America’s Nuclear Flying Saucer
Source: Military.com
February 10, 2001
From 300 miles in space the LRV would be able to rain
nuclear destruction on the Soviet Union, Red China and North Korea.
How It Works
Helium balloon carries vehicle back to the launch site.
Escape capsule deployment
Multistage controllable chute
In normal operation, the LRV would use its saucer shape
to dissipate re-entry heat and then provide lift for atmospheric
flight. In 1949, the biggest black hole in the universe wasn’t in
space, but across the Bering Strait. Stretching across 12 time zones,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, as Winston Churchill
would so memorably describe it, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside
an enigma." The few
things that most people knew about life behind the Iron Curtain seemed
to be pieces of an incomprehensible puzzle.
For the handful of intelligence experts who saw how the
pieces fit, the "workers’ paradise" presented a clear and present
danger to the American way of life. What the intelligence community
knew, and most people did not, was
that in the final frantic hours of World War II, the Soviet army had
hastily raided Germany’s most advanced weapons research laboratories.
And, on Aug. 29, 1949, only four years after Hiroshima, the
technological booty from those raids turned a country whose farmers
still used horse-drawn plows into a nuclear superpower.
The fireball of the communist atomic bomb cast a
sinister new light on an event that previously seemed quite
inconsequential. In the summer of 1945, an unusual rumor had begun to
circulate within the intelligence division of the European Command.
During interrogations, captured German aircraft engineers referred to
an extraordinarily fast rocket plane under development at a secret
base in Bavaria.
Unlike the Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket planes that had
begun to attack Allied bombers in the last months of the war, this
aircraft had an odd-looking curved wing that blended into its
fuselage. The aerodynamic advantage of this configuration had been
known to American designers for more than a decade. It created more
lift than a standard wing, especially
at low speeds, and provided more internal capacity for carrying bombs.
In the early days of the war, the U.S. Navy had briefly
experimented with circular wing design for those very reasons.
Anticipating that the first generation of communist atomic bombs would
be as heavy as those America had dropped on Japan, it seemed
reasonable to U.S. defense planners that the Soviet air force, which
then lacked a nuclear bomber, would try to adapt German disc
technology. The United States was, after all, doing exactly the same
thing with the V-2s and Nazi rocket scientists it had spirited away in
Operation Paper Clip.
In our July 1997 cover story, "Roswell Plus 50," POPULAR
MECHANICS detailed how Air Force interest in duplicating Nazi
technology led to two American flying disc projects. Project Silver
Bug sought to build a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Project
Pye Wacket was to create small discs for use as air-to-air missiles.
Documents declassified since
then point to a third secret project, a 40-ft. "flying saucer"
designed to rain nuclear destruction on the Soviet Union from 300
miles in space.
The official designation for America’s nuclear flying
saucer was the Lenticular Reentry Vehicle (LRV). It was designed by
engineers at the Los Angeles Division of North American Aviation,
under a contract with the U.S. Air Force. The project was managed out
of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, where German
engineers who had worked on rocket
plane and flying disc technology had been resettled.
The LRV escaped public scrutiny because it was hidden
away as one of the Pentagon’s so-called "black budget" items -- that
is, a secret project that is incorporated into some piece of
nonclassified work. On Dec. 12, 1962, security officers at
Wright-Patterson classified the LRV as secret because: "It describes
an offensive weapon system." The project
remained classified until May 1999, when a congressionally mandated
review of old documents changed the project’s status as a government
secret, downgrading it to public information. The Department of
Defense did, however, successfully seek to have the document’s
distribution restricted to defense contractors. PM obtained its copy
as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request.
Inside The LRV
"The operational mission design is six weeks’ duration
at a nominal orbital altitude of 300 nautical miles, with a crew of
four men," according to the report. The weapons bay would hold "four
winged weapons" that could be either launched or detached and parked
on orbit. There are repeated references to the LRV launching
weapons-carrying clusters. A considerable part of the design study
focuses on the details of
building a 40-ft.-dia. airframe and strengthening it against the
acceleration of 8 g’s and wind shear it would experience during
launch. However, no mention is made of the type of booster the disc
would ride into space.
Most likely, the LRV would have flown atop a multistage
rocket, like the Saturn booster used in the Apollo moon program. The
engineering study, however, suggests a more intriguing possibility. At
some point, the LRV could have been powered by one of the nuclear
rockets then under development by the Air Force and the Atomic Energy
Commission. Several of these rockets were in fact built and
successfully tested in Nevada.
Although the government claims all of its nuclear rocket
program records have been declassified, a search of the Department of
Energy (DOE) human radiation experiment database indicates otherwise.
PM has learned that 40 cu. ft. of records related to the human health
effects of the nuclear rocket program, compiled between 1956 and 1975,
are stored in a secured
location -- Building 1001 -- at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in
Los Alamos, N.M. A DOE spokesman told PM that the only reason these
records would have remained classified was if they dealt with an
operational military system.
The four-man crew would ride a wedge-shaped capsule
built inside the LRV. The capsule would divide the front portion of
the disc into separate work and off-duty areas. The nuclear-tipped
rockets would be stored in the rear segments.
