Which includes what has to be the Quote Of The Day:
Literally years in the making, I’ve put together two versions of a photo essay of several surviving examples of the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile. Available free for the downloading is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Abridged Edition as a 13 page PDF booklet. This contains photos of the AGM-129s on display at Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah, the USAF Museum in Dayton and the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska, ready to print.
Also available is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Full Edition. This 34-page edition includes more photos of these missiles, along with the missile at the San Diego Aerospace Museum restoration facility, a rare General Dynamics display model, official USAF photos of the AGM-129 in test and in service and drawings of the missile, including 1/32 scale layout diagrams. This is available through MagCloud, either as a downloadable PDF ($5.75) or as a professionally printed and bound edition ($11.80).
Don’t forget to check out my other MagCloud publications, including Justo Miranda’s Reichdreams Dossiers, Aerospace Projects Review, Historical Documents, and Photographing Stuff.
And don’t forget to check out Stagger Around #1, F-104A Starfighter, and Stagger Around #2, Starship Enterprise.
If you liked this and want to see more like it… feel free to toss fifty cents, a buck, a hundred bucks, whatever, my way. Think of it as a donation to a worthy cause. Or a bribe. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.
Shockwaves are awesome. The Small Diameter Bomb delivers.
A small diameter bomb hits an A-7 parked inside a concrete aircraft shelter during a test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. SDB is an autonomous, 250 pound class weapon that can be used in adverse weather and has a standoff range of more than 50 nautical miles.
October 3, 1942: a German A-4 rocket (a.k.a. V-2) launches from Peenemunde and attains an altitude of 90 or so kilometers, becoming the first man-made object to exit the atmosphere, if rather briefly.
The ATK “rocket garden” near promontory, Utah, has a Trident C-4 sea launched ballistic missile on display. Projecting from the blunt nose of the missile is an “aerospike.” This is not an aerospike rocket engine (such as the X-33 was supposed to have), but instead a telescoping rod with a smallish flat plate. Stored within the nosecone, it would project forward shortly after launch. The plate – made of wood, of all things – would take the aerothermal heating load of hypersonic flight at relatively low altitude, and would set up a shockwave well ahead of the nosecone, reducing drag. The Trident has a blunt nose for packing purposes… a pointy nose simply wouldn’t fit within the limited missile tube length of a submarine. The aerospike lets it have more or less the aerodynamics of a pointy nose while being shorter.
I wandered by Hill Aerospace Museum a while back and was surprised to see that they have an AGM-129 stealth cruise missile on display. On close inspection, this one seems to have been “restored” by spackling over all the surface details. Granted there weren’t that many to begin with, but they even plugged up the tailpipe.
It’s also very likely skewed polling and hand-selected quotemining, but still…
Claim is 84% of Brits polled want to keep children from seeing images of hunting.
An interesting article on efforts to keep the B61 nuclear weapons stockpile up and running:
And here’s the line that will fill you with optimism:
“We bought three or four on eBay,”
Nukes are not really “wooden rounds.” You cannot build a nuke, pack it in a box, leave it in a dry cool place for a decade and expect it to function; they need constant attention and scheduled maintenance. And to do it right, they need an infrastructure that knows what it’s doing. By chopping away at the nuclear bomb-building base, you end up losing the experience needed to simply maintain what you already have, never mind build new stuff.
The USAF understandably wants new weapons for the future. One such is the “High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW),” which is to be an air launched hypersonic ground attack missile. A reasonable enough sort of thing for the USAF to want. well, they’re in the early stages of trying to work out just what they want, in cahoots with the aerospace industry. Behold:
Included therein is a link to a PDF file of a draft Broad Area Announcement. now, a perfectly reasonable approach would be for the USAF to basically say “We want a missile that weighs less than W pounds, will go X miles in Y minutes and carry Z payload,” and then detail stuff about cost and meaneuverability and schedules and whatnot. What the USAF produced starts off like this:
General Program Objectives: The overall objective of the High Speed Strike Weapon Demo program is to identify, assess, develop (increase the technology maturity level), integrate and demonstrate through modeling and simulation, ground and demonstration flight testing of an S&T technology demonstrator weapon system, technologies for a hypersonic, air-launched cruise missile. The scope of the demonstration flight(s) includes launching the S&T technology demonstrator weapon from either an F-15E or a B-52 at a tactically relevant altitude and airspeed.
Good so far. But then they totally screw the pooch with this:
The propulsion system for the S&T technology demonstrator weapon must include an air-breathing engine capable of supersonic combustion.
Oy vey.
Instead of asking for capability, they are asking for a specific technology… scramjets. A technology that has been in development for sixty years and still doesn’t work.
Who knows, solid rockets or maybe conventional ramjets might have worked, and relatively cheaply. But instead the USAF looks like it’s saddling itself with a science project. Which would be ok… but a science project is rarely a good basis for a production program.
What’s next? Is the Navy going to specify a fusion reactor powered attack sub?
A truly amazing sequence of photos: