Northrop-Grumman B-3?

Today on www.military.com there is an article titled New Bomber Program to Begin in 'Black'

What's interesting is that the author states that..

Another platform that has been floated as one that could meet the service's 2018 long-range strike needs is Northrop Grumman's B-3 bomber, an offshoot of the company's venerable B-2 bomber.

Is this simply conjecture on the author's part, or has the existence of a Northrop-Grumman B-3 been confirmed?

Originally posted by crusader97
Today on www.military.com there is an article titled New Bomber Program to Begin in 'Black'

What's interesting is that the author states that..

Another platform that has been floated as one that could meet the service's 2018 long-range strike needs is Northrop Grumman's B-3 bomber, an offshoot of the company's venerable B-2 bomber.

Is this simply conjecture on the author's part, or has the existence of a Northrop-Grumman B-3 been confirmed?

Actually, the author (Carlos Munoz) was referring to Northrop Grumman's "B-2B" concept which was proposed as an interim bomber to compete with Lockheed's "FB-22" which was a bomber version of the Raptor and Boeing's proposed arsenal aircraft. The B-2B was just a trimmed down $800,000,000 B-2A Spirit.
The B-2A Spirit costs around $2 billion per unit, therefore $800 million was supposed to sound like a bargain, but I don't think the USAF was impressed.

So, no - there is no B-3, that was the author's reference, not an admission from Northrop Grumman or the Air Force.

BTW, I was at the Air Force Association's Air & Space Technology Exposition this week in DC where Gen. Ron Keys made these comments.

Gen. Mike Moseley had an opening day speech and more of a "state of the union" type address on Wednesday. In that speech he referred to the F-35A and how he expects it to have a "first flight" within 2 weeks at the Ft. Worth, TX Lockheed plant.

Mostly though, he spoke of Air Force reorganization and lightly touched on some of the more advanced systems that are being developed such as Long Range Strike, CSAR-X, KC-X, etc.

Another interesting address was given by Anna Maria McGowan who is project manager on "Morphing Technologies for Future Aircraft", a NASA program - but it's at the Langley facility so there is a certain spook factor to it.

[edit on 9-30-2006 by intelgurl]

Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps the author should have referred to it as "B-2B". While not as interesting (or exciting), it sounds like it would have been much less misleading.