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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The two things that make or break an airplane are the engines and airframe. Everything else can be swapped out. As long as the airframe can support the engine, structurally and aerodynamically speaking, there are no issues. Wiring and avionics can all be easily replaced. The control systems for the plane can be reworked too.
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.
You pose an interesting theory related to "if star wars was real they would have robots fly all the planes". In that, something our own nostalgia and hubris will ultimately lead us to always mostly demand manned aircraft.
> somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Make America Great Again" leans a lot into restorative nostalgia so it's unsurprising that ideas from the past are going to be presented as an idealized goal.
The current administration is so thoroughly enmired in nostalgia for the 20th century that I won’t be surprised when they restart production of the P-51.
perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
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.
>perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Most modern spy satellites are low observability. Combine that with overlapping coverage and the only thing you can predict is that there’s probably a satellite capable of looking at you right now.
> Despite them being complex, high-bypass turbofan engines ARE exotic technology.
Sure, I'll concede here. I think of "exotic" as "few people/nations understand it well enough" but including the manufacture and tooling seems like a no brainer inclusion.
I never saw extraterrestrial technology or any indication of extraterrestrials existing, other than gag stuff in hangars.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I respect the J58's place in history, but it has no place in modern aviation. The ideas behind it still remain relevant, but the implementation is long, long outdated. I think it could be redesigned and reimplemented for cheaper that it would cost to resurrect and maintain the original J58.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
The Navy has been pushing for a large cruiser for literally decades now. The Trump-class is that under a different name. We're at the end of what we can cram in a hull that's nominally called a destroyer, especially if you want to host larger hypersonic strike weapons and ABM interceptors, plus the radars to manage the ABM battle.
That's the same kind of silliness as calling the Russian Kirov class 'battlecruisers' in my opinion. It's not going to stand in the line of battle and exchange shells with other battleships is it?
Kirovs are the size of WWI battleships and exchange the heaviest AShM missiles made with other battlegroups, so yes?
At the end of the day the Navy is seeing Orange Man offer a them a check to build the cruiser they've wanted for decades. They'll finally have the space and power to do all kinds of things they can't pull off on a destroyer hull (even if said "destroyer" is really a cruiser in other clothing). If they have to call it a BBN or whatever to make Trump happy they'll do it.
The US Navy needs fewer Kirovs, Yamatos and Ticonderogas. When (not if) the US enters the Pacific theater, they will be going up against Chinese land-based strategic AShMs and potentially 50+ Type 052 destroyers. The moment the US enters any capital ship into this theater, it will be like a 21st-century Battle of Midway with hypersonics, SAR satellites and ballistic missiles.
The Trump-class is pretty clearly one of those interim study projects that only exists to fill a perceived gap in force composition. Unlike the USAF NGAD, I don't think the Trump-class will ever see the light of day, let alone a battle versus a peer-power.
a single hit from enemy anti shipping missles would likely blow the whole thing up.
I agree with the manipulating the nostalgia angle, the real plan just isn’t anything like an actual battleship, and the approval is also because they’re using ‘battleship’ to manipulate the nostalgia.
I would be willing to wager that the US already has at least one high altitude, very fast research plane that incorporates all sorts of modern materials and technology, and therefore has no particular need for an obsolete aircraft from the 1960s that was primarily designed to solve 1950s problems.
At several points in time, the Pentagon proposed mothballing the SR-71 and relying on sat-recon. And each time, the aircraft-recon imagery people screamed bloody murder and insisted they needed the aircraft imagery. And then one day the Pentagon announced that they were shutting down the SR-71 ... ... and there was a thundering silence from the aircraft-recon intel people. Almost as though there was already a replacement for the SR-71 but nobody could talk about it.
And then NASA kept operating it as a research platform for another decade, until they also stopped. Almost as though it had lived out its useful life for that purpose.
> “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!
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.
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.
Sometimes things really are delusion until they become reality. Isaacman built up Draken International, "an American provider of tactical fighter aircraft for contract air services including military and defense industry customers." [0] Its fleet includes 1960's vintage aircraft like the Mirage F1. He also is privately undertaking a restoration of a Pavina Tornado. [1] Additionally he has donated restored or to restore early missile artifacts to a space museum. [2]
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.
