Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.

But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:

It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.

Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.

Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).

Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.

No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.

Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.

So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.

“Ready about!?”

Eager to take a look at a super-secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite?

Now you can thumb through a sourcebook on a Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia called the Altay Optical Laser Research Center.

Allan Thomson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst prepared the Russian/English language sourcebook that spotlights the Russian ground equipment capable of cranking out images of high-flying spacecraft.

The sourcebook contains shot-from-the-ground adaptive optics imagery, albeit a bit blurry, of Russian spacecraft, several NASA Earth observing satellites…as well as the NRO’s Lacrosse 2 spysat lofted back in 1991.

Lacrosse (see image) uses powerful cloud-cutting radar for day/night surveillance tasks.

BTW: A second Russian site will be equipped next year with a more powerful satellite-imaging telescope, hardware generally seen similar to a facility the United States operates in Hawaii. That upcoming satellite-scanning, sky-watching Russian equipment is to be located within Savvushka, Zmeinogorskigy area, the Altai territory, according to the sourcebook.

The sourcebook was made available today by Secrecy News from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

Go to:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/altay.pdf