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NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

324 pointsposted 5 days ago

410 Comments

scrumper

3 days ago

The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here.

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.

jmyeet

3 days ago

The SR-71A was a reconnaissance or spy plane that flew at high altitude where it avoid anti-air weapons of the era by flying at high altitude and at Mach ~3.

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.

scrumper

2 days ago

> 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.

runjake

3 days ago

Look, I'm certified as the world's biggest SR-71 fan. As a kid, I saw it fly a number of times, got to see it up close, and had a family member who worked as an engineer on the program. I believe it may have even been this Blackbird, 844. It impacted me so much that I later went on to work on my own black and other military aircraft.

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.

ryukoposting

3 days ago

> My hope is that if they're going to resurrect the Blackbird, they'll at least retrofit modern engines into the thing.

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.

Tangurena2

3 days ago

The control "computer" for the engines of the SR-71 is hydraulic, not electronic. Some of the parts of this aircraft reach temperatures beyond what current semiconductors can cope with.

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.

runjake

3 days ago

You might be interested in the GE RTA :-)

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.

runjake

3 days ago

There's standards for signaling like this. One being MIL-STD-1553. Another being ARINC. And you're now seeing a lot more Ethernet and such.

Normally, the engine itself uses proprietary signaling for its systems internally, but will present a standardized interface to the avionics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1553

ryukoposting

3 days ago

Some quick wikipedia surfing suggests the SR-71 was built at least 7 years before MIL-STD-1553 was introduced. Wikipedia says 1966 for the Blackbird, and 1973 for MIL-STD-1553.

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.

runjake

3 days ago

It is worth noting that MIL-STD-1553 can and has been retrofitted into multiple aircraft that were manufactured decades before it existed.

ryukoposting

2 days ago

The aforementioned P-3C being an example - a Lockheed-built example, no less.

There's still part of me that can't quite believe that the SR-71 wouldn't be an exception. You don't just make a turbojet out of 1965 technology, without something being so wackadoodle batshit crazy as to make comparions to all other planes pointless. Another commenter mentioned something about a "hydraulic computer?"

I'd love to be wrong. It'd be hilarious if some madmen from the 1960s built a Mach 3 jet out of mostly-normal parts, and then that mostly-normal jet turned into American patriotic folklore. And yeah, I'd feel a bit of patriotic euphoria to see a Blackbird in the sky! I'm not above that.

Onavo

He really should read less Hitler books, who constantly knew everything better and hampered their russian campaign by insisting in big tanks, instead of smaller, faster ones.

jumpinjack710

3 days ago

'nitpicking' is a weird way to describe 'expects new technology to be reliable, wants to use the tried and true technology until then'

LorenPechtel

3 days ago

The F-14 got sent to the boneyard because it was so much more expensive to operate than comparable aircraft. The F-14 had only one real mission: carry the Phoenix to defend the carrier from the Russian bombers. And it was a suicide mission--the sprint to launch position would not leave enough fuel to get back to the carrier.

andruby

2 days ago

Do you have a source on these being suicide missions without enough fuel to get back? The F-14 has drop tanks, and after firing all missiles, that sheds another 4,000+ lb of payload.

I think they planned with proper return. Which can also be at slower speed.

LorenPechtel

2 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat

You can't launch with full fuel and full weapons.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

>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.

jandrese

3 days ago

> 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.

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.

runjake

3 days ago

Turbofans are not exotic technologies. They are well understood, and their limitations are well understood.

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.

AshleyGrant

3 days ago

Despite them being complex, high-bypass turbofan engines ARE exotic technology. There are vanishingly few countries/companies that have the expertise necessary to produce the single crystal fan blades used in the engines of these 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.

philistine

3 days ago

The whole of the SR-71 was built around what kind of cameras was needed to perform the mission. Modern electronics and cameras are much smaller. I would presume an unmanned plane launched from a bomber could perform the mission today.

3 days ago

> 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.

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.

dghlsakjg

2 days ago

I like the idea of keeping an example of everything flying from the perspective of my inner child, but it would be such a colossal waste of resources in reality.

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.

dofm

5 hours ago

Yeah. This one just does not seem plausible, and the reasons why are as you say.

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.

robocat

3 days ago

> Avro Vulcan

For anyone interested, they're referenced here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck

blks

3 days ago

Hopefully it won’t be leaking fuel anymore with modern engines

SoftTalker

3 days ago

IIRC the fuel leaks on the ground were because the sheet metal was all fit rather loosely to allow for expansion in flight. At the speeds it would fly, the skin got quite hot.

krisoft

3 days ago

But it is the fuselage gaps which was leaking, not the engines. After the elastomer filler broke down due to heat cycling. They needed the elastomer because the fuselage was heating up during flight which made it expand.

