Great clip ST,
... now I can put a craft to the engine - there is a photograph and explanation in an old Von Nostrand Scientific Encyclopedea (1963 I believe) of an experimental fission pile engine which I have always thought was the likely culprit for cooking messers Cash and Landrum.
In the picture it is on a test rig and is the shape of an ice cream cone - basically a large vertical turbofan with a funnel shaped nacelle and a small pile nailed into it. As it explains the combustion chamber is replaced with a pile and a heat exchanger using liquid hydrogen ... the article leads you to believe that this is a completely sealed regenerative system - but a quick study of the unusual compressor stage sizes tells me that this is not high bypass design, this thing was designed to force huge amounts of atmospheric air through the heat exchanger - and possibly pile too ... if so, it is bound to pick up some nasties into the exhaust ... I would imagine being underneath that to be quite hostile - hot and toxic, exactly the way Cash and Landrum described ... I'll see if I can dig out that pic in due course, all the best, Win.
Special Ops 106 Nightstalkers - Cash-Landrum Xmas 1980
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Re: Special Ops 106 Nightstalkers - Cash-Landrum Xmas 1980
by winkeech » Fri Jan 16, 2009 9:23 am
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Re: Special Ops 106 Nightstalkers - Cash-Landrum Xmas 1980
by redsocks » Fri Jan 16, 2009 10:59 am
interesting clip, cant see any simularities with the RFI though,but it does give good weight to military test flights with evidence of injury etc.He was a brave guy to fly that thing!!
I watched UFO hunters on the RFI for the first time yesterday and was intrigued by something they said about the lighthouse,Halt said the object was a bright light that was like "winking" in the centre,later on in the documentary they interviewed the lighthouse keeper who said there is a shield to protect the light going onto land and making it brighter out to sea,now as the light comes round you can clearly see that when the light comes into view it blanks out slightly for a split second as it is shielded in the centre,was this what Halt described as "winking" ,this wasnt mentioned in the documentary.
Redsocks
I watched UFO hunters on the RFI for the first time yesterday and was intrigued by something they said about the lighthouse,Halt said the object was a bright light that was like "winking" in the centre,later on in the documentary they interviewed the lighthouse keeper who said there is a shield to protect the light going onto land and making it brighter out to sea,now as the light comes round you can clearly see that when the light comes into view it blanks out slightly for a split second as it is shielded in the centre,was this what Halt described as "winking" ,this wasnt mentioned in the documentary.
Redsocks
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Re: Special Ops 106 Nightstalkers - Cash-Landrum Xmas 1980
by winkeech » Fri Jan 16, 2009 1:46 pm
Here's a similar engine to the one I saw in the picture:
This was one of the HTRE engines made by GE for the X6 project
it was also envisaged that it would be installed in an aircraft in this configuration:
it was a cross between this and the NERVA atomic rocket engine:
both things I wouldn't like to be standing underneath,
Here's some blurb on the project:
"It was a good beginning, full of promise; but it was only when the project engineers started to closely study how to build a nuclear plane that they realized the staggering technical problems. The main problem was, and always would be, how to make an adequately shielded reactor that was still light and powerful enough for use in an airplane.
The reactor could be one of two types. The first and most widely used was the "slow" model, in which the neutrons are slowed by a bulky moderating substance, such as graphite or water to a low enough speed for a self-sustaining chain reaction to take place. This type of reactor was relatively easy to design and operate. However the shielding was usually made of a specially prepared concrete 5 to 10 feet thick and weighing about 200 tons, too much even for the heavy-lifting capability of the B-36H. The "fast" model ran on higher speed neutrons, the same kind that activate an atomic bomb. Such a reactor could be made the size of a 3 to 4 foot sphere and weigh approximately 50 tons. But the heat generated would be very high, at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit-four times as hot as the slow reactor. Unless the engineers made materials that could withstand such heat, the reactor would simply melt itself.
GE's solution for the X-6 was to design a single, large, air-cooled reactor that had a core of 143 pounds of uranium dioxide fuel elements riddled with air passages and sandwiched between rings of stainless steel. Four J-53 turbojet engines were manifolded to the front and rear ends of the reactor; air from the compressor sections of the jets passed directly through the core and then out the exhaust nozzles. The all-up weight of the power plant came to about 128,000 pounds, 60,000 pounds of which was shielding.
