NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
aviationweek.com
aviationweek.com
Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes.
But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.
I'm assuming that, if this rumor is true, somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia. My hope is that if they're going to resurrect the Blackbird, they'll at least retrofit modern engines into the thing.
But there are much more modern, cost-effective ways to build very-high-altitude, very-fast aircraft. I'm doubtful that going manned is the right approach. It takes a lot of weight and space to carry a person and the required life support systems. That capacity could be better utilized for more fuel and sensors.
There's better technology that's far cheaper to maintain and operate. And you could potentially get hypersonic, or at least near-hypersonic, performance.
Question for people who actually make the engines: is this idea feasible? Like, at all?
I always imagined a plane's engines to be very tightly coupled to its electrics. In my mind, even if the wire harnesses somehow lined up right, the signals inside would be talking totally different languages.
If you watch a YouTube on the J-58 engines that go into this plane, you will find out that it behaves like a jet at "low" speed (like Mach 1 or below) while at Mach 3 it behaves like a ramjet. There's no other aircraft engine that does this.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20050196667
The spirit of what you say about the J-58 is true -- it does work like that but it is still "just" an afterburning turbojet.
I personally think the path forward is a turbine -> ramjet -> scramjet architecture for an aircraft that goes zero to hypersonic.
Normally, the engine itself uses proprietary signaling for its systems internally, but will present a standardized interface to the avionics.
Granted, plenty of de facto standards exist long before they're codified into a formal document. So maybe the Blackbird actually does use it, or something close enough for a dinky little converter box to do the job.
According to that Wikipedia page, out of the first 6 jets to officially use MIL-STD-1553, only one of them was a Lockheed product. That single Lockheed product was the P-3C, which was a retrofitted version of a plane Lockheed started making more than a decade earlier. To me, that suggests that, even if MIL-STD-1553 existed as a de facto standard at the time of the SR-71's contstruction, Lockheed probably wasn't using it yet.
All speculation, obviously. But the timeline leaves me with doubts.
GP is correct, this is a plane designed almost pre CFD, a clean sheet design would go much further than this. They are missing out on half a century of material science advances.
USAF stuck to the "we must use manned aircraft!" mantra for far too long, but even they have conceded now.
For the reply guys: I know there are small caveats to the above.
Trump is a huge fan of Top Gun, there is an article he is nitpicking current aicraft carrier design and pushing them to revert to old tech steam powered hydrolic liftoffs because he thinks it looks cooler. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-navy-st...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/trump-aircra...
He also nitpicks where the towers should be located on aircraft carriers and wants them to look more like the ones from WWII: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/15/...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-to-order-redesign...
Bringing back the SR-71 for nostalgia/cool factor tracks reverting to steam hydraulics liftoffs and overhauling the aesthetics and tower location to look like old warships.
It's literally called "The Maverick Act."
I would appreciate a solid explanation of which periods and aspects "Make America Great Again" refers to. I can think of a couple ones off the top of my head regarding technical progress, but I'm unsure whether MAGA helps or hinders that progress.
That's how populism and fascism (or whatever kind of neo-fascism this is) work. They all catalyze a yearning for a return to a mythological "golden age" which never really existed, and whose inheritance has been denied to the people by the perfidious enemy within.
>I would appreciate a solid explanation of which periods and aspects "Make America Great Again" refers to.
The 1940s and 1950s. A return to American wartime aggression and postwar economy, coal and fossil fuels, Conservative Christian values, white men getting the respect and dignity they deserve, a lifetime of steady employment at the assembly line and a gold watch and a pension, and women knowing their place.
Is there? High speed turbofans are still exotic technologies. Or are we doing the research with drone rockets now? I have to imagine that building a modern SR-71 replacement would be an expensive development project with little commercial prospects. The sort of thing that is extremely hard to complete in the modern political environment.
Presumably, an SR-71 successor would use a mix of turbofans and ramjet/scramjet to meet their performance (speed/altitude) goals, depending on whether it would be self-sufficient or use takeoff assist from another aircraft.
As far as the SR-71, its engines were turbojets that transitioned to ramjets above Mach 2ish. They required a special grade of jet fuel and a dedicated fleet of refueling aircraft.
I rather doubt an SR-71 successor would use a turbofan. The mission profile really doesn't require it. I would expect it to be a turbojet that transitions (as you said) to a ramjet and eventually a scramjet.
I would love to see the SR-71 fly again, if only from a nostalgia standpoint, but I really doubt this effort will be successful. I doubt even more that much of value can be accomplished by getting one to be flyable again that couldn't be achieved in a much more cost-effective manner via unmanned aircraft.
