The Air Force has a very special base sitting atop Haleakala, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. It doesn’t look like any other air base because the USAF Maui Space Complex has a very special mission: Spy on objects orbiting Earth. This is how it looks:
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When the Soviet Tupolev Tu-4 bomber made its debut in 1949, it was more than a big deal. This reverse-engineered Boeing B-29 Superfortress gave the Russians intercontinental strategic strike capabilities that the existing US fleet of F-61 Black Widows and F-82 Twin Mustangs simply couldn’t compete with. The American response: Build a better interceptor. Enter the F-94 Starfire.
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America’s fleet of surveillance and attack drones are far older than most people realize. While the unmanned platforms have certainly come into the spotlight since the start of the War on Terror, they’ve actually been dutifully getting shot out of the sky on behalf of our national interests since World War I. And one of the most impressive—and impressively named—of their ranks was the Ryan Firebee.
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In the 1980s, the US Air Force only knew about roughly 5,000 pieces of space debris orbiting our planet. By 2010, that number had tripled to 15,639 objects. And our current space trash tracking system can’t even detect some of the smaller bits zipping around up there. That’s why the USAF is developing a new iteration of the venerable "Space Fence" that’s both more precise and more cost effective than its predecessor.
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When an American aircraft goes down, be it over a remote training ground or behind enemy lines, the Air Force’s crack teams of pararescue forces jump into action. The new HC-130J Combat King II is the plane that delivers them when Blackhawks can’t, even into active combat zones.
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With the third X-51A WaveRider failing to reach hypersonic speed due to a fin failure last August, it seemed the United States Air Force would possibly forgo the fourth (and final) run. On the morning of May 1st, however, that last X-51A got its chance to soar, successfully reaching Mach 5.1 during a record 370-second flight. According to the Wright Patterson Air Force base, the aircraft’s rocket booster helped it hit Mach 4.8 about 26 seconds after being released from a B-2H at 50K feet, at which point its air-fed scramjet brought it to 60,000 feet while achieving hypersonic flight. The USAF notes that “it was the longest of the four X-51A test flights [230 nautical miles] and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight” — surely taking some of the sting out of the $300 million program’s previous shortcomings. Past flights aimed to hit Mach six, with the first and second tests only sustaining Mach five.
The aircraft made destructive splashdown landing into the Pacific as planned, but data from the whole flight was recorded. The USAF isn’t planning a follow-up to the X-51A anytime soon, though the program will likely serve as a reference for future designs. You can dig into the official rundown at the link below.
Filed under: Misc, Transportation
Via: Slashdot
Source: USAF
Many have lamented the seeming decline of the US space program. While we’re not expecting an immediate return to the halcyon days, the President’s proposed federal budget for fiscal 2014 could see some renewed ambition. NASA’s slice of the pie includes a plan that would improve detection of near-Earth asteroids, send a solar-powered robot ship (like the NASA concept above) to capture one of the space rocks and tow it back to a stable orbit near Earth, where researchers could study it up close. The agency would have humans setting foot on the asteroid by 2025, or even as soon as 2021. It’s a grand goal to say the least, but we’d potentially learn more about solar propulsion and defenses against asteroid collisions.
If NASA’s plans mostly involve the future, the US Air Force budget is looking into the past. It’s setting aside $35 million for a long-discussed resurrection of the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, also known as DSCOVR — a vehicle that was scuppered in 2001 due to cost overruns, among other factors. Run by NOAA once aloft, the modernized satellite would focus on warning the Earth about incoming solar winds. That’s just one of the satellite’s original missions, but the November 2014 launch target is relatively realistic — and we’ll need it when the satellite currently fulfilling the role is overdue for a replacement.
Via: Space.com
Source: NASA, AP (Yahoo)
The US Air Force’s armada are among the most advanced aircraft on the planet. As such, the USAF isn’t going to let just any schmuck fresh out of basic training take to the skies in an F-35. Instead wanna-be Top Guns must first prove their mettle in a less expensive plane that’s trained more than 50,000 pilots since the Eisenhower administration. More »
The first people to step on to the surface of Mars won’t arrive aboard the chemical-fueled rockets that delivered Apollo 11 to the Moon—they simply don’t provide enough thrust to get to the Red Planet before exposing their crews to months of dangerous space radiation. Instead, NASA is turning to long-ignored nuclear-thermal rocket technology to deliver the first Martian explorers into history. More »
Death by ICBM was a near constant threat to both sides during the Cold War. America’s answer: a long-range, phased-array early warning system designed to find, identify, and track these sea-launched ballistic missile threats. It worked so well, the Air Force still uses it. More »
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