The GE design employed the so-called direct or open system. Air was ducted straight through the reactor, emerging super hot to replace the heat formerly generated by the burning of fossil fuel (such as kerosene) in the jet's combustion chamber. The reactor-jet power plant was to be mounted inside the X-6 in its aft bomb bay with the four J-53s underneath the aft fuselage in an exposed group. The total amount of shielding was divided. A large tank of water surrounded the reactor itself (water acting not only as a shield but also as a reaction moderator in the core). A circular, lead-and-steel Gamma-ray shield, 80 inches in diameter and 4 inches thick, was immediately behind the forward Crew compartment.
Even with all that shielding, a worrisome amount of radiation still could get through. For a plane designed to stay aloft perhaps weeks at a time, the cumulative effect might be too much. And it was not enough just to protect the crew; airplane parts were also vulnerable. For example, radiation will sometimes transform rubber tires into a glassy or molasses-like substance.
Despite these problems, the first serious setback to the ANP program was political rather than technological. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration was looking for ways to fulfill its campaign promise to trim the federal budget. The ANP was singled out for severe cutting. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson claimed that even if the X-6 could be built, it would be no more than a flying platform to prove that nuclear flight was feasible-it would not be a militarily useful aircraft. "I am not interested, as a military project, in why potatoes turn brown when they are fried," he declared, a pointed reference to the ANP and what he thought was its philosophy of doing something "because it is there." Wilson also called the X-6 a "shitepoke"-a Texas nickname for a species of heron. "That's a great big bird that flies over the marshes," he explained, ".. .that doesn't have much body or speed to it or anything, but it can fly" The ANP however had some powerful friends, principally in Congress' Joint Committee On Atomic Energy "I do not care how big it is," said one representative, "and I do not care how much it costs. I want the Department of Defense to propel an airframe with nuclear power 50 feet off the ground, 20 miles an hour if need be, but move it." It was this kind of support that kept money coming through to the ANP but at a steep price. The scheduled X-6 test flight in 1956 was indefinitely postponed.
Still, even with continued funding, the question of military usefulness dogged the ANP Its rationale from the beginning had been that a nuclear plane would be the world's first true intercontinental bomber It would be able to travel supersonically from an inland base in the United States to strike any place on earth without the need for politically uncertain foreign bases or vulnerable aerial refueling. But as shielding and heat-transfer problems made completely atomic-powered supersonic flight less likely a proposal was made in 1955 for a so-called hermaphrodite system. Officially known as the 125-A weapon system, it used both conventional and nuclear power.
It was also called the "nuclear cruise, chemical dash" technique. Along with the thrust provided by the reactor-heated air from the main combustion chamber there was a separate chamber directly behind it for burning chemical (fossil) fuel only. This combination allowed the aircraft to cruise for periods on atomic power alone and, when near the target or under attack, to boost its speed with the chemical fuel to 2,000 mph for short periods.
The Air Force wanted weapon system 125-A by 1963. But project engineers soon discovered not only that the necessity of carrying liquid fuel decreased payload but also that mating nuclear and chemical engine technologies added needless complexity to a program that had yet to build a flyable aircraft. "It was as though the Wright brothers had been asked to build the F-86 Sabre Jet," said one critic. All in all, it began to appear that the projected 125-A mission could be performed much better by an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the development of which was proceeding faster than expected.
A further complication entered the AMP when indecision cropped up about the basic nuclear-engine design. The Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division of United Aircraft, which, since 1953, had a small contract with the AEC, seemed to be making rapid progress on a design that GE had considered at the start and then rejected. It employed the so-called indirect (or closed) system, which, instead of ducting air straight through the core, transferred the reactor heat to a heat exchanger by pipes filled with a liquid metal, such as sodium. The jet's air would be heated by pipes from the exchanger and not by passing through the reactor itself-heated second hand, so to speak. The advantage of this was that liquid metal is a much better conductor of heat than air so the reactor could be made smaller and thus operate with about 50,000 pounds less shielding than the direct system.
The disadvantage, as GE was always quick to point out, was that the weight and complexity of the heat exchanger with its network of 18 miles of tubing carrying molten metal under high pressure, nearly canceled out the shielding decrease. Less quickly pointed out by GE was that the relative simplicity of the direct system had severe disadvantages as well. The shielding would have to be heavier, and, because the air would go directly through the core, far more radioactivity would be released into the atmosphere. Indeed, this problem was serious enough to warrant a separate study by the Air Force, appropriately named Project Halitosis.