All the aerospace technology I've ever worked with or heard of has a pretty clear (human) engineering lineage. None of the planes you've seen or heard of, or parts thereof, are based on extraterrestrial technology.
Came here to say this is exactly my guess.
FWIW I think it's almost always a good idea to keep at least one example of any plane flying, just out of simple cultural principle (I feel this way about the Avro Vulcan and I think it's really sad that none can do more than taxi anymore) so I am not sure it's stupid for them to ask, but I can see why keeping an SR-71 in any kind of functional condition might be implausible.
I would guess this is not a serious project to get it flying, but more a recognition that it will take more than two years to do it, could be cancelled at the two year mark without really wasting vast amounts of money, and ensures some very easy, regularly replenishable goodwill from the man who thinks the USA has planes that are literally invisible.
There is precedent, after all: his insistence on a return to steam launchers on carriers.
This plane had its own special blend of fuel, meaning it had its own special tankers too since it needed to refuel immediately after takeoff, and custom rubber blends for the tires.
So we would need to have a refinery that can make the fuel, a tire manufacturer to make the rubber and tires, and a tanker program to fuel the thing.
All this for a plane that is incredibly dangerous to fly (37% of them were destroyed in crashes, none due to enemy action), and that adds no capability.
I'd be really surprised if this was not Trump-nostalgia-driven, and in that sense it deserves a bit of cynicism.
However, it doesn't seem particularly wasteful to have people in a room whose job is to see how far that could go in principle, even if the real value in that project is that it would keep historical technology decisions about that plane in people's active working knowledge, passing institutional and personal recollections down to a custodian etc.
The past is prologue, really — and not all history is nostalgia. Sometimes things that weren't practical because of cost become practical, but are almost forgotten; exercises like this are possibly worth doing for almost every legacy project when the original team are nearing the end of their lives.
For anyone interested, they're referenced here:
I'm sure we could "fix" it. But changing the engines doesn't seem to be the right way to achieve that.
Why would you assume that?
See this comment for a quick set of links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910639
It would be shocking if it wasn’t what was happening - resurrecting the SR71 makes no sense, just like resurrecting the idea of a battleship. Tech has far eclipsed their usefulness.
It’s the military budget being prioritized based on boomer nostalgia, not any actual plausible fit to reality.
We simply don't need that capability anymore. Recon of this sort is now done by satellites (at much higher resolution) and it's unclear if designated enemy states don't have or couldn't have an effective defensive system.
Now you cold have a program to develop hypersonic airframes and engines (eg scramjets) but it's way more likely that this kind of technology will be applied to cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles and so on.
Some things we don't need to maintain just to maintain them.
The point of my note was less about SR-71 and more about developing the capability to resurrect old technology in general, a skill we do not often practice at institutional scale. The SR-71 is a visible and cool way for NASA and contractors to teach themselves how to do something we'll probably have to do again in future. Making a documentary series out of it would be a smart move too, if we are attempting to inspire the future of American engineering by fetishizing the past as seems to be this administration's intent.
Then:
> We simply don't need that capability anymore. Recon of this sort is now done by satellites (at much higher resolution) and it's unclear if designated enemy states don't have or couldn't have an effective defensive system.
Isn't really true. The A12/SR-71's predecessor, the U2, is still flown operationally today because satellites are only a 90% solution. They can't be tasked to overfly a particular site on demand or on an arbitrary schedule, can't have their sensors switched out on demand, and can't loiter. The air defense evasion aspects of the Blackbird aren't as important now which is why the U2, being much cheaper to operate, is still flown and the SR-71 isn't. Of course that is not an argument to spend billions returning Blackbird to flight, since we already have the U2. But high altitude reconnaissance aircraft are still useful.
That sounds all to familiar to people that actually has to accomplish stuff, heard from management. Engineering will not take care of that because engineering is the one that is raising the concerns!
Engineering says the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The message management hears is, "It's impossible." They respond - often correctly, if we're being fair - "But of course it's possible." Engineering instead hears them insisting it's feasible.
I bet that cycle gets cranked up to high gear in an environment like the current US administration where two-way communication is impossible because telling your boss something other than what they want to hear is tantamount to handing them a resignation letter.
Could Isaacman's NASA restore and fly an SR-71? If anyone on the planet had a chance, it's either him or Paul Allen and Allen isn't around any more.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draken_International
1. https://thisisflight.net/2024/07/02/jared-isaacman-announces...
2. https://www.yahoo.com/news/private-astronaut-jared-isaacman-...
