Glenn Reynolds, over at Instapundit, has pointed out this Aviation Week story on the deep black space plane that has been under test at Groom Lake through the last decade.
I have long suspected such a vehicle was flying, partly because of logic. I could not imagine there has been nothing new since the design of the 40 year old SR-71 and the US would retire that fleet of spy planes without someting newer and better. No matter what was said about satellites, they are just not as generally useful and do not have the immediacy of a launch on demand and maneuver on the way aircraft.
I know for a fact that the USAF was studying space planes in the late eighties and early nineties because I knew the guy running the study. It was called Black Horse, an H2O2 fueled aircraft which topped up from a tanker after take off. That officer moved on in to private space but the idea of being able to, as he put it, “put precision holes in the ground anywhere in the world within 90 minutes” was one I assumed had just gone totally black.
Another small piece of information came from a friend with a classified job title back in the early 90’s. A spacer like myself, he told me that his real job would not be public for decades but people would be quite surprised and it was important… and he added that it took him three airplanes, the last of which was a light plane to get to where he worked. I immediately thought of Groom Lake but kept it to myself then and ever since. I have always assumed the Groom Lake sightings were of an at least suborbital SR-71 replacement.
The other item which clued me that something was going on happened last summer. A number of persons I spoke to were pushing a technology called ‘hot structures’ which was about to come out of the black and they were afraid that the technology and all of the money expended on it was about to be lost simply because no one knew it existed. While interesting, it turned out to be far too pricey for anyone I know to employ at this time.
Hot structures have to do with hypersonic airframes of the blended bodies sort. This is stuff you build if you are working on spaceplanes as there is little other use for it. I did not however put the final piece together as AWST did with its far greater resources and contacts. My guess is this technology is about to be lost because the SR-3/XOV is being cancelled.
Does anyone else have any interesting scuttlebutt?
No scuttlebutt, but you know if they retired it there has to be something else, better, faster, slicker, in the inventory.
I especially like the idea of the hypersonic rods falling from the heavens onto some buried “impregnable” bunker somewhere. A few kilos of titanium or depleted uranium travelling at 7 or 8 thousand kilometers/hour would leave a really nasty hole in the ground. You’d need oh about one of them to take out the entire Natanz Iran nuclear facility and leave a hole the size of Luxembourg.
I would say that this program would be long overdue if it was in fact what is claimed. The advances in aerospace have slowed drastically since the 70’s.
The black helicopters have landed!
When I read the article I thought of “Aurora.” In the 90s there were a few articles in the LA Times about seismic sensors (of which SoCal has many) picking up the sonic boom from something flying very fast, very high towards the Pacific from the direction of Nevada. At the time the speculation was that it was a top-secret SR-71 replacement code named Aurora.
Dale
A few points, first of all according to the Rand study on the “Rods from God’ “Space Weapons – Earth Wars.” these would not be that useful against deeply buried targets because they lose too much energy when the hit the ground.
Secondly, there does seem to be some truth to this due to Av Week’s excellent sources and also because as they put it the DoD surrended the SR-71 and any number of spaceplane projects such as the Black Horse and the Space Maneuver Vehicle.
We all heard the same kind of rumors in the mid 1980s before they announced the existance of the F-117.
This could eventually be the source of a great space tourism vehicle. Just like the B-29 lead to the stratocruiser. Not to mention a nice emergency rescue vehicle for humans in Low Earth Orbit.
Actually I wasn’t talking about the “Thor’ system at all. I’m sure you know the name of the person I was talking to, and he meant the kind of precision holes a B-52 makes with smart bombs… only Black Horse would deliver its package *much* more quickly.
Did “Aurora” fly out of Macrahanish in west Scotland? I have heard an apocryphal story about air traffic control at aldergrove asking the mod what it was that flew over at 67000 feet at speeds that made them spill their tea. I hear they were told to not ask again.
The big difference between this and Mitch’s designs is of course that this uses a carrier aircraft, which severely limits the size of the spacecraft, while Mitch favoured mid-air refuelling.
That said, this would be a very goood use for the Valkyrie, or something like it, if they got the dangers of supersonic separation of the vehicles sorted out. It’s publically known that they tried that with SR71 variants and a large drone carried on top of it, and lost aircraft in the process.
Just in case anyone is interested in Black Horse, I have a collection of pointers on the design here: http://www.islandone.org/Launch/
“these would not be that useful against deeply buried targets because they lose too much energy when the hit the ground.”
