Re: FOBS as a Primary Motivator for Human Spaceflight


"Pat Flannery" <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13mlss43fru4nf2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


It wasn't as difficult as the U-2 to fly; their main problem was if you
got off course at 2,000 mph you could end up over the wrong country in a
matter of a very few minutes.

Yeah, one of the excerpts from a pilot talks about how he missed his turn
and ended up WAY off course.

Not surprising when you think about it, but it did mean that you really had
to think about your flight path a bit more than when flying saying a Cessna.
:-)


I'd hate to think how hard it would have been to keep the engines lit
at speed and altitude if you had to pull some kind of evasive maneuver.


Any maneuvers would have to be very slow and gentle.
It looks tough, but it wasn't highly stressed at all (nor was the MiG-25
Foxbat).
Even in subsonic flight, you didn't want to go over positive 3.5 G's and
negative .2 G's.
http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/5/5-8.php


Hmm, hadn't heard about the -.2 limit, but I will say the +3.5 G was higher
than I had thought (I thought it was closer to about 1/2 that.)

But again, the idea wasn't that it was going to be going into aerial combate
as much as firing and forgetting your missile load.




And then there is the fact that it's made of a lot of exotic alloys and
etc. and maintenance is going to be more like a B-2 (in complexity and
cost) than an aircraft that's slightly less exotic (say an F-104).


I knew a guy who worked on the engines of them.
Just opening the nacelle to get at the engine was a very time consuming
process, requiring over 100 screws be removed.

Pat


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Greg Moore
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Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html


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