> The original design was conceived by two Lockheed Skunk Works engineers who had prior race car engine knowledge. In the mid-1970's, the engines of the start carts was changed to Chevrolet LS-7 454's. The Chevrolet big block engines developed 465 horsepower each. Even so, for many years they were still referred to as the Buick's.
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Engines/starting-t...
And eventually the start carts themselves got replaced.
> In the '80's the AG-330 Start Carts were mothballed and in there place came a Pneumatic Air starting system for the SR-71's. It is true that the start carts were hard to maneuver around. Logistically, a recovery of a Blackbird at another base could be done easier with Pneumatic Air.
Sure, less impressive than a contraption with a bunch of car engines but much more powerful.
We fixed it the other easy way: In the event that an SR-71 makes an unscheduled stop somewhere that wasn't prepared for it, then we send out a bunch of dudes with a cargo plane and some starter carts. That just takes money, which even easier.
It also takes time, but time was not a big deal: The plane was going to be there for awhile anyway. It could go over 15,000 miles between takeoff and landing; it wouldn't have landed where it did if it weren't broken somehow to begin with.
It'd need repaired by the crews who actually knew how to work on it -- who would also need flown in.
It would also need fuel before it could leave. That's problematic since the JP-7 it required was shared by ~nothing else in the sky, so: More deliveries.
Waiting for some Buick V8 starter carts to be delivered from the other side of the world wasn't really a roadblock at all.
You can credit card as many ready-to-run 9L+ V8 engines as you want[1], built to modern tolerances using high quality tooling, tested on a dyno and equipped with a warranty. Maybe different mounts and/or couplers are needed, but that's a very finite problem.
I suspect one actually difficult problem would be finding a refiner that can make the special fuel used in the unique engines of the SR-71. Then again, the US has a great many agile refiners at its disposal.
The SR-71 is a rather awkward thing to operate. Fuel leaks out of the tanks until atmospheric friction heats the aircraft enough to make them seal. It's a big mess, and the cohort of people that were actually capable of making these things work is aged out of the workforce. Assuming any of this real, NASA must have something truly extraordinary in mind to consider this.
1) when people say "destroyed the jigs, tools and spares in 2007" What do they actually mean? Burying things isn't destroying. Putting them in a furnace is destroying. Is it possible that both parts, and tools actually are recoverable e.g. from the seabed? The dimensional stability might be off, but to help reconstruct tools, it's not nothing. Likewise digging up something buried in its packing crate is not rocket science.
2) "that would be ludicrously expensive" doesn't mean much any more. It's not unlike "we can't make a saturn 1 any more because the tools were destroyed and it would be ludicrously expensive to make an F1 engine" -well yes, but thats not impossible, it's just unlikely and expensive. So maybe this is unlikely, expensive but ... has a unicorn sugar daddy?
3) there are craft in all sorts of places. Not just on sticks outside NASA property. I am not a historian or a federal government employee, but I wouldn't think it impossible for people to ask other agencies to let you inside the shell and remove the bits you want, or even ask for it back. The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs..
4) its a titanium alloy. It's temperature and corrosion resistant, noting some things (like chlorine according to the web) are bad for it. It's not made of pure chinesium or balsa wood. Interior surfaces would be in pretty good shape.
This is very labour-intensive, which is why it is generally carried out in dedicated workshops, with specialised equipment, and so on, by staff who have been specifically trained and do nothing else.
If you add jigs, production-specific tools, and so on, all of that has been lost and needs to be recreated: staff need to be trained, QA defined and workshops need to be reorganised. This can take decades to return to the expected standard. You can throw as much money at this sort of problem as you like without actually being able to speed things up.
Finding the drawings and dimensions is the easy part of reverse engineering a mechanical device. The real challenges lie in identifying the manufacturing processes and quality control procedures, and achieving the expected performance with an acceptable scrap rate.
If I place a monocrystalline turbine blade on your desk, you’d be able to draw up the plans for it. But that would tell you absolutely nothing about the processes required to produce a monocrystalline ingot of a nickel superalloy.
Source: former mechanical engineer in the nuclear industry, managing obsolescence was one of my day-to-day tasks.
The C4 Corvette had a titanium component back in the early 1980s (I worked for GM back then). The piece was flat and mechanics tended to use it to hold tools. Leaving the tool on that piece when closing the hood resulted in a dented (fiberglass) hood. Most tools (at least back then) have a cadmium coating (to keep them shiny). Cadmium causes corrosion to titanium. There were lots of service bulletins about this.
The original A-12 took 4 years (or less) to design and build from scratch with slide rules and manual machine tools.
Surely we can match that with our 70 years of advanced knowledge and equipment?
Maybe our risk tolerance is low now, and we don't have Kelly Johnson.