I'm sure we could "fix" it. But changing the engines doesn't seem to be the right way to achieve that.

runjake

3 days ago

You'd probably be using some mix of better turbofan/turbojet engines along with ramjets/scramjets and 50-60 years of materials sciences advances. So, yes.

pbk111

3 days ago

Don't underestimate the J-58. This is as much if an extraordinary engineering feat as the SR itself.

3 days ago

Have you heard about the ‘new’ battleship plans? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship]

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.

jandrewrogers

3 days ago

The naval terminology reflects a displacement class and use case, not a specific design.

The now-cancelled DDG(X) next-generation destroyer already had a larger displacement than a heavy cruiser. And it was cancelled for not being large enough to support its mission load-out as a modern destroyer.

The name “battleship” may be archaic but the displacement requirements for the next-generation destroyers (or whatever they are eventually called) are roughly in “light battleship” territory.

To put it another way, we were calling battleship-class ships “destroyers” for historical continuity reasons. Over time, ships in a class have become much larger but we kept the old names. Even the older Arleigh-Burke destroyers would be traditionally classified as heavy cruisers if they were commanded by a flag officer.

LorenPechtel

3 days ago

"Battleship" is based around big guns. What he wishes he had in his pants. In a modern situation there's simply no use case for a big gun. How do you propose to get within range?

On one side we have a battleship. $2B in current dollars for a WWII ship.

On the other side we have 10% of that value in harpoonskis.

The battleship never reaches gun range.

Naval gunfire has use against targets not worthy of a missile. But anything you're going to be shooting it at doesn't have armor to speak of.

lazide

3 days ago

Don’t forget thick armor. A battleship with no guns and no armor is literally no battleship at all, hah.

Amezarak

a day ago

OK, but the proposed battleship is what the GP described: a souped-up Arleigh Burke with hundreds of missile launchers, which are described as the primary battery.

The guns are described as secondary and, other than the proposed single railgun, are basically the same as a cruiser.

4 days ago

> “Every time I threw one of these things out there, he says, ‘Oh, engineering will take care of that [and] engineering will take care of that,’” Relja recalls.

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!

bunderbunder

3 days ago

Sounds like a common communication disconnect that I've seen time and time again.

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.

tyrabound

3 days ago

It's funny how management's self-delusion about things never makes it into the mind and reality distorting Hollywood movies where the boomer reactivated from retirement saves the day through muscle memory alone in 48 hours of tense montage of frustrations and final inevitable success.

brightball

Tangurena2

3 days ago

> They are particularly prone to galvanic corrosion, which means that specific tools must be used, all forms of ferritic contamination must be avoided, special tools must be used, and they must be stored separately, etc.

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.

gurumeditations

3 days ago

MisterMower

3 days ago

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.

rkangel

3 days ago

>> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost.

> 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.

BoxOfRain

3 days ago

While not metalwork, some are surprised to learn how old CNC machined guitars are. I have a Peavey T-60 and they were among the first CNC-machined production guitars in the late 1970s. It's going strong to this day as well, they're very well-built instruments.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Still, I don't think anyone is ever going to hand assemble thousands of tubes for nozzle cooling & prepare them for brazing.

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.

Beretta_Vexee

3 days ago

The assembly of the tube bundle in a nuclear steam generator is still carried out mainly by hand, using hundreds of shims, anti-vibration bars and supports.

At the other end of the spectrum are stamped-plate heat exchangers, which are mass-produced using a press line.

Each has its own specific application, and they are neither comparable nor interchangeable. The comparison makes no sense.

fragmede

3 days ago

How does SpaceX's 3D printed raptor engine factor into your analysis?

verzali

3 days ago

The one that keeps failing?

fragmede

3 days ago

3 days ago

I’d suggest questioning the sources you are reading. Wood working and sewing are hugely popular hobbies across younger generations. There used to be a site, Ravelery.com maybe, that was on here all the time because of their engineering blog and all the work involved in sharing sewing patterns.

djriley

4 days ago

As far as number one goes, the tooling has almost certainly been recycled when they say "destroyed". By recycled I mean in to new steel in an electric arc furnace. It's pretty common even in every day mass production for tooling to either be sent for destructive testing or a destructive decomissioning/EOL use (cutting, defacing, used for practice for facility apprenticeship, etc). I imagine something on the level of Blackbird tooling would have gone through a very strict decomissioning process before it even hit the scrap bin.

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.

Tangurena2

3 days ago

> I imagine something on the level of Blackbird tooling would have gone through a very strict decommissioning process before it even hit the scrap bin.

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.

bluGill

3 days ago

Large production runs (think cars) the tooling is sold to a third party to make spare parts. However that third party will watch what sells and scrape the tooling when sales are not large enough to justify keeping it around. Things that never break have the tooling scrapped early. Things that collectors break the tooling stays around - if it wears out they make replacement tooling.

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.

hvb2

4 days ago

> The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs.

That's an A-12, not an SR-71

Tangurena2

3 days ago

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.

m4rtink

4 days ago

Yeah, big car engines is actually not that impressive, rather surprisingly primitive. Modern jets have external APUs for starting, usually via compressed air, that have compact yet powerful gas turbines inside.

Sure, less impressive than a contraption with a bunch of car engines but much more powerful.

Itanu

4 days ago

So they LS swapped the SR71 lmao

mrheosuper

4 days ago

Can the plane just carry....the starter ?, it's another 200-300kg of payload, may affect the max range, etc, but much more convenient.

ssl-3

4 days ago

It could have, sure. That would have been easy. But it would have added weight and complexity. That would have reduced speeds and/or altitude and/or range between in-flight refuelings.

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.

4 days ago

> but the V8s probably isn't one of them

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. https://blueprintengines.com/

dboreham

3 days ago

Aware. I've seen one being fueled, started, and flying.

topspin

3 days ago

The best theory I've heard (Alex Hollings) is that NASA is doing an exterior refurb to get the plane ready for a big reveal of some other exotic aircraft: putting it on stage with the new thing for glamor shots.

0xbadcafebee

3 days ago

It's an example of how weird and custom everything about them is. Not just the plane but the tools too, and the knowledge of how to work on them. It's like reinventing the plane again.

justin66

4 days ago

> The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.

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!"

mrweasel

3 days ago

That seems reminiscent of the Fogbank material in the US nuclear weapons. The process of making it was lost, and when it was finally recreated modern processes where to good and it still didn't work. In the end they had to compensate for the improved processes and re-add impurities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tqlf31YTc

trhway

4 days ago

it looks like it would be much easier to get a powerful regular fighter jet engine (even old Mig-25 engines were fine for 2.8M), stick it to pilotless frame and just launch. Work a bit on intake shape, modern materials, CFD, and probably you can push it well into 3+.

justin66

3 days ago

Building a machine that can travel at speeds exceeding Mach 3 for a brief period of time is probably well within aeronautical engineering's current capabilities, with today's engines, yes. The innovation with the SR-71 was that it could fly at those speeds for an hour and a half, thanks in part to that JP-7 fuel with its high flash point.

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.

walrus01

4 days ago

2 days ago

Even in that case, cheap and unmanned would be much more cost efficient.

The SR-71 was uncontested in the 70'ies, but it wouldn't be today. Today it would be vulnerable. Missiles reach higher and fly faster. There are missiles that are designed to intercept ICBM's, which come in faster than a Mach-3 SR-71.

Radar detection, tracking and firing has also become much more effective in the last 60 years.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

greedo

3 days ago

Those responsible are mostly dead...

drtz

3 days ago

Making a single SR-71A airworthy again is likely not the goal. The tactical need for it is no longer there and a single working aircraft doesn't add much.

Rebuilding the institutional knowledge for future supersonic / hypersonic projects, on the other hand, seems like a worthwhile target.

walrus01

4 days ago

Don't forget the new 'Battleship'. You should have seen the looks on the faces of some of the DoD people when they trotted out the big CGI rendered posterboard of the thing. They know it's a boondoggle and they're kicking the can down the road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship

FlowingRiver

4 days ago

3 days ago

My guess this started as a misunderstanding and nobody wants to admit it.

Like Four Seasons Total Landscaping or Tools For Humanity and Bruno Mars.

walrus01

4 days ago

I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71 (likely unmanned) that has been flying around at night from facilities like Groom Lake for years. Look at how long the RQ180 was flying around in semi-public and known about before it became seen in daylight by plane spotters in Greece. And a long time before that there were public relations approved photos of the Lockheed Martin Polecat.

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

throwawayffffas

4 days ago

I would not be so sure, the environment that led to the development of the SR71 is not there any more.

