Secret Space Program

[wwkirk]

I can't decide what I think about this, so I've created this poll.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Thanks.

 

[Randall]

As usual I'd say this depends on what we mean by "space program". Is somebody someplace connected to the DoD trying to figure out how UFO propulsion works? Probably. Does the public know the full capabilities of our existing technology? Very doubtful. I remember when the F-16 came out ( back in the 70s ) that it was described as having "out of the atmosphere capability". This particular feature has never been described in any detail ( that I'm aware of ). A couple of obscure references I ran across later mentioned vectored thrust and an oxygen tank for the fuel mix to keep the engines running.

Assuming those references were true, it would make the F-16 the first real production line Buck Rogers type aerospace craft, and since then there have been a lot of upgrades in technology. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that we've got stuff flying around up there once in a while that we didn't think could do go there and back so easily. But I don't think we have any sort of sc-fi type space fleet or Moon bases or bases on Mars.

 

[Trajanus]

Assuming those references were true, it would make the F-16 the first real production line Buck Rogers type aerospace craft,

The MIG-25 and SR-71 came closer.

But I don't think we have any sort of sc-fi type space fleet or Moon bases or bases on Mars.

Nor do I believe the Serpo story. I don't outright dismiss all claims of contactees getting saucer rides, perhaps well beyond Earth, but I don't buy serpo specifically.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

What would be the point?

The reason the US wanted to win the space race in the 60's was to stop the expansion of communism.

There is now no political imperative to invest in this.

Militarily, there is no advantage to a base on the moon or mars, satellites in orbit around the earth can perform military functions at a much closer range. There are no soldiers from China or Russia to fight out there.

Why would you want to fly around a lifeless solar system, fighting nobody and keeping it secret so you can't even use the technology for political or military leverage. In the current domestic climate of conflict are you telling me a national technological achievement such as an advanced space fleet would not be used to inspire and motivate a nation that is stagnating in moral outrage arguments?

Sure there is a black budget but it makes more rational sense it is being spent on drone tech, AI, cyber warfare and covert funding of propaganda and militias in target states (see the project for a new American century) and not secret star cruisers.

 

[Trajanus]

There is now no political imperative to invest in this.

Why would you want to fly around a lifeless solar system, fighting nobody and keeping it secret so you can't even use the technology for political or military leverage.

You may well be right about it being lifeless but I wouldn't be so sure just now, as Mars and Europa might have subsurface life.
Exploration of the solar system can resolve a lot of scientific questions and it might have economic payoffs.

Sure there is a black budget but it makes more rational sense it is being spent on drone tech, AI, cyber warfare and covert funding of propaganda and militias in target states (see the project for a new American century) and not secret star cruisers.

Generally that may be true. But there are grounds for believing the US has acquired some alien tech and at least some black budget money has gone to secret study and attempts at duplication.

 

[marduk]

What would be the point?

The reason the US wanted to win the space race in the 60's was to stop the expansion of communism.

There is now no political imperative to invest in this.

Militarily, there is no advantage to a base on the moon or mars, satellites in orbit around the earth can perform military functions at a much closer range. There are no soldiers from China or Russia to fight out there.

Why would you want to fly around a lifeless solar system, fighting nobody and keeping it secret so you can't even use the technology for political or military leverage. In the current domestic climate of conflict are you telling me a national technological achievement such as an advanced space fleet would not be used to inspire and motivate a nation that is stagnating in moral outrage arguments?

Sure there is a black budget but it makes more rational sense it is being spent on drone tech, AI, cyber warfare and covert funding of propaganda and militias in target states (see the project for a new American century) and not secret star cruisers.

Totally agree.

The "Secret Space Program" is really about SIGINT and support for terrestrial military activity.

Even proposals for the weaponization of space have the weapons pointed towards terra firma, not away from it.

All of which is easily achieved from NEO and without putting humans in space.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

I can't decide what I think about this, so I've created this poll.

Unfortunately I can't vote in this poll because you jump from:

"Yes, but only slightly more advanced than NASA's public programs."

to

"Yes. There is probably a secret moon base, and possibly one on Mars."

The correct answer appears to be in-between those two options. I remember seeing infrared video footage that Richard Dolan took through a telescopic camera, showing the classic "TR-3B" shaped object zooming around in the high upper atmosphere (or possibly just beyond the atmosphere), and it looked like something that we made, but it had no visible emissions. So it appeared to utilize some form of field propulsion, but it didn't have that inertia-defying signature of gravitational field propulsion which all of the truly anomalous aerial vehicles demonstrate.

