From: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V2 #37 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Tuesday, 22 December 1992 Volume 02 : Number 037 In this issue: Re: Fast Lunar Congresscritters Re: Foggy Trio, Aurora and DynaSoar Greetings from a Lurker Re: Greetings from a Lurker no subject (file transmission) Lockheed news See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: larry@ichips.intel.com Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 11:53:51 -0800 Subject: Re: Fast Lunar Congresscritters I wrote: >Someone once told me that John W.R. Taylor, of Jane's fame, once wrote that >a few US Congressmen saw and rode in a Mach 6 capable aircraft in the late >1970s (aint disinformation wonderful!) Tom Hackwood responds: >Not really..... Let me see, what congress critter went to the moon? >His return flight, upon reentry, approached Mach 8+? (My memory is a >little fuzzy on this). Dean Adams responds: >Hmmm? Did one of the lunar astronauts get elected to something? >Well... actually all orbital reentry flights start out at Mach 25, although >a returning lunar vehicle would likely be going a little faster than that. Yes, I think the official fastest human record is currently jointly held by one of the Apollo crews returning from a moon mission at over Mach 31 (if I recall from Anderson correctly - earth orbit escape velocity being higher than earth orbital velocity (Mach 25)). I have this source at home. I can easily look it up. Larry ------------------------------ From: larry@ichips.intel.com Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 12:47:03 -0800 Subject: Re: Foggy Trio, Aurora and DynaSoar Mary Shafer writes: >I hate to say this, but I doubt if anyone thinks that this mailing >list poses any threat at all to the national security. GREAT! > As a rule, >the rehashing of previously published material is unlikely to lead >to any startling breakthroughs, WOW! > particularly when the rehashers are >not part of the aerospace community. WOW! WOW! Heck, I've had 'aerospace community' people tell me that they disinform each other! In this business lying can be such a big part of dealing with unaccessed people. All I can say about the above is please read the response to the next statement below! >In regard to this last point, I'm going to echo something one of my >colleagues posted in a newsgroup the other day--we, the flight test >community, knew about the F-117 long ago, because we knew that people >were vanishing into the project. We knew who was building it, we knew >about the first crash, we knew when it became operational. We didn't >know what it looked like or what kind of plane it was, but we knew it >was there. The same was true of the B-2 before the Administration >decided to tell the taxpayers about it, although in this case there >was a very strong feeling that it was a flying wing. Even the non-aerospace community 'rehashers' knew the B-2 was a flying wing! If you also read the stuff reported about the eventual F-117A before that first Pentagon press conference, you'll notice that SOME of the descriptions were quite accurate. Lockheed, in their excellent publication "We Own The Night" Lockheed Horizons, Issue 30, May 1992, indicate that part of the whole 'trick' to the F-117A design was in the public domain, in a paper even done by a Russia physicist! I reproduce a section below for purposes of discussion from pgs 6-8. "Key to Lockheed's approach was the work of Skunk Works software engineer Denys Overholser and retired Lockheed mathematician Bill Schroeder, who developed what ammounted to a "Rosetta-Stone" for stealth design in a computer program called ECHO 1. ECHO 1 was born in the creative insight of Schroeder, who revisited a century-old set of mathematical formulas originally derived by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and refined by turn-of-the-century German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johannes Sommerfield. These calculations predicted the manner in which a given geometric configuration would scatter (or reflect) electromagnetic radiation. Russian physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev had taken this early work a step further, developing a more simplified approach that concentrated on electromagnetic currents at the edges of geometric shapes. The Maxwell, Sommerfield, Ufimtsev equations WERE AVAILABLE TO ANYONE [emphasis added by me] but had been considered too cumbersome to be applied to anything but simple geomentric forms. Lockheed's breakthrough was Schroeder's concept of reducing the complex shape of a traditional aircraft to a finite set of two-dimensional surfaces that could be reasonably analyzed using these calculations. The result was "faceting" - creating a three-dimensional aircraft, not out of smooth, gracefully curved surfaces, but out of a collection of panels. ... " Also, the best defense against disinformation are normal US citizens who report being awakened by things that go bump in the night. I might add, that back in the mid-to-late summer of 1989, when the pulser was first reported by normal 'non-aerospace community' people, when they were awakened by same during a 3AM overflight, some of the most skeptical people, were NASA people. It's interesting now that in the past year some NASA people have started to 'come around'. Craig Harding responds: >I saw the message Mary is referring to, from Al Bowers I believe? One thing >he also said was that along similar lines, he *hadn't* seen any "hole" >appearing in personnel that could be attributed to Aurora. Mr. Bowers may not see anyone, but allow me to say this, from what I have heard, this is not completely true. Larry ------------------------------ From: wrc@cs.rit.edu (Warren R Carithers) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 16:50:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: Greetings from a Lurker Hello! As one with no background in aerospace design, hypersonic flight conditions, etc., I find that I can't typically contribute to the discussions on this list. However, I have had a long-time love of the SR-71 and a deep interest in Aurora-type projects (shrouded in mystery, requiring that small clues be nudged into place ever so carefully), and I find the discussions to be highly educational and more than a little bit exciting to observe. As a lurker, then, I would like to thank Mary, Phil, Larry, and everyone else who contributes on a regular or not-so-regular basis for everything they share with the rest of us. Furthermore, in this season of reflection and hope, I would like to extend my wish to all recipients of this list that your holiday - whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just the Solstice - will be peaceful and joyous for you and those you love, and that you will enjoy a safe and prosperous New Year. Once again, thanks! - -- Warren R. Carithers, RIT Department of Computer Science, Rochester NY 14623-0887 Internet: wrc@cs.rit.edu, wrcics@ultb.isc.rit.edu (716) 475-2288 UUCP: {allegra,rutgers}!rochester!rit!wrc FAX (716) 475-7100 ------------------------------ From: Joe.Lurker@Corp.Sun.COM (Joe Lurker STE) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 92 16:41:03 PST Subject: Re: Greetings from a Lurker Damn! Pullin' my leg again! Thought I had found another long lost family member! =8^) Joe (It ain't easy bein' a Lurker) ------------------------------ From: gt6745b@prism.gatech.edu Date: Mon, 21 Dec 92 21:10:35 EST Subject: no subject (file transmission) Does the YF-22 (F-22A Lightning II ATF) ever get discussed on here? Michael David Knight gt6745b@prism.gatech.edu * In this world and the next,* Georgia Institute of Technology * fight to live, and retreat * Atlanta, Georgia 30332 * only into happiness and * Aerospace Engineering (404)676-0520 * success. * ------------------------------ From: dnadams@nyx.cs.du.edu (Dean Adams) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 92 22:01:01 MST Subject: Lockheed news Here is a little news item which deals with our favorite company... (from Military & Aerospace Electronics, 12/16/92) Lockheed Advanced Development Co. (Burbank, CA) is using Intel's 128-node PSC/860 supercomputer for engineering analysis on some unspecified DoD programs, according to Intel. Configured with two Gbytes of main memory and 96 Gbytes of disk storage, the iPSC/860 can solve a large system of equations--with up to 75,000 unknown--in 65 hours, says Mark Corbitt, manager of the government sector for Intel's Supercomputer Systems Div. "The Intel systems achieved 4.9 GFlops of sustained performance--63 percent of the peak performance capacity--and is now running in a full production environment at Lockheed. "Problems of this size have never been executed this quickly before", claims Corbitt. Quickly solving matrices of this size is vital to advanced modeling applications. - ----- Hmmm... "unspecififed DoD programs" and "full production environment", eh? Interesting. :-) - -dean ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V2 #37 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "listserv@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu". 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