This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the B-2 Stealth Bomber’s first flight. To celebrate, Northrop Grumman’s has unveiled the B-2 Stealth Bike, which unfortunately doesn’t fly and it’s not invisible. It looks… hmmm, stealthy?

[Flight Global]

As you can see in the image, Misty uses a conical reflective balloon. Little is known about how it works but in theory this design—which is patented by Teledyne Industries, who did the design for the US government—can both deflect ground lasers, radar waves, and hide it from the plain eye. [GWU via This Is Rocket Science]

The catch is, the Navy is insisting upon donating it in tandem with a giant, ugly, rust-laden submsersible barge called the Hughes Mining Barge. The vessel was actually used as a floating dock for the Sea Shadow, protecting it from the prying eyes of Soviet spy satellites.

The WSJ has a great story on Frank Lennon, a Naval museum operator in Providence, RI whose sole attraction—a retired old Soviet sub—was sunk by a tidal wave. While it has recently been exhumed from the deep, Frank has his eye on the Sea Shadow as his next big crowd-getter. Now he just has to figure out what to do with ths shitty old barge it comes with.

Anyone want to take on old Frank for the prize? The Navy is waiting for your calls. [WSJ]

A Royal Navy source told the Times:

It is remarkably difficult to detect a modern submarine with sonar and we work very hard with our own submarines, as do our allies, in making them as quiet as possible so they are not detectable.

And he’s serious about that—even after realising they’d hit something, the French crew couldn’t tell what it was. They wrote the object off as a shipping container, only to find out that they had actually collided with another submarine upon docking three days later, after the government had deduced the collision from routine information exchanges with the British.

The problem was that both submarines use passive sonar to map out their surroundings, which doesn’t give away their location with the ‘pings’ of active sonar, and is somewhat less sensitive. Without these ‘pings’, it was nearly impossible for either sub’s passive sonar to detect the other’s, leading to the collision and subsequent confusion.

In reality, the whole thing was a bit more subdued than initial reports (or our imaginations) led us to believe. The subs, which were travelling very slowly, just sort of bonked into on another, and the only critical damage to either vessel was to the French sub’s sonar system. [Times Online]

I’m no warmonger, nor am I a motorcycle fiend, but I can appreciate both a landmark plane with an iconic design and a lavishly expensive bike all the same.

Yet when I look at this B-2 bike, all I can think is, the US Airforce actually spent money on that?

How about we commemorate 20 years of the B-2 bomber with, say, the uber-badass B-2 bomber? Who cares that this bike has some of the original titanium from the original B-2 aft deck or that each wheel features some stupid scale models of B-2s in star formations? What’s next, B-2 collectible cards in the spokes?

I look at this motorcycle and can only reminisce of the short-lived Street Sharks cartoon/toy campaign. It’s a caricature of America’s historical techno-military supremacy, but an unintentional one at that. [Northrop Grumman via Gizmowatch]

The Price: $US80, but going for $US60 just about everywhere.

The Verdict: Good goggles for the price. While they aren’t exactly battlefield quality, the goggles work well enough to light up your path in the dark. The close-up setting is okay if you only care about what’s right in front of you, but you won’t be able to check up on your former lover from a tree without turning on the long-distance setting which will give up your position with a bunch of bright red lights.

Friends who’ve tried on the goggles complain that the night vision is only displayed in one eye (the other is covered with a piece of plastic), but I think that cameras in both eyes could get more confusing than necessary. The only problem I have is that it takes 6 AA batteries, which is too many to hold on your head comfortably if you’re going to be wearing them for a long time. But again, they are way cheaper than the next level of night-vision gear, so if you want to feel and look like you are from the future without spending future prices, these goggles are the way to go.

Boeing Advanced Systems says that this is not a “cartoon”, but a real prototype “representative of what we’re doing”. The new bomber won’t require the development of new technologies, as they are gunning for lower costs by integrating existing ones.

The Northrop Grumman proposal for the NGP may seem chunkier and not so elegant, but apparently it has been designed to make room for a large weapon bay. As if throwing one nuclear bomb wasn’t enough. [Ares via Defense Tech]

Five Big Wins

The internet – You know, ARPANET, or a communications network that heals thyself. The whole porn-music-movie triangle trade was not in the original blueprint.

GPS – The idea that satellites up there could tell us where we are down here is as old as Sputnik, and DARPA had an attempt or two before getting it right with GPS. Again, not originally purposed for civilians and their “points of interest”—more about targeting ballistic warheads, but you know, potato, po-tah-to.

Speech translation – Soldiers in Iraq use handheld machine translators to aid in communication with some degree of success, meaning it’s only a matter of time before some German tourists ask you to speak into the microphone.

Stealth planes – Stealth aeroplane technology was so sneaky it even snuck up on Air Force top brass, who were apparently shocked to learn about the prototype for the original F-117.

Gallium arsenide – Yep, some DARPA egghead discovered you can do more with arsenic than poison KGB triple-agents. It’s now found in all kinds of everyday electronics. That may not last, though, because environmentally speaking it’s still some pretty nasty stuff.

Five That Didn’t Quite Make It

Hafnium bombs – DARPA put US$7 million into researching a bomb with massive initial devastation but no radioactive fallout, but alas, it didn’t ever work. Apparently if you want the good, you gotta take the bad.

The mechanical elephant – Hannibal would have been proud of this one: During the Vietnam War, some dudes at DARPA wanted to take terrain-friendly robot elephants into the jungle. Even DARPA’s director was embarrassed.

Telepathic spies – People who claimed psychic powers were on the receiving end of a lot of government funding in the 1970s. Even though the project was a failure, getting rich by pretending to be psychic does seem to suggest a kind of sixth sense.

FutureMap – Apparently a bunch of Dick Cheney’s friends betting on terror targets was considered grotesque by some people. I’ve still got US$30K riding on Dubuque.

Project Orion – This is a nerd favorite: it’s the spaceship powered by atomic-bomb turds. I think everyone was sad to see that one go.

Check out the New Scientist story for the real deal behind these 10 projects, and a look at some crazy projects that might make the list in the next 50 years. [New Scientist]