Isn’t that what they are suppose to do.
I think he meant they lose their energy at too shallow a depth. I am not certain this is true, but I do not have time to dig or run any numbers myself right now so I’ll leave any debate there to others.
I would point out that we know how to build penetrators for other planets that go many meters into the ground, but that is not quite the same either since we *want* these things to release their 1/2mv**2, not ‘lithobrake’.
I’ll bet every last on of ya that nothing of the ilk you describe exists. “Aurora” theories have almost no evidence behind them. Regardless of sub-Mulder conspiracy theories about “black budgets” anything with this kinda capacity is more useful as a LEO launch vehicle than as a strike / recon plane.
Given the cost of development it would’ve been shared with NASA. The Yanks are embarrassed enough at the measly 60s vintage replacements they’re building for the shuttle. NASA would’ve loved to trumpet this one from the highest mountain.
Assume I’m wrong and some secretative cabal of US Airforce / CIA types have pushed through an SR-71 replacement at huge expense (and presumably sacrificing the F-22 Raptor build from 480 to 180 to pay for it) then I ask you why? The Cold War is over. Air recon over the Iraq no-fly zones was provided quite effectively with Canberra PR9s (UK) and U2 Dragonladies (US). Both 50+ year old designs. Why would anyone authorise a huge chunk of cash to build something utterly Buck Rogers if the planes the SR-71 replaced seemed to be up to the task?
The SR-71 was retired because the cost of maintaining them was phenomenal. The F-111 went for the same reason. In fact, it’s by far the commonest reason for the US to have dropped a plane type in the last 40 years.
“these would not be that useful against deeply buried targets because they lose too much energy when the hit the ground.”
The problem with this is that’s the objective – vaporize on impact. The rapidly expanding metalic gas would do the work; the energy has to be dissipated somewhere, like the earth.
The Meteor Crater in Arizona was created by an iron-nickel meteorite, hardly an aerodynamically optimized object, of approximately 300,000 tons impacting at 28,000 MPH. While a ‘Rod from God’ would be significantly less massive, it would be aerodynamic and optimized for this mission. It is worth bearing in mind that Meteor Crater is over a mile wide and 570 feet deep. We hardly need an impact that large.
A timed stream of rods impacting the same area would cause massive deep ground damage, quite aside from the cratering effect, similar to the effect of an kinetic round on a tank. The round doesn’t have to penetrate, the energy of impact knocks everything inside loose to go flying around killing people and destroying equipment.
The current GBU-28 “Bunker Buster” weighs about 5000 pounds and can penetrate about 20 feet of reinforced concrete or at least 100 feet of earth. Given the mass/velocity relationship a 100-200 pound object traveling at 20 or 30 thousand MPH would have to deliver a significantly greater punch. I haven’t done any numbers on this so it’s all sort of ‘reasoned’ rather than calculated so YMMV.
Why would anyone authorise a huge chunk of cash to build something utterly Buck Rogers if the planes the SR-71 replaced seemed to be up to the task?
You underestimate the ability of the US gov’t and the military-industrial complex to build completely unnecessary weapon systems. They are built not for any strategic purpose but to funnel money to the districts and patrons of Congress-people.
But I have no idea if these things are being built or not.
Oh Mr Steele!
Your knowlege of fluid mechanics lets you down. “Rods from God” are a farce. Leaving aside the cost of placing such a system in orbit and also the ticklish issue of the fact that any adversary sufficiently sophisticated to need such treatment would have the capacity to track the orbital launch platform (that can be overcome by enormously fuel intensive satellite maneouvring which brings us back toe the first point) how large would a KE weapon have to be in order to make a big hole? In order to survive atmospheric insertion it would have to either be aerodynamically braked and shielded (like the shuttle) and therefore lose most of its destructive power, or it would have to be gigantic (like the asteroid you described). Seeing as the cost to LEO is currently about 11USD/gram there are many more cost effective ways to bring death from above.
“Rods from God” is just a smart phrase which caught on. It’s a ludicrous concept. The US DoD is very fond of such phrases. In the 80s there was a big push to create smaller, cleverer weapons. They termed most existing weapons “Moronic Mountains”, more advanced stuff “Smart Rocks”, future developments “Brilliant Pebbles” and the ultimate goal “Savant Sand”. I don’t recall much coming from any of this.