Support was to swing back and forth between the two systems for several years, but, since GE was further along in its work, it was the first to build and test its design, at least on the ground. As an experiment, GE took the dependable J-47 engine, already used in the Air Force's Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber and modified it to use a nuclear heat source. This was then redesignated the X-39 engine.
In 1955, on a test site in Idaho, the X-39 was run on a ground test stand in what was called the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment No. l (HTRE-l). Engineers tested a complete aircraft power plant consisting of a reactor, a radiation shield, two X-39 engines, ducting, control parts and instrumentation; the whole assembly was called a core test facility because it was designed for the insertion of different reactor cores as they were developed. In January 1956, the engines were operated successfully but, because there had been no attempt to restrict the weight of the shielding, they would not have been flyable. Later in 1957, other cores that were tested, HTRE-2 and -3, did reduce the weight somewhat. The HTRE-3 assembly produced enough thrust to theoretically sustain a flight at 460 mph for about 30,000 miles. However radiation levels were still a problem; at one point in the tests, controls failed and released enough radioactivity to contaminate 1,500 acres."
hope this is of interest, Win.
This was one of the HTRE engines made by GE for the X6 project
it was also envisaged that it would be installed in an aircraft in this configuration:
it was a cross between this and the NERVA atomic rocket engine:
both things I wouldn't like to be standing underneath,
Here's some blurb on the project:
"It was a good beginning, full of promise; but it was only when the project engineers started to closely study how to build a nuclear plane that they realized the staggering technical problems. The main problem was, and always would be, how to make an adequately shielded reactor that was still light and powerful enough for use in an airplane.
The reactor could be one of two types. The first and most widely used was the "slow" model, in which the neutrons are slowed by a bulky moderating substance, such as graphite or water to a low enough speed for a self-sustaining chain reaction to take place. This type of reactor was relatively easy to design and operate. However the shielding was usually made of a specially prepared concrete 5 to 10 feet thick and weighing about 200 tons, too much even for the heavy-lifting capability of the B-36H. The "fast" model ran on higher speed neutrons, the same kind that activate an atomic bomb. Such a reactor could be made the size of a 3 to 4 foot sphere and weigh approximately 50 tons. But the heat generated would be very high, at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit-four times as hot as the slow reactor. Unless the engineers made materials that could withstand such heat, the reactor would simply melt itself.
GE's solution for the X-6 was to design a single, large, air-cooled reactor that had a core of 143 pounds of uranium dioxide fuel elements riddled with air passages and sandwiched between rings of stainless steel. Four J-53 turbojet engines were manifolded to the front and rear ends of the reactor; air from the compressor sections of the jets passed directly through the core and then out the exhaust nozzles. The all-up weight of the power plant came to about 128,000 pounds, 60,000 pounds of which was shielding.
The GE design employed the so-called direct or open system. Air was ducted straight through the reactor, emerging super hot to replace the heat formerly generated by the burning of fossil fuel (such as kerosene) in the jet's combustion chamber. The reactor-jet power plant was to be mounted inside the X-6 in its aft bomb bay with the four J-53s underneath the aft fuselage in an exposed group. The total amount of shielding was divided. A large tank of water surrounded the reactor itself (water acting not only as a shield but also as a reaction moderator in the core). A circular, lead-and-steel Gamma-ray shield, 80 inches in diameter and 4 inches thick, was immediately behind the forward Crew compartment.
Even with all that shielding, a worrisome amount of radiation still could get through. For a plane designed to stay aloft perhaps weeks at a time, the cumulative effect might be too much. And it was not enough just to protect the crew; airplane parts were also vulnerable. For example, radiation will sometimes transform rubber tires into a glassy or molasses-like substance.
Despite these problems, the first serious setback to the ANP program was political rather than technological. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration was looking for ways to fulfill its campaign promise to trim the federal budget. The ANP was singled out for severe cutting. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson claimed that even if the X-6 could be built, it would be no more than a flying platform to prove that nuclear flight was feasible-it would not be a militarily useful aircraft. "I am not interested, as a military project, in why potatoes turn brown when they are fried," he declared, a pointed reference to the ANP and what he thought was its philosophy of doing something "because it is there." Wilson also called the X-6 a "shitepoke"-a Texas nickname for a species of heron. "That's a great big bird that flies over the marshes," he explained, ".. .that doesn't have much body or speed to it or anything, but it can fly" The ANP however had some powerful friends, principally in Congress' Joint Committee On Atomic Energy "I do not care how big it is," said one representative, "and I do not care how much it costs. I want the Department of Defense to propel an airframe with nuclear power 50 feet off the ground, 20 miles an hour if need be, but move it." It was this kind of support that kept money coming through to the ANP but at a steep price. The scheduled X-6 test flight in 1956 was indefinitely postponed.