Design is a very different matter when you have a workshop full of skilled workers and machinery right on your doorstep, who can critique your work and explain what they can and cannot produce. A lot of engineers discovered this the hard way when companies started outsourcing to the other side of the world and lost control of production process.
Designing parts that look nice but are impossible to machine or assemble is simple.
Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer.
Just look at the struggles faced by all the organisations that stopped producing anything for a long time and then wanted to restart production. Whether it’s ships, aeroplanes or nuclear power stations, each time it takes something close to ten years to restart.
When they manage to do so.
I'd compare it to a really old codebase. Sure, our modern tech is much better. But if you need to make an old, top-secret COBOL program work as-is, you're in a pickle. Sure, we could rewrite it in Rust and make it way better, but management sees it as more cost-effective to just "turn the old one back on, it worked great!". And unlike software, it's pretty hard to comprehensively test a plane in a non-destructive way. Bolt falls off turbine while in flight, etc etc. Losing even a single SR-71A airframe would be a massive headache, methinks.
The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
The Rocketdyne F1 was the pinnacle of hand-crafted engineering, with each engine being slightly different and the people having to account for those differences during assembly. It has a whole bunch of complicated welds which require a lot of tweaking, adjusting, and literally days of welding work? Neil's got to go to the moon, so you better get to it!
Those highly-skilled highly-specialized engineers don't exist any more, and for a good reason: with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost. It just requires the designers to make it automation-friendly from the start. Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
So no, we literally cannot build a new Rocketdyne F1. We can design and build a better F1-like engine, though!
This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
The same applies to quality control, fitting and assembly.
I don’t think they’re planning to start mass producing of SR-71s.
> because the job had become obsolete
You are greatly underestimating the number of parts, welds and inspections carried out on critical equipment that are done by hand or in small batches by highly skilled workers. The fact that they use a CNC machine does not make their job obsolete. In fact, quite the opposite is true, its require more skills.
Apart from the turbine section, virtually nothing on a helicopter is produced with a high level of automation or in large batch.
> This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
This isn't right.
CNC machines aren't magic and they do require skilled people to design for them and operate them.
BUT: they are an enormous advance on capability compared to 30 years ago and are absolutely not limited to mass production. 3D CNC milling is how most prototyping of metal parts is done and can be done to extraordinary precision, repeatably. It was always a low volume technology - it was Apple that started applying it in volume as part of mass manufacture.
Not when you can get the same for a fraction of the cost by CNC milling the channels & then shrinking a jacket over it. Or in some cases even 3D printing the thing.
IMHO the SR-71 is going to be problematic due to sourcing the materials and fluids more than finding skilled CNC techs.
source: worked on Edwards for several years
As far as I know that is still not true. Manual welding provides less defects and higher quality welds. Provided one has experienced welders. The cost is much lower for robotic welding but the results are still not as good as manual welding.
> Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
The skills can be acquired by new people.
Regardless I believe the industry has moved to 3d printed parts for engines due to lower costs, higher throughput. And in either case rigorous inspections are the way to get reliable parts.
I do agree that they cannot build a new F1, but they can build a new better model. But I believe that has to do with engineering and the loss of the contextual knowledge and experience building these things, the loss of why the design settled at what it did, why the processes settled to the ones documented, the undocumented knowledge the people building these had.
This knowledge can be rediscovered, but it would be easier/cheaper to start with a new design and acquire that knowledge organically.
I remember a Wall Street Journal article about 25 years ago where business leaders were upset that there was a "terrible" shortage of Swiss-style machinists in the US (whose daily output of tiny stuff would fit into a shot glass). And that they had to import those machinists from Germany.
Buried in the lede was that to get the skill level needed requires an apprenticeship that took at least 10 years. Germany provided that with trade schools and subsidies for hiring apprentices. In the US, the Cold War provided the money and incentive for aerospace and defense companies to subsidize that apprenticeship. High schools used to supply much of that trade education. I remember the high school that I was going to attend in NJ had vocational programs (for boys) in vending machine repair, machine shop and auto repair. Vocational education moved from high schools to community colleges. Along the way, community colleges went from free (for students) to something students have to pay for.
So the question becomes "who is going to pay for this?" I don't believe that what would be needed can possibly be done in America.
They can be. However it will be expensive to train them. (starting with figuring out what training is needed - probably a lot of trial an error because not all of this was written down) Also you will need to pay people to get this training - they won't pay for it themselves since it is unlikely to be a useful job anywhere else anymore so they have better investments in their time/money.
You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste and YouTube or AI has all the answers. Children in schools even now in 2026 right up to high school and even college can't read. Many who can read can't comprehend what they are reading.