It's all but certain that we currently have genuine aerospace technology (craft that can maneuver both in the atmosphere and beyond it). They don't really need a compelling strategic reason to develop that kind of thing - they've got a $700B/year budget and any new capability is a positive thing in the military mind because the farther head of your adversaries that you are, the better.

But more than that - research into fundamental advancements is an on-going process (after all, that's how we ended WWII). That's why I can't believe that we ever abandoned work on gravitational field propulsion technology: because the first nation to achieve it will quickly achieve missile delivery times that defeat all known countermeasures. No general in their right mind could turn their nose up at that prospect.

So here's the thing - once you have that technology, the spin-off applications are mind-boggling. Once you have a metric propulsion delivery system that can take a warhead from Utah to Tehran in less than a minute, building aerospace vehicles with interplanetary - and even interstellar - spaceflight capabilities, is a snap.

I've seen zero evidence that we possess that form of technology at this point. But it would be insane to let our geopolitical adversaries get there first - because if they did, that one massive blunder would be a grave existential threat to our national security.

However we do seem to have something that's "in the middle," because in recent decades we've seen indications of craft that exhibit no outward propulsion characteristics, and yet still follow inertial trajectories. The craft we saw over Area 51 when the Bob Lazar story broke, come to mind. There are many possible methods for achieving this, the most well-known is magenetoaerodynamic propulsion (which Stanton Friedman loves to discuss) - just ionize the air around the vehicle and then force that air behind you with a varying magnetic field. Another possibility involves a focused alternating magnetic beam that employs the Lenz law to repel against the surface of the ocean (I've even seen indications that at extremely high frequencies the Lenz law can work against matter than we normally consider to be insulators or semiconductors, like silicon, which is prevalent in the Earth's crust). And there are other options as well. One or more of those principles appear to propel craft that have been in production for at least 25 years. Others may be in the prototype/testing phase.

But to secretly travel to the Moon to make a Moon base, or to get to Mars with ease, I think we'd need a metric propulsion system, and that still appears to be a way's off. I could be wrong though - I often wonder if the military has arrived at a unified field theory (aka quantum gravity theory): if we've got that, then all bets are off. Because if we have that, then we might have a metric propulsion system already - and if we do, then we could have a device with no obvious propulsion signature, and which could accelerate astonishingly fast - so it could leave the atmosphere just like a ufo, and how could we ever tell the difference? We couldn't.

 

[Randall]

The MIG-25 and SR-71 came closer.

I've never seen anything suggesting the SR-71 had any out of the atmosphere capability ( it's still awesome though ), but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Soviets have something with out of the atmosphere capability, maybe even the Chinese too these days.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

There is competition for military funds from all the agencies and branches of the DoD. Fierce competition.

Your ask for cash needs to address a specific function e.g. the SR71 this will allow us to see their missile sites and know if they are planning a first strike.

Creating space ships for exploration and addressing no clear and present military need makes no sense with regards to someone actually signing off on the budget allocation when there are soldiers lives at stake here on planet earth.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Creating space ships for exploration and addressing no clear and present military need makes no sense with regards to someone actually signing off on the budget allocation when there are soldiers lives at stake here on planet earth.

Any advancement in propulsion technology is an obvious strategic advantage, so we can and should expect constant fundamental research in this direction within extremely classified programs. I cited hyperfast missile delivery as one example of a clear military advantage, but there are many other applications, such as a fighter that can outperform any combat jet and evade any incoming missile.

We've already surpassed the limits of human endurance with our reaction propulsion technology - we can build aircraft that can accelerate too quickly for a pilot to survive. Gravitational field propulsion technology is the only known method to transcend that limitation, because every atom of the pilot is accelerated at the same rate as the craft itself, so there are no crushing g-forces, regardless of the magnitude of the accelerations.

So at this point it's a military imperative to achieve such technology to leap ahead of all of our geopolitical adversaries. I would be stunned if it's not the top priority in fundamental aerospace research.

And once we have it, all kinds of spin-off applications will have obvious defensive utility, such as creating a Doomsday command center on the Moon for leaders to survive a nuclear war or a lethal biological attack, or a self-sustaining Mars outpost to insure the survival of the species after a nuclear holocaust or a major asteroid impact etc. But even that's not the full potential of such a technology - with metric propulsion we could colonize habitable planets beyond the solar system. It's almost too mind-boggling to conceive, but those kinds of options are in play once we have that level of technology.