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.

evilduck

3 days ago

We've had public reports of space based weapons usage this month. The environment is changing.

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.

j4k0bfr

3 days ago

I agree that any military on equal standing would blast the SR71++ to smithereens. But how many wars does the US fight against equals? And on the reconnaissance side, there are pros and cons to satellites. They're hard to replace and easy to track & destroy. Plus even the best space sensors lose quality due to distance.

Do I think an SR72 is a good idea? Hell no, but I don't think like the US military haha.

cryptonector

3 days ago

> Do I think an SR72 is a good idea?

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.

postingawayonhn

3 days ago

Based on the war in Ukraine S-400s aren't really able to intercept much at all.

hylaride

3 days ago

Like most things militarily Russian, the S-400 over-promises and under-delivers, but that doesn't mean it's not potent. It's probably incapable of hitting most ballistic missiles in real world conditions, but a plan flying in a straight line would be a lot easier, ignoring any stealth capabilities.

fivefifty

4 days ago

The 'SR-72' timeline makes for interesting reading, LM was talking about it for a while when it was their private concept then suddenly scrubbed all mention of it from their website a few years ago, which some suggest that it became an official government funded black project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72

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.

PaulRobinson

4 days ago

The SR-71 is mostly analogue. It has remarkable battlefield resilience including ability to operate when EMP and nuclear radiation are issues that would affect a lot of digital systems.

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.

leeter

3 days ago

Side note: IIRC a lot of the star tracking tech still exists and is used by Trident D-5, B-52, B-1, and B-2 etc. IIRC. Most of it is analog, although I think only the B-52s version is a mechanical computer assuming its still in service. You never design your second strike capability to require a system that will be knocked out in the first round.

imglorp

3 days ago

> mostly analogue

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?

browsingonly

3 days ago

The SR-71 mission set included trans-attack reconnaissance for SAC, where it would overfly a radiating Europe and USSR perform nuclear bomb damage assessment for follow-on strikes. Aside from nuclear bursts and leftover detritus from the ICBMs etc., it was anticipated to operate in an environment where nuclear-tipped SA-5 and other Soviet SAMs would be bursting here and there. It's EMP-hardened.

adolph

3 days ago

The astro-inertial navigation systems in the SR-71 and ICBMs predate GPS by a lot.

4 days ago

I was replying to a comment from a person who was talking about satellite ISR, referring to 'can loiter over an area' for why the RQ180 or similar exists and is used in certain tactical scenarios instead of satellite, not to justify some absurd reactivation of the SR71. Please read the comment I replied to and what I wrote again.

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.

mrguyorama

3 days ago

>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

We have confirmed the loss of like 40 reapers in Iran.

mrguyorama

3 days ago

Also the SR71 can barely loiter at all. It has a turning circle at altitude and speed of 80 miles

Demiurge

4 days ago

There are satellites in geostationary orbit that have realtime live feed and agile pointing capability. However, besides the SAR, RGB style observations are limited by clouds, and also you can’t switch out the sensors on a whim. Airborne platforms are always more flexible and cheaper for certain missions.

walrus01

4 days ago

Without leaking anything that's even remotely close to classified, WAMI (wide area multispectral imagery) sensor systems that can mount on even relatively medium sized group 3 UAV are really damn good these days. This is a pretty basic unit compared to the things that aren't publicly known:

https://www.logostech.net/products/redkite/

https://www.logostech.net/products/blackkite-i/

jauntywundrkind

4 days ago

This guy has been working on their own SAR drone for a while, just had another really nice blog post. Definitely looks like it weighs <10 lbs. He post-processes, but I doubt that's that hard to rework. https://hforsten.com/interferometric-synthetic-aperture-rada...

walrus01

4 days ago

It looks like a DIY implementation of some of the commercial land surveying SAR payloads that companies will sell you (for $60,000) to fly below a DJI M400 or similar size craft for tasks like monitoring open pit mines, etc. Also not realtime data return over RF data link, it's a download and post-process workflow.

adastra22

4 days ago

I think you are confused. Spy satellites do not use geostationary orbits.

walrus01

4 days ago

It's not something I can cite with any public URL to a website that's an authoritative source, but if by 'spy' you include SIGINT satellites in that category, yes they absolutely do... Ever seen a diagram of a Boeing (Hughes) 702 series satellite bus and antenna system built for L/S-bands like frequency ranges similar to those used by Thuraya, Inmarsat and Iridium handhelds?