In addition to that I recall a UK study that said smartphones have caused a lack of hand dexterity. Not social media or content but the phone itself a two dimensional surface means hand dexterity is not developed. People do not have hobbies like wood working, sewing, anything that involves fine manipulation and strength. The biggest hit is to the medical field and lack of surgeons because people in medical school now do not have fine motor skills needed for the job.
I think a lot of this has been driven by businesses completely dropping their part of the deal in a pursuit of ever increasing profits. Formerly there was the long term promise that staying with one company would be rewarded and instead now for 99% of companies you're deeply punished if you don't hop jobs every couple years for a pay bump. Then they've also lobbied to completely gut funding for education to lower taxes or shift into subsidies. And a lot believe college is a waste because there's been a huge reduction in the value of just holding a college degree while the costs have ballooned.
The whole system that created it has been dismantled for profit long before the culture of it started to fall apart.
As far as #2 and the rest goes, I agree that with enough money you could make anything happen. However, sometimes recreating something so complex could be a "not enough money in the world" type situation. Sure, drawings and specs exist, but even on today's 3-d modelled assembly you're not typically modelling every single part to full accuracy. You have things that are off the shelf that might be a black box drop in, you have things you contract out that are built to spec. You know what you get, but not necessarily exactly how it's done. Then in your own facility there is a certain level of institutional knowledge that is not necessarily documented in such a way you can just recreate it.
Finally, one of the biggest hurdles, there's are not things that you can just throw an LLM and some engineers at. The actual trades themselves have changed so much since the time of production your only option is to call in retirees. The machinery is different now and so are the workers.
I feel like with a large budget they could definitely get an SR-71 in the air for testing and exhibition purposes, Id love to see it happen. I guess it really depends on how much was removed and destroyed when the machine was decomissioned and how much damage lack of maintenance, environmental factors and age have taken their toll. The good news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time. The bad news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time.
Source: I am a toolroom machinist at a material science lab in the aerospace and defense sector.
Being a military vehicle, the tooling would have been classified. It would need to be "demilled" (or de-militarized) before disposal. Depending on the materials involved, it could be melted or shredded before burial in a classified landfill.
The SR-71 was not made in large enough numbers to get the above treatment. If the government wants spare parts they need to pay to keep that tooling around.
That's an A-12, not an SR-71
There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.
"It's not my money!"
Either way it's unclear why NASA, with its decreasing budget, might feel like they need to be taking this on as a research project.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hermeus+q...
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
edit: for those who haven't seen the RQ180: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+gre...
edit 2 (apologies for the X link): https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193
For one thing space based observation is very good and has a much faster turn around now days.
Back then photography was film based, satellites would fly take pictures and release the film in a pod to reenter and be recovered mid flight[1].
And on the other hand altitude and speed does not buy as much survivability as it did back then.
Fighters flew at a maximum of 1.5 mach and missiles at 2-2.5 mach.
S-400s for example can launch interceptor variants that can intercept targets at almost a hundred thousand feet moving at 14 mach. I know that is for ballistic targets, but I doubt an aircraft flying at a similar altitude even at hypersonic speeds would have much luck.
Perhaps this is placing a bet that Kessler syndrome is a real threat to surveillance capabilities and they want these in case the satellites go down.
Do I think an SR72 is a good idea? Hell no, but I don't think like the US military haha.
It's idiotic. Unless the goal is to waste money and opportunities, then it's brilliant.
Between spy sats and drones we don't need a spy plane, not even a mach 6 spy drone.
Not sure why they would need an old SR-71 unless maybe they plan to test out something like new generation engines at very high speed, maybe with plausible cover to hide the newer more secret aircraft as flying at Mach 3+ tends to cover a lot of distance so it would be difficult to keep within secret test areas.
Worried about how to navigate if the GPS systems gets knocked out by an adversary? SR-71 has an analogue system, use that. Worried about how an adversary could use cyberwarfar against your avionics? SR-71 has you covered, use all of that.
And sure, you could take all the designs and hand them over to the SR-72 team at LM and say "yeah, all of that please", and they could figure it out, but you know what might be handy? A working SR-71 they could play with. And who knows, maybe the answer is to take an SR-71 in its entirety, and just upgrade a few parts to get the SR-72 performance (Mach 6) that you're after.
Crucially, the engine inlet spikes were computer controlled. And since it's an observation platform and not a bomber, is it going to be EMP hardened? That was probably classified at the time. /shrug
https://saemobilus.sae.org/papers/sr-71-digital-automatic-fl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px9YLM6R6MM
Anyway, don't you think the modern platforms are prepared for a little ECM action?
https://www.twz.com/17207/sr-71s-r2-d2-could-be-the-key-to-w...