I just don't think we're close to it yet, because we still haven't seen a foreseeable conceptual approach in the academic literature for engineering such a thing yet. But it's coming. I just hope that we're ready for it when it arrives, because it will be a major international crisis when it arrives - the prospect of a nuclear delivery system that's virtually instantaneous is almost too terrifying to imagine.

 

[Flatwoods]

I've often wondered if some ufo sightings might involve the use of tethered vehicles. By "tethered" I mean craft that are connected by way of a lightweight, super-long tether to an orbiting space station or high-altitude mothership, something so high in altitude that in can't be seen. Such a thing might be possible using highly advanced carbon nanotube material for the tether. NASA did a lot of testing and research into space tethers in the 1990's, but since then we don't hear much about it. Maybe the research went black.

 

[DROBNJAK]

One just needs to google "Pentagon black budget trillion" to find a ton of articles about finances for secret programs. Here is one:

See for Yourself: The Pentagon's $51 Billion 'Black' Budget

It happened before and it is happening right now.

During WWII US was secretly pouring money into project Manhattan to make atomic bomb. Cost of project was $1B in WWII money and it was consuming 10% of the total electricity produced in US. Not even a vice-president Truman new about it and had to be briefed after Roosevelt died.

Since US economy was 3 times bigger than either British or German economy, that would mean that Britain or Germany would need to spend 30% of their electricity output to produce the atomic bomb. Nobody in divided Europe was capable of doing it.

So, there is a chance that metric propulsion exists. There are some rumors to the effect that work is done on the metric propulsion, coming from weapons development programs. But that's all, just rumors.

But its doubtful that there is a secret space program, because military would have more pressing need to spy on foes rather than to fly to nearby starts to check if there's life. Even technology exchange would make no sense, because aliens would laugh at our technology. It would be like technology exchange with Victorians, if it was possible.

 

[marduk]

Any advancement in propulsion technology is an obvious strategic advantage, so we can and should expect constant fundamental research in this direction within extremely classified programs. I cited hyperfast missile delivery as one example of a clear military advantage, but there are many other applications, such as a fighter that can outperform any combat jet and evade any incoming missile.

We've already surpassed the limits of human endurance with our reaction propulsion technology - we can build aircraft that can accelerate too quickly for a pilot to survive. Gravitational field propulsion technology is the only known method to transcend that limitation, because every atom of the pilot is accelerated at the same rate as the craft itself, so there are no crushing g-forces, regardless of the magnitude of the accelerations.

So at this point it's a military imperative to achieve such technology to leap ahead of all of our geopolitical adversaries. I would be stunned if it's not the top priority in fundamental aerospace research.

And once we have it, all kinds of spin-off applications will have obvious defensive utility, such as creating a Doomsday command center on the Moon for leaders to survive a nuclear war or a lethal biological attack, or a self-sustaining Mars outpost to insure the survival of the species after a nuclear holocaust or a major asteroid impact etc. But even that's not the full potential of such a technology - with metric propulsion we could colonize habitable planets beyond the solar system. It's almost too mind-boggling to conceive, but those kinds of options are in play once we have that level of technology.

I just don't think we're close to it yet, because we still haven't seen a foreseeable conceptual approach in the academic literature for engineering such a thing yet. But it's coming. I just hope that we're ready for it when it arrives, because it will be a major international crisis when it arrives - the prospect of a nuclear delivery system that's virtually instantaneous is almost too terrifying to imagine.

A counterpoint.

We still fight mostly by throwing metal at each other using gunpowder to push it down a tube. That's been around since the 12th century. It's a very efficient antipersonnel weapon.

We still get around mostly by using dead dinosaurs to cause explosions inside a piston. That's been around since the late 1700's, and is an efficient way to generate rotational power.

We still push on air or water using fans. Since the 1800's or so. Again, efficient, simple. We still throw chunks of pointy metal in the sky using chemicals that burn fast. We still use fixed wings to generate lift.

All of these things are simple and reliable. There hasn't been a revolutionary mechanism for warfare since the creation of the atom bomb 70ish years ago.

Why at this point in time do you suspect that military strategists would abandon the narrative that's been in place since then - make these things more efficient and reduce the risk to your own personnel - by attempting to create something that may or may not be possible?

Military types aren't known for their creative thinking. When it comes to efficiency vs effectiveness, they seem to rely on efficiency almost exclusively.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

A counterpoint.

We still fight mostly by throwing metal at each other using gunpowder to push it down a tube. That's been around since the 12th century. It's a very efficient antipersonnel weapon.