It's widely accepted in the commercial two way satellite telecom industry that the NSA has comparable things with big unfolding umbrella-like antennas in geostationary which serve a similar purpose for signals collection.

ErroneousBosh

4 days ago

> It's widely accepted in the commercial two way satellite telecom industry that the NSA has comparable things with big unfolding umbrella-like antennas in geostationary which serve a similar purpose for signals collection.

How does that even work, do people just accept that their satellites hang around suspiciously close to other geostationary satellites and hoover up the very edge of the beam somehow?

Because if you're transmitting stuff *to* geosynchronous birds you have to aim pretty accurately.

walrus01

4 days ago

Handheld S/L-band things like Thuraya, Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat phones don't transmit in a very directional way at all. Or things like a Garmin inreach that have an Iridium modem in them. They're omnidirectional enough that the broad requirement for a user is to be outdoors with a good view of the sky.

If you have a NSA-type geostationary satellite somewhere in approximately a 1/5th arc of azimuth along the equator of the earth that can 'see' an area on the ground, with antenna systems aimed at the area of interest (let's say, Afghanistan), it's not necessary for your NSA satellite to be anywhere close to the actual service provider's satellite.

Note that Thuraya BGAN-like devices and handheld phones talk to geostationary, Iridium is LEO (but likely some combination of LEO, molniya orbit and geostationary can "sniff" it), Globalstar is similarly LEO in its service provider architecture, and Inmarsat is geostationary.

Also lots of conjecture out there that sigint platforms exist which are good enough to capture ordinary handheld device cellular traffic or VHF/UHF radio traffic that's not intended by its users or terrestrial operators to go into space at all. This is probably done from a combination of low earth orbit platforms and more complicated orbits or what we would call MEO (maybe about the same height as an o3b satellite?) to achieve longer dwell times over an area of interest.

ErroneousBosh

4 days ago

But then with the difference in distance from LEO stuff like Iridium (RIP - I actually saw the ground flash of an Iridium flare once!) you'd need a truly *massive* antenna to hear that out at geosync.

walrus01

4 days ago

An Iridium 9555 handheld phone talking to Iridium satellites in LEO with its antenna extended transmits in approximately the same frequency range and about the same tx power as an inmarsat isatphone 2. The former is LEO, the latter talks to geostationary.

Same concept for an Iridium 9555 or its successor in a dock plugged into the small coaxial cable that goes to the external hockey puck sized antenna. This is all happening between approx. 1400 to 1700 MHz in either system.

Look up the detailed RF specs for the isatphone 2.

walrus01

3 days ago

If you think the US doesn't have a plethora of DoD things in geostationary orbit you would be extremely, terribly wrong. In addition to well known programs like AEHF, WGS for two way military satcom purposes, a person with an amateur grade telescope can literally spot the satellite that keeps station near an existing commercial Thuraya satellite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-202

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/thuraya-2.htm

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/thuraya-4.htm

adastra22

3 days ago

Those are geosat communications, not surveillance. Surveillance is not happening in GEO.

morkalork

4 days ago

Well there's also the X-37B Orbital "Test Vehicle" that performs some long-run missions. Satellite warfare? Observation instrument tests? Who knows!

somat

2 days ago

My theory is satellite retrieval, Not ours, theirs. Play the long game, year two of a three year mission, do a little unannounced orbital dance, somebody's spy satellite has a unexpected failure, while really it is now in the rf shielded environment of the x-37's payload bay. Year three, bring it down for study.

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.

numpad0

4 days ago

Satellites are defenseless and easily shot down, either one by one using ballistic missiles or by creating a sweeping ring of debris, in a full scale WW3 where things like treaties and sanctions don't matter

wafflemaker

4 days ago

Pluss any fuel costs 100x the fuel mass on launch.

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).

walrus01

4 days ago

> 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.

dotancohen

4 days ago

The attacking bird needs to raise apogee to GEO anyway - after that the plane change is relatively cheap. They might not even raise perigee.

walrus01

4 days ago

I was replying to a comment where the person was talking specifically about LEO. Interfering with things in geostationary orbit is a whole other question.

dotancohen

3 days ago

Imagine implementing the above from LEO.

m4rtink

3 days ago

The rest of the world should maybe try take care of its own problems first, starting with the active wars in Europe.

Too bad all's they can do is sit back and condemn things, by your own admission.

netsharc

3 days ago

High oil price -> Iran war -> who started that? -> can we ask them for compensation?