I think you’ve been had by the US DoD rumour-mill.
Jeez, is this Samizdata, or the place the Lone Gunmen chew the fat?
Look guys, it’s still big news when a NATO fighter plane is upgraded with a “glass cockpit”. They even make out it’s a big deal to fit it with “colour LCD panels”. I assume most of you don’t regard those as exotic technology. I dunno if you’re aware that NASA have trawled ebay in the last few years looking for 5.25″ floppy disks? Why? That’s what it took to boot the shuttle.
Military and governmental tech is frequently plagiarised from the Ark.
After a little checking it looks like Av Week just took all the rumors and the stuff they’ve gathered on these projects over the years and put this together. A lot of it does not hold up.
For example the Born Gel fuel is so toxic and hard to work with that its called “devil Juice’
They may have worked with some of this stuff in the late 1980s but nothing camne of it.
On the other hand Brilliant Peebles were not canceled because they didn’t work, but because the Clinton Administration wanted to “take the stars out of star wars.”
Ivan,
Of course you don’t. That’s the whole point. The whole thing is a diversion. They want the US tax-payer to believe they’re developing super-weapons because that sounds a heck of a lot better than the fact that they’ve just wasted umpty-billion on some mad-cap blind alley.
Cutting edge research is always speculative. It is not the case that these people can honestly say, “Give us x-billion, and we’ll deliver you a fully working y”. The last thing the Skunk Works wants is funding to be cut off because they’ve delivered a turkey. The Northrop-Grumman A-12 strike jet (a white program) for the USN overan on cost so stunningly it was axed by congress in the 90s. Northrop-Grumman haven’t won a position as prime-contractor on anything similar since. If it’s speculative and deniable it’s different. Black programs are the ultimate pork-barrel because they don’t get congressional scrutiny.
Funny coincidence. Currently, I’m reading The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Sad that the X-planes wasn’t developed more.
Taylor,
What precisely, were “brilliant pebbles”?
I had a vague idea it was some sort of cluster bomb with smart sub-munitions.
And can I get it on ebay?
Mr O’Halloran,
Maybe that’s because the Iragi’s have an intrinsic genetic superiority when it comes to fighting. If you think that sounds daft, you should re-read some of your previous posts on other threads.
Are you trolling, sir, or just an idiot.
I will not deign to answer your question because while you are no student of tactics, you’re a goddamn PhD in being a twat.
Racism and pretension, these are two of my favourite things.
Fredrik,
They were. There were tons more X-planes. They just weren’t as fast or spectacular. There still are X-planes. They (were/are) researching different things. There are plenty or resources on the web. I’d just like to point out on of my favourites. The Grumman X-29 with forward swept wings. It’s still (just) possible that the Russian’s might build a FSW fighter – the Sukhoi Berkut (Golden Eagle). I hope they do because it just looks so Thunderbirds.
For all you guys who mourn our lost future, with cities on the moon and electricity too cheap to bother metering, go to:
http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
It’s a fun ride. I f you think the cars built in the US in the 50s and the 60s had big tail-fins you’re in for a shock when you see what they almost built.
deleted. banned. off-topic. go away.
Matt,
Now I alway thought that was “Un Chien Andalou”. I care not if I have to stand corrected. I’ve always been more of an Eastwood fan myself.
I am frank (hardly fearless, though – this is the net afterall) and I extend the same courtesy to you as you do to 3 billion Asians who clearly have never done anything worthwhile for civilisation because they lacked the sense of adventure for it.
Apart from build the components of my computer, and I suspect yours. Unless, of course your cranky thinking is because you’re having to wind the cogs of a difference engine?
You have the grace to refer to me as being “frank”. Please extend the courtesy. Are you a fascist, or do you just sound that way?
We will just have to wait and see, but the AvWeek story matches up with a lot of things I have been following for years. There are of course more than one viewpoint on this… Taylor and I do travel in somewhat similar circles and get somewhat similar scuttlebutt and have somewhat different opinions on many things…
Thought we were talking about air-planes, not hair-brains.
Sorry, couldn’t resist it.
permanent expat,
Love to get back on msg. You’re not the only one who can’t resist. I guess this thread will be up for a while, so I’ll bid ya all goodnight. But, not before I throw this curveball in. F-22 vs Typhoon? And not just out and out combat ability, cost-effectiveness is a factor here.