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.
So titanium alloys are not completely resistant to all forms of corrosion. 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.
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.
> 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.
The A-12 was not developed from scratch, whether in terms of its design, production facilities or in-house expertise.
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.
"Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer."
Lockheed had no experience with titanium prior to OXCART. 95% of the first 6,000 sheets of titanium had to be scrapped.
It was the first production design to incorporate low-observable shaping.
It was 50% faster than anything Lockheed had previously tried to build, and four times faster than the U-2.
And they literally did all that between April 1958 and April 1962.
So, yes, it was designed from scratch as nothing useful from prior projects read across to it.
The A-12 was built in an era when the aerospace industry was flush with knowledge and active R&D into mach 3+ flight - everyone was convinced that it was the future. Today's industry is heavily optimized for subsonic airliners and fighter jets that have top speeds of "only" mach 1.5-2. No one in the west has built a mach 3 aircraft since the 60s and not in Russia since the early 80s. The knowledge isn't _lost_ (well, we hope) but there is a lot that will need to be relearned, and we all know how even the best documentation is usually missing a lot of details.
Risk tolerance perhaps? But also our increased capabilities make it harder to keep things simple. Should it be radar-opaque? Of course! Capable of autonomous flight? Duh! Carrier landings? Well sure, that might be needed. Refuel midair? Obviously. Sigint to the gills? Seems useful…
Not a mechanical engineer here, but I reckon close to a decade would be pretty realistic for full operational restoration. Even a small amount of lost critical maintenance knowledge could cost the whole airframe.
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.
What, it's a good analogy for this audience. I know enough to have an opinion though. You'll never see me using a thread to locate a part. And I know taste isn't the only difference between red and blue loctite!
If you think my reply was off-base, give me a bit more than this mate.
Complexity and knowledge grow over time. It's likely that the last SR-71 and the processes and materials behind it were much more complex than the first. You have to recreate not only the first unit, but decades of added knowledge, skill, and complexity.
What are your thoughts on creating processes and systems to maintain continuity of this institutional knowledge across programs and talent generations? How do you keep this muscle memory strong over decades besides keeping folks building and working? Or would you say that is the only way?
> 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
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!
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Does it? SpaceX doesn't publish official numbers, but nextspaceflight.com has the Falcon 9 at 99.5% success rate, which seems a bit better than "keeps failing" to me.
The Raptor v3 had a 7% (3/39) failure rate on yesterday's Starship Flight 14. As others have mentioned, Falcon 9 uses the Merlin engine, which is a completely different, much lower complexity engine.
I actually agree with your point overall, but Falcon 9 uses the Merlin, not the newer raptor 3 for starship which is more 3d printing and has had some teething issues (no definite causation, and I expect they’ll get it sorted).
Just to clarify one thing, Edwards AFB still has a lot of those highly-skilled engineers. Edwards has a huge machine shop with all the fancy tools and the engineers in there job is mostly making one-off replacement parts for planes. NASA and the Air Force are still flying all sorts of test planes out there and they often need some part they can no longer get from the manufacturer. They drop the spec for the part and it gets made, sometimes it takes a long time, but I promise there are skilled people on that base who can make it.
IMHO the SR-71 is going to be problematic due to sourcing the materials and fluids more than finding skilled CNC techs.
No doubt there are highly skilled engineers there, but saying "those" might be a stretch. It is possible someone there has worked on an SR-71A, but it last flew 27 years ago. It was originally introduced 60 years ago. A lot of the knowledge about this plane has most likely unfortunately passed on. That isn't to say people can't learn, but it is a tougher starting point. Honestly, almost like starting over I would guess.
USAF has a lot of TOs (technical orders) that include things like schematics for the aircraft and its components. I'd be surprised if that data has disappeared or was incomplete for the SR-71. IME, TOs have been getting worse and systems from the time of the SR-71's period of service were generally better documented, though not perfectly.
> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost
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.
US corporations are allergic to paying for training in any form.
Everytime it’s come up people always argue that if you train the employee they’ll just leave for more money once they’re skilled.
Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay, or even making a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years in exchange for the training costs is never an option.
They’d rather have the position stay empty or outsource outside the country even if that has associated issues with shipping costs or quality control.
> Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay
But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
> a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years
Literally shudders. Employer has no practical way to ensure adequate quality of work from their employee. Generally it is not a problem, because employer can get rid of those workers one way or another, but when you have spent money upfront... Shudders.
Thank you for reinforcing my point that no US corporation wants to pay for training.
> But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
No, they spent their time without even having a partially trained employee and just having empty positions. If they are still outcompeting you, access to labor wasn’t your problem.
You can structure a contract so that the company has the right to fire for performance still. It’s how moving bonuses are normally done with a “you’ll work here for X year/s or return the bonus”
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.
> The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
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.
> You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure you "can" have a new F1. But you could also make a brand new design using current capacity manufacturing that will also do the job for a lot less. So why would you do the former?.
To give you an idea how ridiculous this is: to start each engine, they made a cart out of two Buick V8 engines tied together - so four V8 engines to start the plane. Those V8 engines were long since out of production, so at one point they went around the country, to every junkyard, buying up every one of those V8s they could find, so they would have spares to start planes up in different places. If an SR71 had an issue and landed at an unusual airport, they had to fly the start cart and other equipment to that airport to start the plane again. Everything about this plane is expensive and one-of-a-kind. It's a hot rod that goes to space.
Rather than re-engineer the cart to use a different block? I mean, I guess when a part reaches end-of-life, your first move is to buy as many as you can, before you try to re-engineer things so it isn't needed, but... horsepower is horsepower. Torque is torque. It shouldn't be that hard to replace...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They would have to make the plane bigger. The SR71 is already an enlarged version of the A-12, made bigger to support more fuel, a heavy camera, and an extra pilot. It needed something like 900lb-ft torque per engine; even modern electric motors would add enough weight that it would be problematic.
There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.
For military planes, every bit of weight you can shed up front increases some operational capability of the plane. In this case, not carrying an extra 200-300kg of weight for starters meant 200-300kg more spy equipment /could/ be carried along on the mission.
Granted there are likely many obstacles to getting this airframe flying again, but the V8s probably isn't one of them. All those V8s did (and I've seen them in action) was turn a shaft. There's an infinite number of alternate options available to turn the same shaft.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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+.
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.
This feels like the steam catapault kerfuffle from earlier this year. Maybe I'm missing some vital reason these retired technologies must be revived, but it's not inspiring when our military doctrine is "let's go back to what worked 60 years ago"
My speculation level is at full but the SR-71 program was the gold standard and I think it's good to tap those responsible for it. They were doing some incredible stuff 60 short years ago and dismissing it as "old" is folly.
The SR-71 wasn't randomly retired, though. The tactical need to go really fast at a high altitude disappeared because you can now get the same intel from satellites and stealth aircraft. The real question is why do you suddenly need that capability again?
Planning for the possibility that access to space may become denied, and wanting a backup option. If the enemy takes out your spy satellite, how else are you going to get photos of the warzone?
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.
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.
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.
Yes, like the graphic at the top shows multiple rockets launching simultaneously from the ship. Is this even something that came from what the navy needs or is it just an ego trip?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I suspect everything comparable of late has been orbital, which begs the question what is it they’re worried about with orbital? Satellite warfare is already accelerating if the rumors are true, is it that this is untouchable still? Is there some new camera sensor where eliminating that extra atmospheric diffraction or slowing down (lol) is needed?
I am sure that the orbital capabilities are also vastly improved from what the public has ever seen. But I think there's likely a high degree of tactical value in having something that can keep station over a certain active conflict area (as an RQ180 can, maybe flying in a racetrack pattern at altitude, with sensors aimed down).
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 problem is that "can loiter over an area" and "SR71-like" are fundamental contradictions.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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:
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Both of these only work because the channel size is extremely narrow.
The antenna on the commercial satellites that do two way S/L-band to handheld stuff (or INMARSAT BGAN size terminals) from geostationary is massive, I've no reason to believe that a high budget billion dollar NSA satellite at MEO or higher altitudes wouldn't have a similarly gargantuan unfolding antenna.
The ground units do not have any sort of narrow beam capability, thus you don't need to be anywhere near the satellite to intercept them. I have a low end satellite device: Garmin InReach (text only, provides tracking and emergency communications in the middle of nowhere.) It has a preferred orientation, not a required orientation.
