9 ms·

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 tidbi

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 sentence and 10 paragraphs. They never mention that the #1 worldwide producer of titanium is Australia. They never mention that South Africa produces a lot as well. They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) They don't talk about whether alternatives were considered. I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 3y ago
The public never hears about our successes, only our failures.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tokai 3y ago
As I understand it Soviet material science was ahead of everyone when it came to titanium alloys in the 60s. Both in the compositions of alloys and in the production of alloys with precise heat treatment. I guess the US just wanted the best materials.
- numpad0 3y ago
  The problem isn’t that the story is suspicious, but that only the cached thumbnail version is around, and we can’t make out the letters on the mug.
philipkglass 3y ago
There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult. 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-present-and-future 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?
- shkkmo 3y ago
  You seem to be confusing processing ore into sponge with mining that ore. TFA says that "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US"
defrost 3y ago
I can add some details, namely that the USofA began development on the SR-71 in 1957 | 1958 at which time the only ilmenite mine in Australia was a relatively low volume affair in Bunbury, Western Australia. 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-energy/australian-mineral-facts/titanium https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals...
- Dork1234 3y ago
  First flight of A-12 the airplane that became the SR-71 was 1962. Shortening the time frame needed to acquire material. Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    > Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well. And it was way worse back then given it was a field being actively developed. Not to mention the development and characterisation of titanium grades and alloys, and their treatment (heat and solution). According to the wiki, at some points Lockheed has to reject 80% of the titanium they got due to metallurgical contamination, and they had to rebuild tooling and processes because of corrosion issues with chlorine (from tap water) and cadmium (from tools plating).
anoy8888 3y ago
That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
  - mcny 3y ago
    >> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. > If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech? My reading is they are trying to make us useless but we are not there yet? I assume it takes time, right? In any case, not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
    - mechanical_bear 3y ago
      What “we” did? Speak for yourself sir.
    - azathough 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - chii 3y ago
      > not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Of related interest, here is an old CIA.gov webpage giving an account (from the CIA, keep in mind..) of the United States' realization that the Soviet Union was building the Alfa class of submarine with titanium hulls, which many people believed wasn't possible for various reasons (the difficulty of shaping and welding huge pieces of titanium in dirty shipyards, titanium alloys supposedly dissolving in sea water, etc): https://web.archive.org/web/20080919231406/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol52no3/unravelling-a-cold-war-mystery.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080919231406/https://www.cia.g...
aardvark179 3y ago
I agree there probably is an interesting story, but it’s also worth noting the things that weren’t true back in the 60s. I found some old declassified CIA reports that suggest the USSR controlled 70% of world titanium production, and that this was five times US production. Patents for the processes used in Australian production appear to date from 1960 onwards, and there is also a note that 80% of the titanium bought for these aircraft was rejected due to impurities. Putting all those things together I would guess that they could not get enough titanium without getting it from the USSR, and that they would have had to use a front company in any event as they had not publicly acknowledged the aircraft’s development.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  This isn't really true, the YF-12 in 1964 was used by the government to acknowledge the aircraft's existence without revealing its exact purpose.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kyboren 3y ago
You can download and read the declassified official history of the program, called Project Oxcart: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-oxcart/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-oxcart... I read the 2013 release a few years ago and recall that I found it quite entertaining, but I don't remember any specific quotes or factoids about the consideration of alternative sources.
rl3 3y ago
>They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) ... I'm curious if you have any citations for that. If I google it, your guess is the top result. In The Rock (1996), the Red Sea Trading Company is the name of a shell corporation used to launder proceeds from illegal arms sales. Wonder if the writers put it in there as some kind of nod.
baybal2 3y ago
> I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline. They say that the trade was done under cover, but they don't tell why the Soviet Union was doing that trading at all. USSR was absolutely existentially dependent on its foreign exchange streams, and what little they were able to sell to the West, was sold it prodigious quantities, no questions asked. The Soviets have probably tried to upsell them again, and again. USSR needed USD like water to maintain the supply of Western luxuries for CPSU higher ups, but what was even more important than that was USSR's near complete reliance of the Western high tech goods up until late eighties. That's why selling things like titanium was taking a precedence for them over making their own jet fighters out of said titanium in the first place. Luxuries, and technologies were taking far higher precedence in CPSU's minds over that.
wslh 3y ago
I found a possible pattern here: with lithium I see similar articles that are wrong regarding the worldwide reserves and country ranking. For titanium you can check https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233845/reserves-titanium-minerals-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233845/reserves-titaniu... Not saying that these articles are specifically ChatGPT or other primitive generative tool but it is a journalist stupidity and/or copy/pasting/generative.
malfist 3y ago
I can also supply a bit of the why, from what I remember of the exhibit at the Wright-Patterson air force base museum. The SR-71 needed a specific grade of titanium, something of extreme purity. Only the USSR sold that purity with regularity, I believe what I read said something like 90%+ of what they bought from other suppliers had to be discarded