If you've ever seen the publicly released videos and audio of an RQ9 operator in communication with ground units watching the activity of a group of men/vehicles on the ground, in live real time, something like that.
As compared to periodic revisits by LEO orbit satellites that don't maintain persistent live coverage, or the extreme distance and data acquisition problem that aiming sensors in geostationary orbit at a 10x10km target area might pose.
The whole point of the SR71 is to be stupidly fast, to the point of being impossible to catch. It could outfly missiles, and the mission was done and over by the point anyone could scramble a proper defense. Have it fly circles over a target and you're negating its one main unique selling point.
Want to loiter over a target? Use an RQ9. Want an impossible-to-stop snapshot camera? Use a satellite. So what's left for the SR71? I guess there are some missions where 1) you don't have air superiority, and 2) the target can hide in time from well-known satellite orbits, but 3) the target can't hide with 15-minute warning from a plane - but are those really common enough to justify the massive investment it'll take?
The RQ9 is fine to loiter over and watch an area that has little to no air defenses, more stealthy things are needed if there's some form of credible air defense. There's a number of non faked photos of downed rq9 in yemen in the past couple years that were shot down by fairly basic air defense systems the Houthis acquired from Iran.
Yeah, probably way to much science fiction there, way too many things would go wrong, and spy satellites tend to have huge antenna have fun trying to stuff that in a rather small payload bay. However... One of the space shuttle mission profiles was to deorbit a satellite. Officially, the space shuttle never did this. But I think the airforce really liked the idea and wanted to retain the capability.
So you're sitting in your orbit and any changes (especially so close to the massive body) are super expensive. Which means sending anything after you must be pretty trivial (once the missile is already in orbit).
Spaceship just launched 30+ starlink v3 sats on its first orbital flight two days ago. It might as well have been flat disks of missile sats, even multi missile per each disk. Sitting there waiting, getting energy from solar, only having to expand fuel when a strong solar storm temporarily increases atmospheric drag on LEO + some minimal station keeping. A missile type sat with completely different budget for fuel and mass has a big advantage.
Maneuvering for a rendezvous (intercept), given 5-40 hours time, is very cheap in terms of ∆V (fuel used).
Only if you're in approximately the same orbital inclination. Plane change maneuvers once in LEO are very expensive in delta V.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
Imagine implementing the above from LEO.
Trying to find reason behind so much of this shit is a fools errand. Vibes based presidency.
Makes me wonder if this whole operation is just public cover for something like that.
If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds, you might realize that regardless of the administration publicly in charge, the government is always doing stuff behind closed doors that your brain could not even begin to comprehend how they pull it off.
Stories like this hilariously implausible "grizzled old man casually leaks secret program to Aviation Week" is like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.
You realise that government agencies including the pentagon have been gutted, and filled with conmen and frauds?
It would be funny for the rest of the world if we didn’t also have to pay for the people America elected.
About the people who gutted every major agency and meddled constantly making forces less effective in the name of the most partisan of partisan politics? Most people won't and that is a completely self-created problem.
Sometimes bad ideas are just stupidity.
That serves a huge number of things both offense and defense: engagement, radar, missiles, trying to boost the speed capabilities of new planes & weapons. And it applies both to manned and unmanned planes.
Russia is less of a concern now, however China is coming on very fast in terms of leveling up their military capabilities. I'd be very surprised if the US military isn't looking to push its capabilities around increasing speed generally, just as it does any other aspect. There hasn't been a significant leveling up in US Air Force speed capabilities in many decades (since the F22 supercruise three decades ago?).
It struck me they were trained to respond to questions about classified stuff. When you asked them a question they responded with a question.
So yes, most probably something has been flying for decades that's at least as fast as the Blackbird. Prototypes which may or may not have been put into production.
Whether that was a cover story for additional spying by the NASA SR-71 is unknown to those of us without the necessary security clearances.
Enjoy the dynamically phased plasmarray.
But an easy illustrative reference is the Predator drone loosing Hellfire missiles during the War on Terror.
Things get re-used in weird ways with other stuff grafted onto them, I'm pretty sure the people who originally designed the F-A/18 never imagined it would be turned into the EA18 growler.
We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.
> But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?
Would it? Testing your billion-dollar taxpayer project in sparsely the populated Syrian countryside seems like a great way for ISIS to get their hands on it. Or the Druze, or the PKK, or the IRGC, or any number of other outfits that would sell a crashed interceptor to China in exchange for air defenses and RPGs.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the US prefers to test it's billion-dollar black projects in places where they cannot be stolen, damaged or interrupted.
