Why do you think most credit goes to John Glenn rather than Shepherd? Because Glenn did orbit, Shepherd only rode shotgun on a ballistic missile. The only reason that was done, was for the US to answer as quickly as possible to Gagarin’s orbits around the earth.

But at least Shepherd attained enough speed to actually leave the atmosphere, and encounter such nastry problems as atmospheric friction upon re-entry. You know, heat shields and the like. A problem conveniently evaded and henceforth ignored by Rutan. Would they have taken this into consideration (which eventually will have to be adressed, if this first step is ever to evolve into ‘private space exploration’), the 20 million they spent on the project would have been peanuts compared to what it would have cost.

Again, no disrespect for the achievement, but they could do it this cheaply because they IGNORED one of the most complicated issues of earth-bound space flight: re-entry. This is why i don’t think this has very little to do with spaceflight at all – unless anyone thinks that a massively downgraded X-15 is anything special, except maybe for the guy who caughed up the money.

At least each and every American is a shareholder in NASA. Scaled composites? Ah, yes, the money from people who paid for their Microsoft licenses.

The IL-76 has far more internal space than a 707, and an A50 is a lot roomier inside than an E-3. Even when i’m comparing the A50 prototype which i’ve been in (used to be at the Chortkov technical school in the Ukraine) with all the extra room for test gear, to a standard NATO E-3A.

For India and China, the Il-76 of course offers nice commonality with already operational airframes. Apart from that, the -76 has longer range than a 737 and can operate from more rugged airfields (dispersed operations).

Nice drawing though. There is a photo of Lun in the Ekranoplan-thread.

I have no doubt the terrain between Gorkii and the Caspian Sea is flat enough for an ekranoplan to ekrane over. But it is F-A-R. I’ve driven it… Along the Volga river, it’s about 3000 kilometres, not quite the distance for a hush-hush ferry. Ah well, i guess they must have been disassembled and transported by barge (there are incidentally very, very large barges rowing gently down the Volga stream). Besides, a 200 metres long ‘aircraft’ flying lower than 100 metres, with a big bubble of overpressurised air beneath it’s wings… not only would it be very hard to mistake something like that for a regulair aircraft, i’m also curious what would happen to little Volodya who just happened to be walking right under the KM’s flightpath. At best, his ears will hurt a whole lot…

As for the dump at Taganrog: yes, there were parts of the Be-1 and of a VVA-14 there back in 1996, as well as a few other WIG-like pieces of metal (speedboats with wings, stuff like that). But there were also much bigger parts i have yet to identify. Most impressive was a large box-like forward fuselage, looking roughly like the forward part of a C-119 fuselage, only bigger and with a more square central-section. The pictures were unfortunately seized (the ones with the factory’s DOSAAF-Wilgas were considered fit for public consumption :rolleyes: ).

It’s still an airplane, not a spaceship. With respect to the accomplishment, a ballistic zoom climb to 100km (and two centimetres) is still a far, far cry from properly leaving the earth’s atmosphere or entering even a low orbital trajectory. The thing barely flew Mach 3 – nowhere near escape velocity.

Congratiulations on an altitude record. But space travel? Baby steps…

As a plane the V22s payload is quite poor for its size.

Sorry to digress from a thread on what’s probably my favourite sort of vehicle, but the V-22 has got a poor payload for it’s size both as a plane AND as a helicopter. The Osprey puts CH-46 payload in a CH-53-sized airframe.

What i think is most sad about those Ekranoplans, is that appearantly none of the single production vehicles survive. The A90 Orlyonok saw a limited production run (about five or so were built), but after one crash and one which struck something in the water and sunk, the remainders were unfortunately scrapped at their base at Kaspiisk.

One thing is funny though – all Ekranoplan trials were appearantly done in the Caspian Sea (duh!) from the base at Kaspiisk (not really imaginative, i know). But at least the Lun (with the missiles on top) and the Spasatel were built in Nizhnyi Novgorod/Gorkii, in 1994 a ‘very large T-tail’ was seen moored in the sea near Saki on the Crimea by two spotters i have high confidence in, and the pieces of wreckage on the dump at Beriev-Taganrog also looked quite a bit bigger than just small trials-Ekranoplans… Yet nobody has ever mentioned actual large Ekranoplans operating from the Black Sea, nor even the 2000km trip from Gorkii to the Caspian.

Sure the Lun wouldn’t have navigated across the Volga river on it’s trip south? There are so many hotels, cities and river cruise boats along the way…

Here’s the Lun with a guy on top, for a nice measure of scale. Spasatel’ is a a rescue version of the same airframe/hull, obviously without the missile launchers and radars. Spasatel should still be lingering in it’s factory, waiting for funds to be completed. Anyone here who’s rich?

The pulverising of Afghanistan only got worse when the Soviets left. The country (at least the city and basic infrastructure) was still pretty much intact in 1989. But by then, it was all to the mujaheddeen and all the other good guys from Rambo III to wreck the rest of the country. And one can’t say that the KGB funded and trained Osama, can one?

Looks like someone is trying to revive disruptive paintschemes again, this time with square patterns rather than the original diagonal schemes as thought out by Keith Ferris in the 1970s. It looks like it’s inspired by the new ‘digital’* camouflage uniforms as those recently taken up by Canada and the Marines – and behold, it is a Marines Hornet!.

* New is of course relative. That silly Soviet camouflage coverall (green with light blotches) already had a digital pattern with the colours applied in little squares.