From: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #289 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Sunday, 4 June 1995 Volume 05 : Number 289 In this issue: Re: Dark Star 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: ijb@unb.ca (Ivan Baird) Date: Sat, 3 Jun 1995 12:12:44 -0300 Subject: Re: Dark Star At 5:29 PM 6/02/95, Byron Weber wrote:>Did I hear right? > >About 6pm, June 1, 1995, a CBS affiliate radio station in Los >Angeles announced the disclosure of a Lockheed-Martin, Skunkworks, >unmanned stealth recon vehicle named the Dark Star. Max. 8 hours >flight time, alt. 45,000 ft. (max.alt.still classified), subsonic >speed 250 mph with on board computer. Just caught the end of the >release, something about tail less. Searched several newspapers >today, not one word. Us Skunk enthusiasts must be in the minority. This reprinted from America Online (without permission), which also included a photogragh: WASHINGTON (June 1) - DarkStar, an advanced aerial reconnaissance drone, was shown in public for the first time Thursday, the Defense Department said. The drone was unveiled at the Lockheed Martin plant in Palmdale, Calif. The plant, known as the "Skunk Works," has developed many advanced aircraft for the military, including the U-2 high-altitude spy plane. The unmanned drone is designed to send back information on ememy locations to field commanders. It can operate at ranges of up to 500 nautical miles from its launch site at an altitude of more than 45,000 feet for over eight hours. "DarkStar will provide affordable, near real-time, continuous, all-weather, wide-area surveillance in support of tactical commanders," the Pentagon said. "The result will be timely information that the tactical commander can immediately exploit for accurate situational awareness and to perform precision strikes and other high-priority intelligence and reconnaissance tasks," it said. Lockheed and Boeing are jointly developing the drone, which is expected to cost $10 million each. The first flight of the drone is expected before the end of the year with flight testing to be completed by mid-1996. - -- Ivan Baird, CET University of New Brunswick (at Home) Micro/Systems Technical Specialist ijb@unb.ca SR75Aurora@aol.com Have a Good One!!! ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #289 ********************************* To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. Administrative requests, problems, and other non-list mail can be sent to either "skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu" or, if you don't like to type a lot, "prm@mail.orst.edu A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "skunk-works-digest" in the commands above with "skunk-works". Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from mail.orst.edu, in /pub/skunk-works/digest/vNN.nMMM (where "NN" is the volume number, and "MMM" is the issue number).