Sure, I'd bet a lot of "black triangle" sightings are exactly that. But if the "tic-tac" lore is to be taken at face value, the implication is that the US military has invented antigravity technology, or reverse engineered it from alien spacecraft. I really don't think that's plausible. If the US had that kind of technology we would be so far ahead of the rest of known science that there would be no value in keeping it secret.
The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion.
If everyone self-censors tabooed topics around here it’s not going to advance the tenor of the HN discourse.
Rebuilding the institutional knowledge for future supersonic / hypersonic projects, on the other hand, seems like a worthwhile target.
I mean, Obamacare was just the nick name for the Affordable care act, but Don actively just has to have it put up there.
Like Four Seasons Total Landscaping or Tools For Humanity and Bruno Mars.
It makes no sense to me, it would be an expensive and pointless vanity project. Sounds like there is a chain of people too afraid to say no, perhaps they’re hoping to drag their heels until priorities change again.
Getting contemporary knowledge of the navigation, hydraulic, avionics and other systems is going to be pretty powerful if you need to build something that is as battlefield-ready in the modern era. Nobody is hacking into an SR-71, and it's going to be delivering its missions just fine if GPS is knocked out. Taking the operational (and not just academic) experience of doing that and putting it into the current generation of Skunk Works engineers is going to be useful.
I'm not sure their plan is to put it into active service, but they could - the SR-72 could just be an SR-71 with upgraded engines and other systems.
However, the process of getting it ready for active service even if just as a flying museum piece could sure help a lot of engineers learn a ton of lost knowledge.
Engineering exists within an ecosystem and that old ecosystem is gone. Everything would be a once off. The materials science could be interesting but that’ll also be one offs and probably wouldn’t generalize.
Seeing the SR-71 still gives me the same buzz as when I read about it in books as a child 40 years ago. It reminds me how cool technology can be, when it increasingly isn't.
I also think it's pretty cool that arguably the most awesome aircraft in existence didn't have guns (I'm ignoring the YF-12).
Make Technology Cool Again.
It's been probably 40 years since I first became aware of the SR-71 myself. I'm definitely not a kid anymore; if I want to feel some sizzle in my SR-71 beans, then I can just get in the car, drive to Dayton, and see one in person.
If that's not nostalgic enough then maybe I can spend some real money on a new-old-stock copy of the first new Lego kit I was given -- set 497 -- and bask in the rose-tinted glory of the past while I put it together on the rug.
But sure: We can make tech cool again. Part of me thinks that tech should be amazing and cool to learn about.
Kids deserve their own new generations of amazing technological spectacles to marvel at, not a resurrection of ghosts from 60 years ago.
Remember how old and archaic it seemed when you were a kid, 40 years ago, and you saw something that was high-tech 60 years before that? We're talking 1926-level tech, here. I sure did love the local history museums that had areas that covered that timeframe, but I recognized them for what they were: Displays of really interesting very old stuff.
We can do better than that for today's kids, but we can only get there by moving forwards -- not backwards.
The Orange Entity sets the direction and his congress provides the money. My guess would be that NASA has been told that the direction that leads to there being money is to forget the space telescopes and other science, and instead to focus on national prestige projects (Moon, Mars) and things that will feed through to military applications (hypersonic flight).
I reckon it's much more likely to be used as part of a training program (maybe related to the shiny new F-47?) or for destructive/non-flight testing and research.
Why call up the old engineers?
Reading through that article makes it sound like NASA has very high ambitions without a very concrete plan which worries me, I hope that management takes the approach of actually listening to their engineers instead of just assuming they can do anything. I mean they are NASA engineers they can probably do anything but ykwim
or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
One of the reasons why the UK went vastly over budget and behind schedule when they built the first Astute class submarine, because almost everyone who had domestic UK based hands on experience building a nuclear sub had long since retired. There's certain technical things, both military or non military, where if you stop making them for a long period of time (at even a minimal rate of production), the institutional capacity to implement them dissolves away.
Politicians think doing engineering projects is like buying something off the shelf. Every engineer will tell you the only way to do stuff is iteration - starting small, learning from your mistakes and growing things. If you start a megaproject without a team of people experienced in doing more or less the same thing recently, it will cost vast amounts. Particularly if you push too fast and commit large amounts of money before you've had a few iteration cycles.
Shout out also to the MiG-25 Foxbat[1]. While not a particularly beautiful aircraft, it's made of steel and could go Mach 3.2 if they didn't want to use it again.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
The Skunk Works team knew when Russian satellites were coming up over the horizon, and so would hide the early development models they had on poles and so on. They obviously didn't want them to be pictured. However the satellites had heat-sensing cameras and so could see the heat differential the model had left as a shadow on the ground just minutes before. The Russians therefore knew there was a new plane in development, and they knew what the outline of it looked like, but nothing else for quite some time.