Nick M
I am not a fluid dynamicist so I’m out of my area here, and this is hardly the forum on which to get into that subjecdt anyway.
The only thing I would observe is that in the article the vehicle is described as both a LEO insertion vehicle and a “pop up” weapon, in which case the enemy can’t predict the presence overhead because it isn’t in orbit.
I would also observe that the U-2, SR-71, F-117, B-2 fit the same profile you now ascribe to “DOD rumor mill.” For “fairy” aircraft they flew/fly pretty well once revealed. The upgrading of a fleet of production NATO aircraft to glass cockpits is hardly in the same class as the highly specialized world of the lack budget.
I don’t know if these things exist, but then they didn’t tell either of us about the SR-71 until it had been in service for 10 years.
YMMV
Also, I believe he is quite wrong about the mass loss of a properly shaped hypervelocity projectile. It will get through the atmosphere and it will deliver a potent punch to the ground.
I’ve been through this discussion before with other rocket scientists in discussions of sending things the other way with a mass driver. It does work. You lose some mass and some energy, but it gets there.
I’m also friends with a guy who worked on light gas guns. They work. They could potentially fire a hypervelocity projectile at a missile or send a shell most of the way around the planet… or put something into orbit if there were circularization burns.
A quick BOTE on this and I’d say it delivers a punch of about 20-30 megajoules per kilogram of weapon to the ground even if you assume energy loss due to friction balances out the acceleration due to gravity. That’s just the 1/2 mv**2 KE at LEO and discounts the PE.
In the past, revelation of the SR-71 and B2 were preceded a few years by increased UFO sitings in the Western USA. But my personal favorite was the Black Helicopter hysteria of the 1980’s. As to why we would want a cool new SR-71 replacement is that the mad cap mullahs in Iran have a nice shiney new missle defense system that is advertised to be able to threaten a U2. Satellites are easy to track so a surpise fly over by something too fast and too high to shoot down, may indeed be attractive. As for NASA, it is too localised geographically to have a strong congressional base of support. Also, no one can make an argument for funding that can compete with the stuff on TV and in the movies.
Brilliant Peebles were an space based, boost phase missile defense system designed to be part of the Global Protection Aganist Limited Strikes (G-PALS) missile Defense system proposed by GHW Bush 41, Based on a advanced IR sensor the idea was to orbit 2000 of the things. When the detected a missile (IRBM, ICBM or SLBM) being launched they would use ordinary thrusters to realign themselves and smash into it as it left the atmosphere and before it could deploy warheads or decoys, they also had some midcourse intercept with a possible decoy discrimination device.
They were based on fairly simple existing technology certainly nothing more inherently complex that an ASRAAM or an AIM-9X. It was the fact that they were a ‘space weapon’ that made the lefties shit bricks.
gravid
There was a ‘ramjet-based aircraft’ that flew out of both Kintyre and it’s corresponding base in Australia during Desert Shield/Storm, as I recall locals described it as ‘concorde-like but with smaller wings’. Whether that was Aurora Project or not was never proven.
Ta’ Julian. I have friends interested in aviation that didn’t know that. Cheers.
Does anyone know the current situation of the Stealth Satellite program? A swift google returned articles showing that it had run into problems with cost overruns; most of those articles appeared to be a couple of years old.
Anyone got up-to-date info?
Anyone else getting lotsa 404s and 500s today?
I’ve been having probs for the last several days, particularly notice I get a failure after posting a comment although comment is saved. Also sometimes seeing incomplete comment screens.
Me too, having to hit F5 a lot on longer threads. Is this anything to do with the trackback problem?
Me too, having to hit F5 a lot on longer threads. Is this anything to do with the trackback problem?
PS: There goes another. I’ll try again. Apologies in advance if this posts double.
They looked at fitting hypersonic kinetic energy impactors as payloads to ICBMs a while ago. The KE impactors were judged inferior to smart multi-stage warhead cruise weapons with terminal manoeuvring. You need to add a lot of energy to a dumb dart to make it hit as hard as something like BROACH. Against a low-tech terrorist camps and the like cluster and fuel air munitions are going to be more effective at sanitising the area. Against high tech installations the defender can go as deep as necessary and add any amount of “armour” to defeat your penetrators, probably cheaper than you can lift and drop them. Or they could make it distributed and mobile. The real “Rod from God” would be a relativistic impactor. Very little warning of it’s approach. However strategic airlift might be a better use of any funds currently available for such wonder weapons.
