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Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
I guess the US just wanted the best materials.
Considering a pizza oven doesn’t require titanium… that’s a strange cover story.
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
Here's a good primer on industrial titanium (see chapter 3):
"Titanium: Past, Present, and Future" from National Academies Press, 1983
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/1712/titanium-past...
In 1948, based on the Bureau's work, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company built and started production in the world's first titanium sponge production facility. The first commercial titanium from du Pont was melted and processed to sheet by Rem-Cru Titanium and then sold for experimental use to Republic Aviation for the Thunderjet and to North American Aviation for the Sabrejet. Also in 1948, 200 industrial, technical, government, and military leaders met in a Navy-sponsored conference and the titanium industry was off to an enthusiastic start with aircraft designers excited and planning early applications. By 1953, annual production was 2 million pounds, and the Douglas DC-7 flew with titanium nacelles and firewalls. Demand and production grew rapidly. To the aircraft and titanium industries it was euphoria, the first heady upswing in the production curve (Figure 1).
... [by 1958] Military strategy shifted from dependence on manned aircraft to emphasis on missiles, and military demand (then the life-blood of the titanium industry) dropped dramatically and, consequently, so did titanium production and sponge prices.
... The U.S. titanium industry has suffered from these periodic reversals. In the 1950s it was the world leader in both technical know-how and quantitative production but now has lost its early worldwide lead to the Soviet Union and Japan although it continues to meet most domestic titanium needs.
So in the early 1960s it sounds like the US actually had more than adequate titanium production capacity. Why use Soviet titanium instead of domestic for the SR-71? Were they trying to conceal the construction of a new titanium aircraft line from domestic titanium suppliers or other domestic parties?
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
Ilmenite is named after the Ilmenski mountains in Russia where the mineral was first discovered in relatively free abundance, the other principle source for titanium is rutile sands .. typically volume access to rich old sand layers requires strip logging of large areas of old growth forest to then remove acres of overburden to then hoover up a band of sands.
Circa late 1950s if you wanted large volumes of high grade ore your choices were pretty much Russia and ..., err, Russia.
( That or subsidising mineral exploration at scale and developing other sources .. which did happen but over a longer timescale .. meanwhile the first flight of the SR-71 was in 1964 )
There's more on the mining apects at the Geoscience Australia page:
https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals...
> After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza… This is a weird dig at the soviets, who were probs just happy to to find some customers to justify having already dug up all the ore. The fraudster seem to be the Americans in this case?
Oh, but the US does not commit fraud. They outsmart. Fraud is only committed by countries that do not dance the tune.
Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one…
Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been this buried deeper in the article "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71." And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I wonder if the order form states they will be used in smart pizzas ovens.
80% of the world's silicon and magnesium comes from Russia/China. US can't make the stealth coating on the F-35 without it. Can't control where the big bang placed mineral deposits... *Technically silicon is everywhere but until the US and EU are willing to rip up their riverbeds to get at it, it's as good as nonexistent there.