We still get around mostly by using dead dinosaurs to cause explosions inside a piston. That's been around since the late 1700's, and is an efficient way to generate rotational power.

We still push on air or water using fans. Since the 1800's or so. Again, efficient, simple. We still throw chunks of pointy metal in the sky using chemicals that burn fast. We still use fixed wings to generate lift.

All of these things are simple and reliable. There hasn't been a revolutionary mechanism for warfare since the creation of the atom bomb 70ish years ago.

Why at this point in time do you suspect that military strategists would abandon the narrative that's been in place since then - make these things more efficient and reduce the risk to your own personnel - by attempting to create something that may or may not be possible?

Military types aren't known for their creative thinking. When it comes to efficiency vs effectiveness, they seem to rely on efficiency almost exclusively.

I didn't mean to imply that advancements in all of the tried-and-true methods propulsion and explosives would be abandoned - that would be crazy. Of course they're working like gangbusters on all of that stuff. And we see the fruits of those on-going efforts all the time in journals like Jane's Defence Weekly.

I'm just saying that any reasonably intelligent military leader would also support research into potentially game-changing technologies like field propulsion. After all, it didn't take long for theoretical physicists to dream up the atom bomb once we understood the equivalence of mass and energy, and the military jumped on that in a major way. We're in a similar position now with regard to metric propulsion - it's a theoretical concept with enormous potential defense significance, so they'd be insane to ignore it. Of course, it's clearly a more ambitious project than building the first atom bomb, but the payoff is also much more significant - it would be a clear and definitive advantage across a dizzying range of applications; piloted military aircraft that would be essentially impossible to defend against, drones that could gather intelligence anywhere on Earth with impunity, vastly supersonic missile systems that are impervious to all present defense capabilities, submersible craft that could perform circles around any existing submarine, and of course the space applications that I mentioned which could ensure the survival of the nation, if not the species.

It would be a gross dereliction of duty to let our adversaries attain those capabilities before we do, so I think it's an obvious direction to pursue while we continue to advance everything else in our military inventory.

 

[marduk]

I didn't mean to imply that advancements in all of the tried-and-true methods propulsion and explosives would be abandoned - that would be crazy. Of course they're working like gangbusters on all of that stuff. And we see the fruits of those on-going efforts all the time in journals like Jane's Defence Weekly.

I'm just saying that any reasonably intelligent military leader would also support research into potentially game-changing technologies like field propulsion. After all, it didn't take long for theoretical physicists to dream up the atom bomb once we understood the equivalence of mass and energy, and the military jumped on that in a major way. We're in a similar position now with regard to metric propulsion - it's a theoretical concept with enormous potential defense significance, so they'd be insane to ignore it. Of course, it's clearly a more ambitious project than building the first atom bomb, but the payoff is also much more significant - it would be a clear and definitive advantage across a dizzying range of applications; piloted military aircraft that would be essentially impossible to defend against, drones that could gather intelligence anywhere on Earth with impunity, vastly supersonic missile systems that are impervious to all present defense capabilities, submersible craft that could perform circles around any existing submarine, and of course the space applications that I mentioned which could ensure the survival of the nation, if not the species.

It would be a gross dereliction of duty to let our adversaries attain those capabilities before we do, so I think it's an obvious direction to pursue while we continue to advance everything else in our military inventory.

I get what you're saying and it's possible.

I just take a look at the R&D projects that have come to light over the years, and they're all derivations of stuff we've seen before.

The bombs get bigger but are still bombs. The missiles get more precise but are still missles. The planes get stealthier and more agile but are still planes.

You can pretty much draw a straight line at how the American Military/Industrial complex develops technologies over the past 60 or 70 years. It's also why I think Corso is full of crap - night vision goggles have precursors pre-rosewell, as do fibre optics and everything else.

The real revolution in our times has been information science - what Vallee sometimes calls by it's old name, informatics. And in that field, I still think what we see in the commercial applications far, far outstrips what we see in military or even SIGINT use. That's just economics. SIGINT now follows the industry instead of drives it, in my opinion.

And the new data tech isn't military spec'd out, anyway. Much of what we do is done in the cloud, virtual or private. Hard to hardlink assets in the field to a cloud when your network can go away. The processors that drive the F-22 are slow as hell, they're just hardened and redundant as priorities instead.
About the F-22's CIP's (Common Integrated Processors)) - General F-22A Raptor forum

 

[Randall]

I've often wondered if some ufo sightings might involve the use of tethered vehicles. By "tethered" I mean craft that are connected by way of a lightweight, super-long tether to an orbiting space station or high-altitude mothership, something so high in altitude that in can't be seen. Such a thing might be possible using highly advanced carbon nanotube material for the tether. NASA did a lot of testing and research into space tethers in the 1990's, but since then we don't hear much about it. Maybe the research went black.