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dylan604 3y ago

The public never hears about our successes, only our failures.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tokai 3y ago

As I understand it Soviet material science was ahead of everyone when it came to titanium alloys in the 60s. Both in the compositions of alloys and in the production of alloys with precise heat treatment. I guess the US just wanted the best materials.

numpad0 3y ago
The problem isn’t that the story is suspicious, but that only the cached thumbnail version is around, and we can’t make out the letters on the mug.

philipkglass 3y ago

There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult. 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-present-and-future 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?

shkkmo 3y ago
You seem to be confusing processing ore into sponge with mining that ore. TFA says that "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US"

defrost 3y ago

I can add some details, namely that the USofA began development on the SR-71 in 1957 | 1958 at which time the only ilmenite mine in Australia was a relatively low volume affair in Bunbury, Western Australia. 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-energy/australian-mineral-facts/titanium https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals...

Dork1234 3y ago
First flight of A-12 the airplane that became the SR-71 was 1962. Shortening the time frame needed to acquire material. Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well. And it was way worse back then given it was a field being actively developed. Not to mention the development and characterisation of titanium grades and alloys, and their treatment (heat and solution). According to the wiki, at some points Lockheed has to reject 80% of the titanium they got due to metallurgical contamination, and they had to rebuild tooling and processes because of corrosion issues with chlorine (from tap water) and cadmium (from tools plating).

anoy8888 3y ago

That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.

andsoitis 3y ago
> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
- mcny 3y ago
  >> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable. > If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech? My reading is they are trying to make us useless but we are not there yet? I assume it takes time, right? In any case, not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
  - mechanical_bear 3y ago
    What “we” did? Speak for yourself sir.
  - azathough 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - chii 3y ago
    > not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars? the west isn't one entity. Plus two wrongs don't make a right. Just because in the past, there has been atrocities committed, doesn't mean there's justification to do so now.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Of related interest, here is an old CIA.gov webpage giving an account (from the CIA, keep in mind..) of the United States' realization that the Soviet Union was building the Alfa class of submarine with titanium hulls, which many people believed wasn't possible for various reasons (the difficulty of shaping and welding huge pieces of titanium in dirty shipyards, titanium alloys supposedly dissolving in sea water, etc): https://web.archive.org/web/20080919231406/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol52no3/unravelling-a-cold-war-mystery.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080919231406/https://www.cia.g...

aardvark179 3y ago

I agree there probably is an interesting story, but it’s also worth noting the things that weren’t true back in the 60s. I found some old declassified CIA reports that suggest the USSR controlled 70% of world titanium production, and that this was five times US production. Patents for the processes used in Australian production appear to date from 1960 onwards, and there is also a note that 80% of the titanium bought for these aircraft was rejected due to impurities. Putting all those things together I would guess that they could not get enough titanium without getting it from the USSR, and that they would have had to use a front company in any event as they had not publicly acknowledged the aircraft’s development.

sidewndr46 3y ago
This isn't really true, the YF-12 in 1964 was used by the government to acknowledge the aircraft's existence without revealing its exact purpose.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kyboren 3y ago

You can download and read the declassified official history of the program, called Project Oxcart: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-oxcart/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-oxcart... I read the 2013 release a few years ago and recall that I found it quite entertaining, but I don't remember any specific quotes or factoids about the consideration of alternative sources.

rl3 3y ago

>They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) ... I'm curious if you have any citations for that. If I google it, your guess is the top result. In The Rock (1996), the Red Sea Trading Company is the name of a shell corporation used to launder proceeds from illegal arms sales. Wonder if the writers put it in there as some kind of nod.

baybal2 3y ago

> I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline. They say that the trade was done under cover, but they don't tell why the Soviet Union was doing that trading at all. USSR was absolutely existentially dependent on its foreign exchange streams, and what little they were able to sell to the West, was sold it prodigious quantities, no questions asked. The Soviets have probably tried to upsell them again, and again. USSR needed USD like water to maintain the supply of Western luxuries for CPSU higher ups, but what was even more important than that was USSR's near complete reliance of the Western high tech goods up until late eighties. That's why selling things like titanium was taking a precedence for them over making their own jet fighters out of said titanium in the first place. Luxuries, and technologies were taking far higher precedence in CPSU's minds over that.

wslh 3y ago

I found a possible pattern here: with lithium I see similar articles that are wrong regarding the worldwide reserves and country ranking. For titanium you can check https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233845/reserves-titanium-minerals-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233845/reserves-titaniu... Not saying that these articles are specifically ChatGPT or other primitive generative tool but it is a journalist stupidity and/or copy/pasting/generative.

malfist 3y ago

I can also supply a bit of the why, from what I remember of the exhibit at the Wright-Patterson air force base museum. The SR-71 needed a specific grade of titanium, something of extreme purity. Only the USSR sold that purity with regularity, I believe what I read said something like 90%+ of what they bought from other suppliers had to be discarded