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Just a theory
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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Yeah that's pretty much what I had in mind. But why would they have something like that though?
Then again this is all 100% conjecture so it could very well be some SUPER SECRET ALIEN TECH 🤷 Pretty damn unlikely but the world's gotten pretty damn unlikely recently
Closer to reality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
I am still pissed we didn't just iron out the issues with this and go down this tech tree / alt hist route.
The cited main problem that lead to cancellation was difficulty in making carbon fiber fuel tanks in a non standard shape.
Pretty sure we have the tech to pull that off now... or just, make it out of a better, more well understood and proven material/design, as literally every engineer on the project was screaming at management to do...
...as best I can tell, everything else about the demonstrater worked.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2006/01/x-33venturestar-what-really-happened/
Basically, despite every involved engineer saying: "this new idea for hydrogen tanks based on a composite honeycomb wrapped in carbon fiber is stupid, we already made weird lobe shaped LOX tanks out of a lithium-aluminum alloy, they work, just make the hydrogen tanks out of them too'.
And then NASA Director Ivan Bekey said, to Congress: "we really need to actually focus on this composite wrap fuel tank design because of uh, technical reasons, and also, it will be harder to attract private funding if we uh... use aluminum tanks that are reliably proven to work... because... uh , uh, uh, wacky composite carbon fiber tanks are necessary, fuck you."
This explanation makes no fucking sense beyond Bekey being incompetent or paid off by someone to intentionally doom the project.
The engineers literally built and tested the hydrogen fuel tanks/mated lobes made out of the aluminum lithium alloy... and it was fucking lighter than the composite honeycomb one that failed, when the whole fucking main idea of using composites was that they would reduce weight.
The linear spike rockets fucking worked. Quite well actually.
But uh nope, instead, all that tech just got mothballed, and now 20 years later we get to watch Elon waste 10s of billions of dollars creating meteor showers with a fundamentally unworkable design.
Its infuriating, and today, almost no one knows this ever even happened, that we've been sitting on the ability to do this for 20 years, for no explainable reason.
...
To summarize and repeat:
We know how to make an actually, fully reusable SSTO craft, that can lift more weight to LEO than the partially reusable Falcon 9 can.
The Falcon 9 can only exceed VentureStar's LEO capacity when it is fully expended, no recovery, no re-use.
We have known how to do this for 20 years.
We just choose not to for nonsense bureaucracy reasons.
Huh, that was an interesting article. I thought the failure of the honeycomb structure to work for the fuel tanks was what killed the X-33 and I'd never heard of that aluminum-lithium alloy; it isn't even mentioned in the X-33 wiki article.
Aaaanyhow, an SSTO vehicle with any sort of "traditional" engine (incl aerospike) wouldn't be quiet by any definition, though. But thanks for that link! It really was super interesting, and I definitely get why you're annoyed.
Oh, I am not proposing that the thing I saw, the black triangle, has any relation to the x33/VentureStar at all.
Yes, an array of aeropspike rockets would indeed be very loud, lol.
I am just ranting about something tangentially related.
EDIT: Just to be super duper clear about this:
Black triangle thing i saw: horizontally oriented, all major light emmiting areas spaced out on one surface of the 'dorito'.
VentureStar: vertically oriented, all engines on one 'edge' of the 'dorito'.
Perhaps vaguely similar body plan, but completely different flight orientation, 'rocket' placement, etc.
Riiight yes, gotcha.
Hmm considering how big the VentureStar would have been, my off-the-cuff airship theory seems like it might make sense - at least if we're not assuming some sort of extremely secret completely noiseless new propulsion technology, which just doesn't seem like something they'd be testing in populated areas where everybody can see them.
Shit, could just be a lighter than air "disinfo craft" – purpose-built to make people go "holy fuck what the hell is that thing", to make it seem like the US is fielding some sort of completely insane near-magical technology.
I mean... yeah, that is a viable explanation.
Nothing I have personally seen would not work with the dirigible idea... observational high altitude blimps and balloons are real things, disinfo by making people think its aliens is a real thing too.
The scifi / advanced classified tech explanation would be more fun, but at least for me personally, I never saw the thing like... suddenly accelerate to mach fuck you... always stationary, hovering.
Online, on a few forums, I have seen other people claim they have seen craft that match the description of what I saw... they have claimed they saw it suddenly accelerate, and I have seen a very shitty quality video once that seemed to show that.
But those people could be BSing, that video could be fake.
???
x files theme plays
Oh yeah I'd loooooove it if this was some sort of absolutely bonkers new propulsion tech – let alone FUCKING ALIENS AKJDSAJKDASJKA – but it just doesn't seem very likely. Keeping something like completely new physics secret for decades, eh, I don't see that happening.