I figure millions of dollars, a couple years to get it to work, a couple trials and then it got shelved. I could be wrong. That amount of funding could probably have built a couple hydo electric dams, bridges, paved a hell of a lot of roads, or put a bunch of high school kids through college which would have rewarded USA with productive professionals with great lives who could have put their kids through college and then many people would be paying more taxes and less people would be poor and living off govt subsidies to poverty. Instead, they wasted the money.
"did not indicate any appreciatble stability" he says... go figure.
Found on http://strangernn.livejournal.com/920106.html
This was the last gasp of a series of attempts to find some way to provide a long range jet fighter escort for the B-36. For truly inspired craziness, behold the XF-85, a tiny jet fighter with folding wings that could fit entirely within one of the two bomb bays of a B-36. Jet fighters were not yet 10 years old back then, the engines were inefficient and unreliable so their range was quite short, mid-air refueling tests had just begun and it was still unclear whether that would work out operationally. So, all sorts of bizarre things were tried, including docking fighters wingtip to wingtip with a bomber, towing fighters behind a bomber, towing winged fuel tanks behind a fighter, fighters with both jet engines for speed, and a piston or turbo-prop engine for long range cruise, and likely a few more I've yet to hear about...
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