FWIW, I saw an experiment to evaluate which gun/bullet combination could penetrate water the best.
Surprisingly (to me), the most effective were simple handguns delivering subsonic bullets, which could easily penetrate a gel target beyond 3 or 4 feet of water.
However, all the supersonic ordnance (including that delivered by guns too big to fire safely when being carried) turned to copper and iron filings on impact with the water surface.
All that happened was a very big splash but the gel target was unmarked even at quite shallow depths. Obviously, though, anything living would have been killed by the shock.
A couple of problems here. The F-117 and B-2 certainly are real and effective (although the B-2’s mission availability is very poor). The problem with a LEO insertion “pop-up” weapon is not that though it’s a very tall order to intercept, it’s pretty obvious that it has been there. This obviously limits it’s effectiveness for recon. Ideally, you don’t want the bad guys, to know that you know. This is part of the reason for the move to low speed, medium altitutude stealth typified by the Nighthawk and the Spirit.
Zimon,
A “relativistic impactor” !
Why not go the whole hog and build the goddamn Death Star!
A couple of comments:
The difference between a LEO insertion ship and hypersonic “round da world” bomber/recon thing is basically nothing.
For reconaissance something like this is good to have and provides better information that U-2 and family because you get there so fast that the the person you are spying on doesn’t have a chance to hide his shit.
Satellites are very predictable, Russian experience has shown that if you care to hide something enough, satellites and unstealthy aircraft are close to useless.
It is my understanding that modeling has shown that short of nuclear bunker busters, there is *nothing* that can effectively attack a properly buried and built bunker. (Well, short of a “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” linear accelerator pounding you for a while.) The good news is that eventually you have to have get in and out and bombing the doors is pretty effective – if you know where they are…
The basic problem is that once you have a couple hundred feet of rock protecting you, anything that can penetrate that deep doesn’t make much of a hole, so you have to hit it perfectly. Very tough targeting problem.
The Pershing 2, IRBM was an accurate bunker penetrating nuke. They had those in the 80s. They gave the Kremlin a fit of the wobbles because those old gits knew that the it meant the Yanks had a capacity to hit the Polit-Buro in their bunkers (amongst other things). There is absolutely no need to develop anything more sci-fi.
I wonder if the success of Burt Rutan and The X prize might have some bearing on this. The private companies seem to have the ball and be running with it. Once free enterprise takes an interest in things and sees a potential reward the development of their products is far more rapid than any govt funded exercise. One of the biggest mistakes ever made was the abandonment of the idea of the original “X” projects in favour of beaurocratically run projects. These only hold up development; so perhaps the USAF have seen sense and know that their aircraft will be defuct in a matter of a couple of years. Expect military interest in some of these new “private ventures”?
Ian,
Probably more than a little funding, I am sure.
So here is a twist on the Rods from God theme. Do a search on “non-nuclear SLBM refit” and peruse the first page. Apparently the good old Trident D-5 is having it’s 3 ton warhead refit with a convential one. Some stats are; Complete stealth for launch platform (the sub) from up to 4,000 miles away, 20,000 KMPH impact velocity, 14 minutes flight time to vaporize various undesireable stuff. So my question is; With this kind of kinetic energy and who knows what kind of technology riding it, can some dictator even afford to bury his secret stuff deep enough?
So my question is; With this kind of kinetic energy and who knows what kind of technology riding it,
Yeah, the velocity is impressive, but what’s the mass of the warhead?
ICBMs are impressively large and all, but most of that mass is fuel that gets expended in the boost phase. What actually reaches the target is a lot smaller.
Then there are the political considerations. If one is going to put a conventional tip on an ballistic missile, it would probably be a good idea to make at least two phone calls before launching the thing. It’s your guess if either of the people on the other end of the calls will pass the information on.
Just so any newcomers are not confused: there is nothing in the AVWEEK item or in the rumour mill that suggests the ‘Thor’ system (rods from god as I think Jerry Pournelle called them) are under study. The article discusses what is most likely an ondemand spyship. I only suggest that it is also the prototype for the delivery of smart bombs on demand as I have talked with guys in blue who would find that really useful. “When overnight simply isn’t good enough” as I seem to remember one of them putting it.
There is no technology in this article which I find particular new; just expensive to design and operate and of performance levels more useful to the military than private sector.