I bet when they first saw it, they agreed - a heck of a beautiful machine, one of my favourite aircraft of all time.
> And Lockheed’s operational manuals for the SR-71A still exist—and are superb...
I appreciate this level of documentation.
Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.
https://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/SR71-crews/da...
Issacman is another in a long line of blatantly political appointments that were installed to prevent actual national progress. He doesn't hide his conflict of interests, regardless of how seriously he might take the position.
And it's not a secret anymore than what I had for breakfast is a secret. Just because I haven't made a press release doesn't mean I'm hiding anything. More than likely, someone is investigating what it would take to get the airplane flying again before a final decision is made on whether it's worth doing.
They clearly feel it’s cheaper/faster to get this working than to try and create a new mach 3+ aircraft.
With 25 years of new tech maybe they can push it even faster.
NASA's SR-71 was used for high altitude and high speed science projects.
And as a connoisseurs of project management disasters, I'm going to get popcorn.
Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.
It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.
This sounds too much like a politically motivated decision.
If the US needed a hard to shoot down recon aircraft, converting a cruise missile to carry a recon package would probably be quicker. There's also the X-37B, the unmanned mini space shuttle the USAF has. The USAF launches one once in a while. It stays up for a year or so, and then comes back down and lands. There have been about eight flights. Seems to work fine. Once it was put into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere and went back out, to test if could do high-altitude recon if desired. It looks a lot like the original Space Shuttle, but it's much smaller, about the size of a small aircraft.
[1] https://www.museumofflight.org/Exhibits-and-Events/Exhibits/...
The remaining members of the quickly dwindling Blackbird community ( maintainers and flight crews) are very skeptical that it can be done but it does not mean that Isaacman is not trying.
Look up aviation records and you'll find the SR-71. It even still holds the #1 spot for the fastest airflight (by a plane) ever. Basically, the SR-71 is old, but old doesn't mean antiquated. The 60s was the era that we went from knowing basically nothing about space, to putting a man on the Moon in 7 years (Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech in 1962, first landing 1969), while we currently flail about trying to recreate it with a program lasting into the decades already. The SR-71 was another product of this era.
There are faster (X-43 is mach 9.6 but unmanned) and higher and stealthier ships. But unless you're going to dip into the classified catalog, a rusty SR-71 is faster than the next fastest two ships which are both MiGs.
Well, the President wants to redesign the Navy to look "cool" - battleships, carriers with steam catapults again and center islands. Why not the Air Force too?
Come out of retirement for one last job!
Excuse me while I vomit.
Like alien tech. Crazy how far our ingenuity has fallen in many ways since the 50s-60s.
Why can't you just pull it out of the museum and get it ready to fly? Did anyone check if the unique fuel formulation this plane uses can still be produced at the quality level needed in the quantities needed? What about delivery and fuel handling?
But hey, we live in an age where you can start a whole Middle Eastern war without a plan. So who needs a plan just for one plane?
Maybe someone in power made a comment like "We need an awesome project like that futuristic black airplane from the 1960s" and through multiple layers of incompetency an effort to restore the SR-71A that had been on display in a museum for 26 years started.
And now its too far along for anyone to say it was a stupid misunderstanding.
I seriously hope they didn't dump all available information into an LLM and are now hoping/assuming they can use that to reengineer & rebuild the necessary physical tools to get it flying again.
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI&t=3355s (around 6min, starting from around 56min)
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.
It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet. I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn't match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury.
Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace. We listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: "November Charlie 175, I'm showing you at ninety knots on the ground."
Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the " Houston Center voice." I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country's space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn't matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.
Just moments after the Cessna's inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. "I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed." Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. "Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check". Before Center could reply, I'm thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol' Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He's the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: "Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground."
And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done - in mere seconds we'll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn.
Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: "Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. "Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: "Ah, Center, much thanks, we're showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money."
For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A.came back with, "Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one." It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day's work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast. For just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.
[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/
[1] as told by https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blackbird-speed-check-storyAnnounced by another billionaire Isaacman.
All this means is that the SR71 looks cool and is thus suitable as a carrot before the midterm elections. A false carrot just like the lies about isolationism the "the besties" peddled up to 2025.
The all-in podcast should be a study object for the most effective propaganda in history.
It’s a true marvel of engineering.
I would imagine the problem they have with the 70 year olds they’re trying to recruit is that there are old pilots and bold pilots but well, you know the rest.