Refugee crisis -> Middle East chaos -> Let's look back 20 years and see who decided to go into Iraq with a giant force of incompetence (or as that fuckwit said "Unknown unknowns") and created insurgent forces that grew into ISIS, etc? -> Can we ask them for compensation?

When grandparent said "The rest of the world has to pay", I don't think they'd disagree with the 2 above examples...

MentalM

3 days ago

> I don't think they'd disagree with the 2 above examples...

I think that is very easy.

"If Muslims get their nuclear weapon (chemical weapon, Jerusalem, that particular abandoned piece of desert, any other random crap, choose whatever you like) they WILL DESTROY THE WORLD. How we can see, the world is still existing. So compensation? That would be pretty nice of them, we are ready to start getting compensation at any moment".

Tanjreeve

4 days ago

>If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds

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.

stickfigure

4 days ago

On the other hand our commander-in-chief (engineering expert that he is) has ordered the Navy to switch back to steam catapults on an already half-built carrier. That will also require bringing back 70 year old retirees. Pretty sure Trump would switch back to coal if he could find any living boilermakers.

Sometimes bad ideas are just stupidity.

walrus01

4 days ago

Political scientists are well acquainted with madman theory, but have we defined "dementia theory" yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

Irrational and volatile as a play-act is one thing, actually being irrational and volatile is a whole other ball game...

ajb

4 days ago

I guess I'm the past, rulers old enough for that also usually collected enough other health issues to be largely inactive. I can think of a few cases where countries had to wait a year or so for the old ruler to die, but not another case where they were still active while demented. Maybe Ivan the terrible? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_...

lostlogin

4 days ago

> Pretty sure Trump would switch back to coal if he could find any living boilermakers.

He has been propping up coal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0209r62k5o

jasomill

4 days ago

dreamcompiler

4 days ago

If they were doing that they would say so. In fact if they were smart they would say that regardless of the true story. The fact they aren't saying that means they're either stupid or playing 4D chess. I know which I'd bet on.

walrus01

4 days ago

Another theory is that some smart people already know better, and they know they're going to waste many millions of dollars investigating its feasibility, but they've been given an order from Whiskey Pete and have to at least go through the motions of writing a study/detailed report on why it's not possible to reactivate in a reasonable amount of time or budget. Never underestimate how often the US military will send a group of subordinate people to do what is effectively busy-work.

adventured

4 days ago

The SR-71 is because they need to test for speed.

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?).

hn_submit

3 days ago

I talked to Lockheed engineers (at a party) thirty years ago about the supposed successor to the SR-71 which was all the rage back then: the Aurora. Obviously they didn't tell me anything but it was nice joking about it.

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.

whalesalad

3 days ago

What we imagine as next-gen sr71 (ie, reconnaissance) is not going to be a plane. It's satellite based. You don't need a super fast plane and pilots going in and out of dangerous airspace if you are not even operating in airspace.

ThePowerOfFuet

4 days ago

Non-Google, non-Musk link: https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/06/incredible-footage-eme...

tiffanyh

4 days ago

Didn’t satellites with superior optics and realtime video streaming … kill the need for an SR71 update?

pwg

3 days ago

The official public reason for NASA having an SR-71 back when they were still flying one was for extreme high altitude atmospheric tests/experiments. No other plane (at least at the time) could fly at the altitudes the SR-71 could.

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.

walrus01

4 days ago

Very possible. Once you've gone to the massive engineering effort/budget to produce something like an RQ180, I'm sure someone will come up with an idea boiled down to essentially "hey what if we took the radar-resistant bay door design and internal munitions bay mounting from the F22 and shrunk it a bit, we could fit at least four 500 lb JDAMs in this bad boy"...

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.

m4rtink

3 days ago

I'm not sure how an unmodified JDAM would handle highly supersonic slipstream. Best case is the guidance section just falls apart. Worst case - the bomb smashes into the aircraft on release, killing the crew.

Would not be the first for the related A-12 program - the D-21 drone program managed top get 3 people killed due to crashes on release.

ricksunny

3 days ago

walrus01

4 days ago

The Tacit Blue is kinda tic-tac shaped (with wings sticking out the sides), but it's also a historical museum artifact now and, as far as I know, was quite slow and cumbersome.

ngc248

3 days ago

check these out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC97wdQOmfI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnofCyaWhI0 . But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?

bigyabai

3 days ago

I've seen those. Exoatmospheric interception vehicles like that rely on the inertia of a rocket booster stack and the thinness of the atmosphere/gravity when it is released. They cannot accelerate to supersonic speeds at ground-level, and have enough drag that it's probably impossible to break the sound barrier without a payload fairing. I don't think the spheres or tic-tacs are a hard-kill interceptor.

