the first stage of which is a

delta-wing A delta wing is a wing shaped in the form of a triangle. It is named for its similarity in shape to the Greek uppercase letter delta (Δ). Although long studied, the delta wing did not find significant practical applications until the Jet Age, w ...

ed supersonic jet (which ''Aviation Week'' referred to as the SR-3). Its description of SR-3 is similar to the

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B-70 Valkyrie The North American Aviation XB-70 Valkyrie is a retired prototype version of the planned thermonuclear weapon, nuclear-armed, deep-penetration Supersonic aircraft, supersonic strategic bomber for the United States Air Force Strategic Air Comm ...

Mach 3

strategic bomber A strategic bomber is a medium- to long-range Penetrator (aircraft), penetration bomber aircraft designed to drop large amounts of air-to-ground weaponry onto a distant target for the purposes of debilitating the enemy's capacity to wage war. Unl ...

, and to patents filed in the 1980s by

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. The SR-3 would carry a second, smaller airframe, codenamed the XOV (eXperimental Orbital Vehicle) underneath, between its two laterally separated engine-banks, each containing 2 or 3 engines. This rocket-powered

, with similarities to the

X-20 Dyna-Soar The Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar ("Dynamic Soarer") was a United States Air Force (USAF) program to develop a spaceplane that could be used for a variety of military missions, including aerial reconnaissance, bombing, space rescue, satellite maintenan ...

project, would be released by its

mothership A mother ship, mothership or mother-ship is a large vehicle that leads, serves, or carries other smaller vehicles. A mother ship may be a maritime ship, aircraft, or spacecraft. Examples include bomber aircraft, bombers converted to carry exp ...

at an altitude of around 100,000 feet. The XOV would then light its rocket motor (

aerospike engine The aerospike engine is a type of rocket engine that maintains its aerodynamic efficiency across a wide range of altitudes. It belongs to the class of altitude compensating nozzle engines. Aerospike engines were proposed for many single-stage- ...

s, similar to those used by the

Lockheed Martin X-33 The Lockheed Martin X-33 was a proposed uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane that was developed for a period in the 1990s. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was pl ...

), and could achieve both

suborbital A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched. Hence, it will not complete one orbital revolution, will no ...

and orbital flight; one source quoted by ''Aviation Week'' estimates the XOV could reach an orbit of above the

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

, depending on payload and mission profile. The XOV would then reenter the atmosphere and glide back to any landing site where it would land horizontally on a conventional runway. This combination of jet-powered mothership and a smaller rocket-powered spaceplane resembles the civilian Tier One spaceplane system as well as NASA's

X-15 The North American X-15 is a Hypersonic speed, hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft which was operated by the United States Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the List of X-planes, X-plane series of ...

, but capable of much higher velocities and thus of attaining orbit. Readers are cautioned to examine the challenges involved in supersonic separation of vehicles as opposed to the more common subsonic separation of ordnance from aircraft, but this separation from the belly might be easier than from the top, which proved to be problematic on the Lockheed D-21/M-21.

The program

The primary use of a military spaceplane such as Blackstar would be to conduct high-altitude or orbital reconnaissance, allowing surprise overflights of foreign locations with very low risk of the spyplane being successfully engaged by existing air-defense systems. This is similar to the goals of the earlier U-2 and

SR-71 Blackbird The Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" is a retired long-range, high-altitude, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed and manufactured by the American aerospace company Lockheed Corporation. Its nicknames include " Blackbird" and ...

reconnaissance aircraft; in some circumstances such an overflight yields more information than a pass by a

reconnaissance satellite A reconnaissance satellite or intelligence satellite (commonly, although unofficially, referred to as a spy satellite) is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications. The ...

, as the satellite's path is predictable, allowing sensitive material to be hidden. Military analysts have suggested that a military spaceplane could also be used to place small satellites in orbit, to retrieve them, to provide a means of launching nuclear weapons from orbit, or to serve as a platform for exotic orbit-to-ground hypervelocity weapons. The small spaceplane described by ''Aviation Week'' appears to have only a very modest cargo capacity, limiting its use in such missions. ''Aviation Week'' suggests that the huge costs of the Blackstar program were borne both by the Department of Defense's own black budget and by hiding the costs of Blackstar inside the procurement costs attached to acknowledged military purchases. To assist in this, and to allow politicians to deny the USAF operates such a vehicle, the Blackstar assets may nominally be owned and operated by the civilian defense contractors who built it. The magazine suggests that a consortium of Boeing and Lockheed is responsible for Blackstar. It is unclear if the Blackstar program became fully operational, although it may have been so since the mid-1990s. ''Aviation Weeks article speculated that the success of Blackstar explains the Government's willingness to cancel the SR-71 Blackbird and Air Force satellite-launch programs.

Similar aircraft

During the 1970s, when studies were underway which led to the specification of the Space Shuttle, most leading US aerospace contractors explored orbital spaceplane designs, some based on a two-stage design. With the adoption of the

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...

design, these avenues appear to have been abandoned. The use of a spaceplane as part of the launching system to replace the Space Shuttle has been suggested in programs such as

VentureStar VentureStar was a single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch system proposed by Lockheed Martin and funded by the U.S. government. The goal was to replace the Space Shuttle by developing a re-usable spaceplane that could launch satellites into orbit a ...

. Some of the details of the SR-3 resemble the rumored Brilliant Buzzard or “Mothership” aircraft, which was alleged to carry reconnaissance aircraft on top, rather than on the bottom as with the SR-3. The second stage of Brilliant Buzzard was considered a hypersonic aircraft, and the lengthening of runways at facilities such as Area 51 (taken by some as evidence of

Aurora An aurora ( aurorae or auroras), also commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly observed in high-latitude regions (around the Arc ...

) could instead be necessary either to support SR-3's takeoff or XOV's landing. In the late 1960s

studied conceptual designs using the B-70 bomber for small space launch of an

type rocket plane. These were abandoned as unpromising. What is known, and a matter of public record, is that, through the 1980s and 1990s, the USAF did undertake a series of projects to study, research, develop and test demonstrator vehicles capable of SSTO (

single-stage-to-orbit A single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle reaches orbit from the surface of a body using only propellants and fluids and without expending tanks, engines, or other major hardware. The term usually, but not exclusively refers to reusable launch sys ...

) and TSTO (

) missions. These programs were code-named, in order, Science Dawn, Science Realm, and

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, and involved the development of three different competitive demonstrator vehicles. It was at the conclusion of Copper Canyon's design phase that the X-30 NASP was proposed, and Scott claimed that the NASP was used to pay for development of this spaceplane. According to one declassified Rand Corp. report, two of the three vehicles failed to achieve their full flight envelope (i.e. couldn't make orbit), while the third, an "assisted SSTO", did achieve orbital capability. All of these programs can be found in US military budget documents with associated budget account numbers for years in the 1980s up into the mid-1990s, though the code name was dropped from the account number in the mid-1990s, even though many millions were budgeted up until recent years.

References

Bibliography

* .

External links

* The Space Review
Six blind men in a zoo: Aviation Week’s mythical Blackstar
Dwayne A. Day, ''

The Space Review ''The Space Review'' is a free online publication, published weekly with in-depth articles, essays, commentary and reviews on space exploration and development. It was founded in February 2003 by Jeff Foust, the current editor, publisher and reg ...