Interesting and creative. I've never considered that before in quite that context. It's certainly possible and could explain a few things. And interestingly:

Space tether - Wikipedia

 

[DROBNJAK]

Various US economists and government's financial auditors estimated Pentagon's black budget might be about equal to US annual GDP, which is $16T. Estimates do vary from $11T to more than $20T+.

Where's that money gone? US is at least 10-20 years ahead of everybody else in military tech. But, stealth aeroplanes, they are still just good old aeroplanes full of very modern electronics and painted with some special paint. That's at most few hundred billions. Toppling third world governments and bribing politicians is relatively cheap, at most $20-50M even for bigger items .

But there is nothing there that's in US military inventory worth $16T to show. For $16T one would expect to get at least a fleet of flying submarines, if not flying aircraft carriers. But since we didn't get any flying aircraft carriers question is: Where had money gone?

This is highly hypothetical, but lets say that, on average, there is one UFO crash every 20 years. First one happening in 1895 in Aurora, TX, than one in 1941 in Cape Girardeau, MO, than in 1947 in Roswell, NM and so on, and lets assume that about five of crashes happened in total in 20th century, all over the world, in friendly countries, where US can go and pick up the remains.

So, at least, US got a good starting point about insight into working principles behind metric propulsion and was able to make some relatively primitive prototypes. However exotic technology is, there was theoretical understanding since 1915 in a form of GR. Put GR and crashed alien craft together and you got the saucer that Mark McCandlish tried to 'disclose'.

Was $16T (one entire US annual GDP) enough money for black budgets to make some basic metric propulsion? I should dare say resounding YES. Maybe not good enough for flying to Alpha Centauri, but good enough to grab few intact Soviet spy satellites from Earth's orbit or even to fly to Moon to find ice deposits.

P.S.
This would make such a good script for a flick ;-)

 

[Han]

Military types aren't known for their creative thinking. When it comes to efficiency vs effectiveness, they seem to rely on efficiency almost exclusively.

I might sound like a complete doom merchant but I disagree:

A lot of the technologies we use for 'civilized' purposes now were developed for military application.

An A-380 is not hugely different to a B-29 and from what I have heard about the capabilities of some of the black project aeroplanes it seems like the civilian side that has been stagnating. For example where is the replacement for Concorde?

Also the internet was designed for the military as far as I understand it.

'they' must have to justify their budget each year surely? and it is common knowledge that it is not peanuts they are negotiating for.

Also I am not sure you can separate efficiency and effectiveness in military thinking.

I am thinking of a game of chess, who would win most: the most effective player or the most efficient player?

 

[marduk]

Various US economists and government's financial auditors estimated Pentagon's black budget might be about equal to US annual GDP, which is $16T. Estimates do vary from $11T to more than $20T+.

Where's that money gone? US is at least 10-20 years ahead of everybody else in military tech. But, stealth aeroplanes, they are still just good old aeroplanes full of very modern electronics and painted with some special paint. That's at most few hundred billions. Toppling third world governments and bribing politicians is relatively cheap, at most $20-50M even for bigger items .

But there is nothing there that's in US military inventory worth $16T to show. For $16T one would expect to get at least a fleet of flying submarines, if not flying aircraft carriers. But since we didn't get any flying aircraft carriers question is: Where had money gone?

This is highly hypothetical, but lets say that, on average, there is one UFO crash every 20 years. First one happening in 1895 in Aurora, TX, than one in 1941 in Cape Girardeau, MO, than in 1947 in Roswell, NM and so on, and lets assume that about five of crashes happened in total in 20th century, all over the world, in friendly countries, where US can go and pick up the remains.

So, at least, US got a good starting point about insight into working principles behind metric propulsion and was able to make some relatively primitive prototypes. However exotic technology is, there was theoretical understanding since 1915 in a form of GR. Put GR and crashed alien craft together and you got the saucer that Mark McCandlish tried to 'disclose'.

Was $16T (one entire US annual GDP) enough money for black budgets to make some basic metric propulsion? I should dare say resounding YES. Maybe not good enough for flying to Alpha Centauri, but good enough to grab few intact Soviet spy satellites from Earth's orbit or even to fly to Moon to find ice deposits.

P.S.
This would make such a good script for a flick ;-)

How could a subset of the budget be greater than the GDP?