The Program
The primary use of a military spaceplane such as Blackstar would be to conduct high-altitude or orbital reconnaissance, allowing surprise overflights of foreign locations with very low risk of the spyplane being successfully engaged by existing air-defense systems. This is similar to the goals of the earlier U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft; in some circumstances such an overflight yields more information than a pass by a reconnaissance satellite, as the satellite's path is predictable, allowing sensitive material to be hidden.
Military analysts have suggested that a military spaceplane could also be used to place small satellites in orbit, to retrieve them, to provide a means of launching nuclear weapons from orbit, or to serve as a platform for exotic orbit-to-ground hypervelocity weapons. The small spaceplane described by Aviation Week appears to have only a very modest cargo capacity, limiting its use in such missions.
Aviation Week suggests that the huge costs of the Blackstar program were borne both by the Department of Defense's own black budget and by hiding the costs of Blackstar inside the procurement costs attached to acknowledged military purchases. To assist in this, and to allow politicians to deny the USAF operates such a vehicle, the Blackstar assets may nominally be owned and operated by the civilian defense contractors who built it. The magazine suggests that a consortium of Boeing and Lockheed are responsible for Blackstar.
It is unclear if the Blackstar program became fully operational, although it may have been so since the mid 1990s. Aviation Week's article speculated that the success of Blackstar explains the Government's willingness to cancel the SR-71 Blackbird and Air Force satellite-launch programs.
Read more about this topic: Blackstar (spacecraft)
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