Message posted by gary on November 08, 2002 at 19:14:24 PST:
I searched the net when the story first hit and couldn't find a photo using keywords from the Pravda (sic) article. Richard Graham in "SR-71 Revealed" has a theory that Aurora never existed. The existence of the project was made up to help kill congressional support for the SR-71 program, which was expensive. That freed up money for the UAVs which are relatively cheap and can loiter. Loitering is apparently a big deal since the SR-71 (or replacement) can only hang around a few hours without refueling, while UAVs are capable of more than 24 hours of observation time. Loitering yields more opportunity to see something. While the SR-71 could get to the scene quickly if need by, the current generation UAV's pack up rather neatly and can be flown to the scene along with a mobile control center, so you can see why Aurora may not exist, i.e. it isn't needed.
In Reply to: Re: Russia Intlel monitor US secret space planes over Earth (!) posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on November 08, 2002 at 18:40:19 PST:
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