Why do you think I am confused? Is this a form of internet condenscension, or are you able to diagnose my mental state based a single comment? No, I don't think I'm confused.
Because GEO is about 100x further than LEO, which means the signal is about 10,000x weaker. Also the risk to geo communications from having multiple birds in the same slot is huge and treaty violating. Why put that risk and insane demand when you can still get global coverage from a dozen or so birds in high polar orbits?
Nobody does what you are saying, because physics, which leads me to believe that you are confused.
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:
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.
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
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).
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.
Even for LEO. Plane changes are expensive - and you've got to then wait potentially many orbits to get a collision. To shorten that timeframe you'd change your apogee or perigee anyway.
Raising the apogee, then changing the inclination there is relatively cheap - and you can adjust the plane change and apogee to time a collision. Remember - there is no need to recircularize. Just collide. If the goal was to recircularize then I don't know if raising the apogee would be worth it, maybe for extreme cases. But not for a collision.
Plane change is extremely expensive--but you only need to match inclination at launch. Put your interceptor at a different elevation, wait until the planes align.
More like, you can just launch couple rings of sand into the polar orbit of Starlink altitude ranges. It'll wipe them all off like a window wiper over few days or so. Or the killer sat could have thrusters to rendezvous with each one, but it'll be more complicated with the size of Starlink constellation.
Yeah, China can probably do that too in a WW3 situation. A nuclear PSU wherever low enough latitude with a telescope next to it shooting up anything moving it sees. LEO satellites can't avoid covering everywhere on Earth where latitude is lower than its inclination. It probably has to be articulating and tracking, not like fixed Minecraft beacons, but even that will do its job eventually.
So you have these LEO Internet satellite constellations with thousands of satellites that have a number of satellites above any place on Earth at any given moment...
The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith. If they’re truly trying to relight these things, my heart goes out in advance to the neighborhood in the Southwest that burns down before they rethink it.
> The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith.
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.
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...
> 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".
>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.
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.
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_...
That USA government - the mythical "deep state" one with all sorts of hyper-competent stuff happening behind closed doors - is dead. To the extent that it ever existed, Trump credits himself with killing it.
Or something as mundane as cleaning up and fixing something that's been out in the weather for 20 years so it doesn't look shabby at the front gate of their base.
Or the whole "retired guy in his late 70s gives a quotation to aviation week" is a red herring intended for US adversaries, which seems like a fairly basic ruse, but might have been put together as a coordinated plan. It could have its own value of sending opposing nation state intelligence agencies and air defense people down a man-hour wasting dead end of investigating something that'll never happen.
There might be a side dish of catching foreign spies by waving a carefully prepared objective in front of them, not only confusing them.
A less generic strategic possibility: hiding something new and useful in the middle of crazy engineering, supply chains and training for the useless SR-71 restoration.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
What do the engines have to do with plasma around the hull, or rather its leading edges, caused by supersonic speed, which never ever even enter them?
And if you're thinking of the exhaust, why would that matter at all for signals reception and transmission, with the exception of a small cone from right behind?
I wonder if people are 1. proud, 2. in awe, 3. regretful, 4. spiteful of the people (engineers, technicians, administrators, executives, and back office people) who make secretive kinetic hardware like this under USG contract / prospective contract.
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.
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.
“Yes we know, Mrs Lincoln, but how did you like the show?”
Classic HNer fixating to something technical because it’s safer than engaging on moralistic lines with broader topic at hand. And this is how unaccountable military technical monstrosities get built.
I know it's probably a forbidden topic around these parts, but the 'tic tac' thing that those FA18 pilots saw several years ago may be indicative of what Lockheed etc are flying up there. It's a hot topic in conspiracy circles but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.
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.
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.
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.
>but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
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.
Some of the "hovers then flies off at great speed" reports match how an SR-71 flight could appear to a ground observer. They took off almost empty of fuel (which isn't made any more), flew as slow as they could to a tanker aircraft (which flew about as fast as it could), refuel then accelerate to Mach 3. When the tanker + SR-71 flew roughly towards you, it looks like it is hovering. Then when it turns and accelerates away it looks like it tears off at a 90 degree turn.