> 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.

ngc248

a day ago

The point is this Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle tech is form 1989, how the tech would have evolved 40 years later who knows.

PaulRobinson

4 days ago

I've suggested this elsewhere in this thread, but the analogue nature of it might be useful to current design teams to get familiar with operationally.

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.

cjbgkagh

3 days ago

I’m going to stick with my pointless designation, sure many things can yield knowledge and if money, time, and expertise were infinite then sure, why not. But they are finite and there a million better things for these people to be doing that would yield useful knowledge more efficiency.

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.

willtemperley

4 days ago

I think it would be worth it for the sheer education and entertainment value.

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.

ssl-3

4 days ago

I've got the same kind of nostalgia about it.

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.

Tangurena2

3 days ago

The fuel it needs is no longer made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP-7

andyjohnson0

3 days ago

The Blackbird is a deeply awesome machine, and hn understandably loves it. But this initiative is almost certainly about agency funding and access to budget, not engineering.

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).

glorth

3 days ago

This is one hundred percent the kind of cover story you give someone to gauge their interest in a real classified project. Guaranteed the people who said yes to this are not working on the SR-71A.

lcb13

3 days ago

This fills me with monumental amounts of joy and excitement. Especially being young enough to only know about the Sr-71 through stories and pictures, it would be incredible to see it in the air again.

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

robertlagrant

3 days ago

I'm also too young to have ever seen one, but I've always liked the SOP for evading an incoming missile: accelerate.

4 days ago

[dead]

brenw

4 days ago

Hands down, the best looking plane that ever took to the skies.

redfloatplane

4 days ago

My preference is the XB-70 Valkyrie[0], one of the only other manned aircraft comparable to the SR-71 in my eyes. The droop nose, the incredible dropping wing tips, six engines… To me, the Valkyrie looks like the kind of plane you'd see in a Gundam anime series.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

PaulRobinson

4 days ago

The Russians apparently fessed up after the cold war that they knew of the SR-71 project from early on, but the only thing they knew about it in the early stages was that beautiful and distinctive outline.

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.

trevithick

4 days ago

Why would they do this?

> And Lockheed’s operational manuals for the SR-71A still exist—and are superb...

I appreciate this level of documentation.

buildsjets

4 days ago

NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.

dboreham

3 days ago

What conflicts of interest? Why would installing someone with some flare for showmanship be a bad thing if the issue is funding?

bigyabai

3 days ago

> What conflicts of interest?

The famous one that the Senate grilled him over, during his confirmation hearing: https://rollcall.com/2025/12/03/nasa-nominee-denies-conflict...

  Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., questioned Isaacman about whether Musk was present during Isaacman’s discussions with Trump about his nomination. Isaacman said there were “dozens of people moving in and out.”

  “You’re refusing to tell us whether or not Elon Musk was in the room that day,” Markey said. “That makes me think that Elon Musk actually was in the room that day, that you understand that’s a clear conflict of interest.”

> Why would installing someone with some flare for showmanship be a bad thing if the issue is funding?

Because the issue is still funding-related. You wouldn't be restoring a half-century old SR-71 if you had the money to make a cleansheet design. NASA is being sandbagged by their own contractors.

isatty

4 days ago

Your reply provides no factual evidence to your claims on Issacman.

bigyabai

3 days ago

You can watch his confirmation hearings for free online. It's on YouTube.

During them, Issacman refuses to answer multiple questions that are intended to clarify his private relationship with NASA contractors.

goodcanadian

4 days ago

I am a bit frustrated by the comments. NASA is not just a space agency; they do fight research. Yet, it seems like no one can imagine why NASA might be interested in having an operational Mach 3 aircraft. Does the military have something more advanced? Maybe, even probably, but NASA can't get their hands on it for civilian fight research.

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.

cryptonector

3 days ago

Why though? We have spy sats galore. We have drones galore. Why build or re-certify a spy plane? What can we get from such an expensive project that we can't get much more cheaply in other ways?

whartung

3 days ago

It’s not a spy plane. It a mach 3 test plane.

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.

EA

3 days ago

NASA did not use the SR-71 for the purposes you stated.

NASA's SR-71 was used for high altitude and high speed science projects.

stronglikedan

3 days ago

There's obviously valid answers to your questions, but good luck getting the clearance to know the answers.

yk

3 days ago

As a SR-71 fan, I fully support the decision.