Nick M, since when has need ever got in the way of want? They’ll always want a new whizzband gizmo with an extra flashing light. Can I have mine in blue please?
One point the article made that should be stressed. If this thing exists, which I doubt, The pentagon is taking it out of service.
The stealth satellite issue is interesting but lets leave that for another day.
By the way the Death Star is already build and ready to go, on 81st street between Central Park West and Colombus, disguised as a Planetarium.
gravid,
I think it’s a little more complex than that. The USAF is dominated by the “fighter mafia”. They’ve already had a tough job getting the toy they really, really want (the F-22) and have had to endure the numbers aquired dropping from 480, to 180. I think this has been the absolute focus of their lobbying. That and they have of course been lobbying hard against certain aspects of the UAV programs.
rosignol,
Point taken about the dangers of firing an ICBM with a conventional tip being mis-interpreted. There is a similar danger with all these KE weapons, mass-drivers and rail-guns. At least initially the attack looks like a baby nuke in that there is one hell of a bang.
You can probably load enough conventional explosive onto an ICBM to do quite enough. The Trident D5 missile carries 8-14 MIRVS, each estimated as weighing <360kg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88_nuclear_warhead
I can’t image them weigh less than 200kg, so the bottom line is 1.6 tons of payload.
BTW have you heard of the US Davy Crockett recoiless rifle? Yup, in the 60s the US Army developed a nuclear bazooka. That had a 23kg warhead – and is generally regarded as about the smallest you can make a nuke. I’d love to get hold of the instruction manual for it. Apparently it starts off by advising the user to “first dig a trench and get in”.
“The pentagon is taking it out of service”
Yes, that is why I believe the hot structures technology is suddenly being offered up from out of the depths of the black world. Supposition of course, but I don’t know why else they would suddenly be dumping it… made no particularly sense to me at the time but I did make a few phone calls to see if anyone wanted it.
Deleted. Get lost you racist loser
NickM is lacking in the hypersonics department. Rods from God do not need to slow down to reenter. What they need is a nose tip that can handle hypersonic velocities at significant atmospheric and dynamic pressures handily. There are such materials. Google up NASA SHARP and Hafnium Diboride or Zirconium Diboride. These SHARP materials melt at 3600 C, but are so fantastic at re-radiating heat they absorb that they allow sustained flight at sea level at mach 7. These materials allow sharp edged and nosed spaceplane designs, not the blunted stuff like Shuttle, and very high speed airbreathing propulsion.
What is more, NASA’s SHARP program was cancelled in 2001 before the first suborbital reentry test could be flown. Rumors are because it was ‘duplicate research’. Duplicate of what, exactly?
As for boron fuels, while diborane and pentaborane are toxic and produce nasty liquid and solid exhaust precipitates, when atomic boron is mixed with kerosene, you get a gel fuel which boosts gravimetric Isp by 31-35 seconds, but DOUBLES volumetric Isp. Fans of Mitchell Burnside Clapp’s Blackhorse know what high density fuels do to help with mass fraction. The exhaust of boron-gelled kerosene is water, CO2, and Boron oxide, which precipitates as a dust that converts to bauxite as it absorbs water.
Rocketdyne developed a boron-gel ramjet in the late 1980’s, long after these fuels were alleged to have been discredited. The engineers were told it was cancelled after it was completed (nice cover, its been used elsewhere).
I wrote about Blackstar last Sunday and again today on my site AeroGo, as well as on Jeffrey Bell’s article arguing that the AvWeek article is bogus.
There’s lots of links on these posts, if anyone is interested in learning more.
I have obtained a copy of what others are purporting to be a photo of a Blackstar sighting which occured a few months ago, near Davis, California. Here is a link to a high res zoom of the original photo (the original png was 29 megs!).
http://www.lorrey.biz/images/blackstar_sighting.JPG
This may be something else, but the photographer claims it crossed the sky in 12-15 seconds on AB. As you can see, there are either two engines on afterburner, or two groups of engines, with some rather large widely spaced vertical stabs. Prior to the Blackstar story coming out, commentary on the web seems to have concluded it was an XB-70!!!!!
Here is a link to the original
http://www.park-ethereal.net/images/DSC_3522.png
Yeah, it looks about right for a Valkyrie.
Compare-
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/ecn-2128.jpg
wings look to straight for supersonic flight