Still, even with continued funding, the question of military usefulness dogged the ANP Its rationale from the beginning had been that a nuclear plane would be the world's first true intercontinental bomber It would be able to travel supersonically from an inland base in the United States to strike any place on earth without the need for politically uncertain foreign bases or vulnerable aerial refueling. But as shielding and heat-transfer problems made completely atomic-powered supersonic flight less likely a proposal was made in 1955 for a so-called hermaphrodite system. Officially known as the 125-A weapon system, it used both conventional and nuclear power.
It was also called the "nuclear cruise, chemical dash" technique. Along with the thrust provided by the reactor-heated air from the main combustion chamber there was a separate chamber directly behind it for burning chemical (fossil) fuel only. This combination allowed the aircraft to cruise for periods on atomic power alone and, when near the target or under attack, to boost its speed with the chemical fuel to 2,000 mph for short periods.
The Air Force wanted weapon system 125-A by 1963. But project engineers soon discovered not only that the necessity of carrying liquid fuel decreased payload but also that mating nuclear and chemical engine technologies added needless complexity to a program that had yet to build a flyable aircraft. "It was as though the Wright brothers had been asked to build the F-86 Sabre Jet," said one critic. All in all, it began to appear that the projected 125-A mission could be performed much better by an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the development of which was proceeding faster than expected.
A further complication entered the AMP when indecision cropped up about the basic nuclear-engine design. The Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division of United Aircraft, which, since 1953, had a small contract with the AEC, seemed to be making rapid progress on a design that GE had considered at the start and then rejected. It employed the so-called indirect (or closed) system, which, instead of ducting air straight through the core, transferred the reactor heat to a heat exchanger by pipes filled with a liquid metal, such as sodium. The jet's air would be heated by pipes from the exchanger and not by passing through the reactor itself-heated second hand, so to speak. The advantage of this was that liquid metal is a much better conductor of heat than air so the reactor could be made smaller and thus operate with about 50,000 pounds less shielding than the direct system.
The disadvantage, as GE was always quick to point out, was that the weight and complexity of the heat exchanger with its network of 18 miles of tubing carrying molten metal under high pressure, nearly canceled out the shielding decrease. Less quickly pointed out by GE was that the relative simplicity of the direct system had severe disadvantages as well. The shielding would have to be heavier, and, because the air would go directly through the core, far more radioactivity would be released into the atmosphere. Indeed, this problem was serious enough to warrant a separate study by the Air Force, appropriately named Project Halitosis.
Support was to swing back and forth between the two systems for several years, but, since GE was further along in its work, it was the first to build and test its design, at least on the ground. As an experiment, GE took the dependable J-47 engine, already used in the Air Force's Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber and modified it to use a nuclear heat source. This was then redesignated the X-39 engine.
In 1955, on a test site in Idaho, the X-39 was run on a ground test stand in what was called the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment No. l (HTRE-l). Engineers tested a complete aircraft power plant consisting of a reactor, a radiation shield, two X-39 engines, ducting, control parts and instrumentation; the whole assembly was called a core test facility because it was designed for the insertion of different reactor cores as they were developed. In January 1956, the engines were operated successfully but, because there had been no attempt to restrict the weight of the shielding, they would not have been flyable. Later in 1957, other cores that were tested, HTRE-2 and -3, did reduce the weight somewhat. The HTRE-3 assembly produced enough thrust to theoretically sustain a flight at 460 mph for about 30,000 miles. However radiation levels were still a problem; at one point in the tests, controls failed and released enough radioactivity to contaminate 1,500 acres."
hope this is of interest, Win.
- winkeech
- Posts: 44
- Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 12:24 pm
Re: Special Ops 106 Nightstalkers - Cash-Landrum Xmas 1980
by redsocks » Sat Jan 17, 2009 10:04 pm
I saw this episode on History channels "ufo Hunters" and found it very interesting, I just actually bought the whole season 1 of ufo hunters that includes the RFI for a mere £14.00 which included postage from the states,it can be bought here http://www.tower.com/ufo-hunters-season ... /112053651 remember you must have a DVD player though that can run region 1 dvd's.
Redsocks
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