And as a connoisseurs of project management disasters, I'm going to get popcorn.

a_paddy

3 days ago

What are the chances it's then mothballed and turns up registered to Draken International 6 months later.

dboreham

3 days ago

Why would that happen?

Computer0

4 days ago

Reading the article, this does seem ill-advised.

yodon

4 days ago

The SR-71 is cool, but this article is not at all confidence inspiring on many fronts.

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.

Animats

4 days ago

What's so surprising is that this is supposedly using an SR-71 that was on outdoor display. The Museum of Flight in Seattle has one in much better condition.[1] It's on loan from the USAF, so the USAF could take it back if they needed it. There's another one at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, and a third at the Smithsonian's annex in Chantilly, VA. All three of those have been stored indoors in good conditions, and were flown to their current location under their own power. Not abandoned outdoors on a pylon.

4 days ago

Why not? Losing that level of capability, and the ability to iterate upon it, seems like terribly poor strategic planning in the past - much in the same way that ending human space after landing on the Moon was also quite poor strategic planning. Reviving the SR-71, in much the same way that human spaceflight is also being revived, seems quite logical - especially because in the case of the SR-71, in contrast to rocketry, there is nothing remotely comparable in the commercial domain.

Near the top of this thread, there's a lot of debate and discussion about what we must have 'secretly' concocted. Some think that the various sighted UFO/UAVs might be secret US tech. But I see no reason to think this is the case, in no small part because things like the decision to retire the SR-71. You don't get from A to E without going from B C and D.

There's also other practical reasons. If we did have anything meaningfully advanced then it'd be being used, however grossly inappropriate it might be, in places like Iran. No chance the current administration holds anything back for the sake of some strategic edge in a possible future conflict. I also think secrecy in modern times is not especially realistic. Everybody has eyes in the sky, to say nothing of probable increases in human level spying and the like. And so forth. Basically the idea of rebooting the SR-71 would be precisely with the aim of eventually fulfilling these sort of 'fantasies.'

Lumich

3 days ago

If you like the SR-71, the U-2 CIA spy plane is at least as fascinating. All this was retired because of advancements in satellite technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

Fact is, the claim that the SR-71 would fly into its own fired bullets is absolutely ludicrous.

Lumich

2 days ago

« claim … ludicrous » — Without knowing much about physics, I totally agree.

eichin

4 days ago

Back when the SR-71 was active, this magazine was nicknamed "Aviation Leak and Space Mythology" - them doing an article after the other rumours and Isaacman quotes reduces the credibility of the story, at least among Old Folk :-)

pwg

3 days ago

Another comment in this thread pointed out that "return an SR-71 to operational flying" is /also/ the exact type of cover story that would be handed out for as cover for an actual project (likely some hyper-sonic aircraft) when trying to rehire retired engineers for this new secret project.

4 days ago

I wish this were the case; if it were for cool points the F-117 would be back!

justin66

4 days ago

Little known fact (but not a secret): the F-117 is still flown today, even though they were "retired" in 2008.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZFwOGfhRZ8

I gather they serve mostly as aggressors and test aircraft - certainly one wouldn't fly that plane into combat. They were never ruinously expensive to operate. The SR-71 on the other hand...

walrus01

4 days ago

The F117 is in active use as a stand-in/simulator for opposing force semi-stealthy subsonic cruise missiles for radar range testing. People see them flying all the time.

Waterluvian

4 days ago

If you’re gonna have an Air Farce we’ll have to tariff you guys, eh?

satisfice

4 days ago

Cue video of the helicopter coming to get Clint Eastwood in Firefox!

Come out of retirement for one last job!

bix6

3 days ago

> The first public hint that a return to flight for the SR-71A was brewing came at the exclusive All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Sept. 12-14

Excuse me while I vomit.

avazhi

3 days ago

This is one of those things we just can’t figure out now, huh lol.

Like alien tech. Crazy how far our ingenuity has fallen in many ways since the 50s-60s.

Zigurd

3 days ago

One would like to think there's a rational reason to do this. But it sounds very steam catapult. It sounds like somebody who hasn't grown a new neural connection since 1980 thought of this.

3 days ago

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigZsFypdyI&t=3355s (around 6min, starting from around 56min)

or Text [1]

  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-story

4 days ago

There was a YF-12 interceptor prototype that was a variant of the SR-71 prototype (A-12).