Although these rockets were not called multiple independent reentry
vehicles (MIRVs), they match the description of these
multiple-warhead-delivery devices, which were later banned by
disarmament treaties. An MIRV-equipped LRV would have been able to
eliminate the war-making capabilities of the Soviet Union, China and
North Korea at the push of a button.
In normal operations, the capsule would function as the
LRV’s flight control center. In an emergency, the crew could fire the
capsule’s independent 50,000-pound-thrust solid-fuel rocket motor and
return to Earth. The capsule’s final descent would be slowed by a
parachute, much like the X-38 "lifeboat" planned for the international
space station now
under construction.
A textbook mission would conclude with the entire LRV
returning to Earth. It would fire its nuclear or liquid-fueled main
rocket to brake, then travel edge-first into the atmosphere. Its disc
form would dissipate the heat of re-entry, then act as a wing. Its
flattened tail structure would provide directional stability and
control. A minute or so before landing,
skids would extend and the LRV would settle onto a stretch of dry
lakebed.
The engineering study does not describe how the LRV,
which would weigh just over 17,000 pounds without its crew, weapons,
fuel and stores, would then have been returned to the launch pad. One
possibility, suggested by the inclusion of a high-pressure helium
storage tank, is that it would have been ferried by a heavy-lift
balloon, as shown in the drawing on the
opposite page. While the LRV would not have had sufficient helium to
inflate a balloon, the tank would have had sufficient capacity for
replenishing the lift-bag to permit trips of several thousands of
miles.
In 1997, as part of its effort to debunk the Roswell
alien landing myth, the Air Force revealed details of several
heavy-lift balloon research projects. Among those were experiments in
which 15,000-pound payloads were lifted to 170,000 ft. While not
specifically acknowledging the LRV by name, an Air Force spokesman
conceded that during the Cold War it
routinely used high-altitude balloons to lift unusual airframes for
aerodynamic tests. Airframe tests of secret planes were most likely
the cause of still-unexplained UFO sightings. And a balloon-lifted LRV
test flight would certainly match the classic UFO reports of a silvery
disc hovering motionless in the sky, then silently shooting upward.
Crash Debris
The engineering study obtained by POPULAR MECHANICS
contains language that describes a re-entry heating test that, at the
time, could have been accomplished by only a high-altitude drop of a
flying prototype. A further indication that the LRV flew comes from a
retired Air Force contractor. He tells PM he personally saw a craft
fitting the description of the LRV at a Florida base that he had been
visiting on unrelated
business in the late 1960s. However, what is by far the most
compelling evidence that the LRV, or a flying prototype, was actually
built comes from Australia.
In 1975, Jean Fraser found an odd bit of honeycomb-like
debris on her family’s ranch south of Brisbane. The area is in the
vicinity of what was then a secret Australian testing range where the
British and Americans conducted some of their most secret atomic
experiments. Since the LRV was to carry a small nuclear reactor to
provide electricity for flight systems, it is conceivable that tests
would have been conducted at this
isolated location.
Local legends claim the honeycomb was debris from a
flying saucer that exploded over the test range in 1966. The remaining
pieces were supposedly collected by the military and returned to the
United States aboard a U.S. Air Force plane. Interested in learning if
the debris was extraterrestrial, Dick Smith, a Sydney businessman,
arranged for the University of New South Wales to perform a chemical
analysis.
The debris contained minerals commonly found in
aircraft-grade fiberglass panels. Based on the university’s report,
the Mufon UFO Journal, the monthly magazine of the Mutual UFO Network,
debunked rumors of the debris having any alien origin.
Unexplained Residue
The materials recovered from the Fraser farm bear a
striking resemblance to LRV engineering drawings.
PM became interested in revisiting the Australian debris
analysis when we noticed a similarity between a photograph of the
mystery honeycomb and a cross-section diagram in the LRV engineering
study. We were also curious about two points that were raised in the
university’s chemical analysis, but not pursued once it was determined
that the debris originated on Earth. The first has to do with the
presence of small amounts of titanium. Titanium is a strong,
lightweight
metal used extensively in spacecraft. While some fiberglass products
also contain titanium, it is not in the chemical form found in the
debris.
The second curiosity has to do with chemical residues.
Those found on the honeycomb were similar to those typically found in
the vicinity of high-temperature chemical explosions. A possible
explanation for such an explosion can be found in LRV engineering
drawings. Like the German Me 163 rocket plane, the main engine of the
LRV was designed to burn hypergolic fuel, highly reactive fluids that
can explode on contact, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Plans
show that the LRV would have carried 9375 pounds of nitrogen tetroxide
and hydrazine.
In Germany, landing Me 163s were plagued by on-board
fires, caused by the sloshing of a type of hypergolic fuel in mostly
empty fuel tanks. According to the design study, the tanks aboard the
LRV could never be completely emptied either, making accidents like
those aboard Me 163s all but inevitable. LRV project managers would
have been well aware of this unique danger, as one of the members of
the Wright-Patterson aeronautical research team was Rudi Opitz, one of
Germany’s first Me 163 test pilots.
LRV documents released thus far tell only part of the
story. But in time, the secrecy on progress reports, construction
drawings and perhaps even operational records will expire and we will
be able to tell the rest of the story. Perhaps they will reveal that
the LRV remained a general’s pipe dream, a multimillion-dollar paper
plane that never took flight.
Or they may tell the story of the most astounding adventure in the
history of flight.
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