Larry J said:

>I did a Google search on AMARV and only found a few hits. Some
>were nothing more than a list of aerospace acronyms. The other was
>the Encyclopedia Astronautica website. All it had was a list of 3
>AMARV test flights out of Vandenberg back in the 1979-81
>timeframe. I couldn't find any other info online.

A few years ago I had a phone conversations with the chief engineer at McDonnell Douglas who ran the AMaRV project (he retired shortly before McDonnell Douglas was bought out by Boeing). At the time, I had the crazy idea of using an AMaRV type vehicle as a poor man's Mars sample return vehicle. My crazy idea was to have the vehicle fly at hypersonic speed while at low altitude and collect dust suspended in the Martian atmosphere using a a shock tube with aerogel. Ames managers rejected the idea because there was no potential for exobiology (not likely to find bugs on dust in the atmosphere). AMaRV was a natural for this concept because much of its technology had been declassified for DC-X (DC-X was essentially a scaled up version of AMaRV). An engineer with McDonnell Douglas provided me with a complete aerodynamic description based upon flight data and a distorted sketch of the vehicle. That sketch was a funny deal. Apparently it was against the rules to provide a correct sketch of AMaRV but okay to provided a distorted sketch with all the dimension labeled (took me all of 10 minutes to redraw it correctly). I was told that 4 AMaRVs were made but only 3 were actually tested. The fourth was used for some other classified program. The three AMaRVs were launched towards Kwajalein where they disintegrated upon hitting the water. I was told that the tests were successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Apparently the test objective was for the vehicle to fly a series of wild hairpin turns at about Mach 10 and then pass through an imaginary window near Kwajalein just before hitting the water. I have heard three conflicting stores as to why AMaRV was cancelled:

1) AMaRV performed so well that people got frightened that it could destablize the arms race with the Soviet Union (AMaRV was almost the perfect first strike weapon).
2) AMaRV used a hydraulic system to position the spit body flap for controlling angle-of-attack and roll. along with two side flaps for controlling yaw. AMaRV used a cordite powered APU to pressurize the hydraulic fluid that was dumped overboard after passing through the flap control cylinders (not unlike the rocket motor gimbal system of some ballistic missiles). Supposably the hydraulic system took up so much space that there was no room for a warhead. However I have heard other people dispute this theory.
3) Sandia had a better MARV that still remains classified.

I tried to obtain more unclassified documents about AMaRV but was told that it was too expensive to declassify them so they were simply shredded (it's expensive to keep classified documents around). A colleague independently obtained additional declassifed information but the documents were nothing more than telemetry data with no companion document to explain what the data meant (essentally useless).

AMaRV is a bit like the SR-71 or the D-21. It's a neat technology that aeronautical engineers like to speculate about but almost no one has all the facts.

Gary