I frankly do like to entertain much more exotic explanations for it, but the overall most prosaic explanation does land on exotic human craft being tested, and the observers not being fully aware of what they're seeing - The tic tac just being an example.
The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion.
I’m sorry. Hope whatever the difficulty is neutralizes.
For what it’s worth, I do endeavor to pepper oblique references to the phenomenon on HN when it seems relevant to, sometimes suffering downvotes for it but who cares.
Thanks man, everything passes eventually but it's still rough.
And yeah I do like seeing the odd reference to the phenomenon here, I'm just quietly hoping that it doesn't all spill out with the current administration and we end up with an Iron Sky scenario lol
Yes! Best book ever on how a high technology startup operates. If you are wondering how to create an "internal startup" - that's your guide. It's a people system - so you need to find the people!
There is an SR-71 on display in Seattle's Boeing Museum of Flight. One of my most favorite memories of it was taking my late Belarussian grandfather to that museum and having one of the docents there, a retired airforce person about my grandfather's age, tour us around, with me translating. I already knew a bunch of BlackBird's lore, but the docent/tour guide was pulling out all the stops to impress my grandpa and was talking about various overflights of USSR, and I my grandfather's smile crinkled up and he said "oh I remember we finally shot that guy [Powell] down, and all the papers were trumpeting about it" and he and the tour guide started laughing and slapping each other on backs!
I miss my grandfather. He was a good one!
I’m with the old guy on this, too long since it last flew.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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).
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.
Agreed, I can't imagine much scientific/engineering value that NASA would get from restarting the SR-71A by itself. There's an easier way to simulate the Blackbird's flight characteristics without having to magic the damn thing back into the sky.
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.
Back in the 1990s, SWRI had access to one of the operational SR-71s in order to test satellites before launch. At the time, vacuum chambers left enough air inside them that bolting the satellite inside the nosecone and flying it at 85,000 feet in an aircraft that cost about $200,000/hour to fly was a better test to ensure that the satellite will survive/operate in space.
Why would they choose SN 61-7980? I get that it was the last one off the line, but it's been sitting out in the weather at Edwards, not even in the boneyard. SN
61-7964 has been out of service about as long, but it's been inside at the Strategic Air Command museum - it's got to be in better shape.
I'd wager a plane in a museum is stripped down internally and nothing more than a shell, while a plane on an actively protected military installation is more likely to be complete (or more complete), thus easier restorable.
The opposite usually. Museums are sticklers for originality. They'll bribe some congressman's mistress to get a meeting so they can get assurances the ATF will behave "favorably" so they can import part of a half parted out anti-aircraft system from Chad ur Uruguay or some shit because that's the only place the obscure gun variant they need for the coaxial machine gun in their tank is still available. Or they'll buy the fuselage of some obscure plane that was only sold to the Indian Coast Guard because it shares all the cockpit instrumentation with some 100 series fighter they're trying to undo the 'nam era mods to and restore to it's 1950s SAC trim.
The SR-71 on display at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Air and Space Museum located near Dulles Airport in Virginia does not have its engines in the nacelles. The rest of the exterior looks complete, but other internals could very well also be missing and the exterior would still look identical.
As time goes on, Warhammer 40k will become a better and better guide to current events, apparently. Only one question: after recovering this lost standard template constructor pattern, how will the rites be learned to appease such a venerated machine spirit?
That doesn't explain why they took the SR-71A off display. What would they need the actual plane for? They must have enough engineering diagrams to build up computer models for whatever new plane they would design.
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
> 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.
See also - mega rail projects that start from nothing (cough HS2).
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.
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.
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.
NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.
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.
Generations of aviation enthusiasts will look back on the legendary risk management of NASA and wonder how it was entrusted to a MiG-29 aerobatics pilot.
This doesn't make much sense. NASA famously has killed two shuttle crews through bean-counter/suits mis-management. Why would having someone who has flown to space (twice) and both flies and manages the maintenance and restoration of fast jets be worse?
Kash Patel might have experience hiding his alcohol abuse and taxpayer-funded vacationing, but that doesn't qualify him as an espionage expert fit to lead the FBI. NASA's problems are funding-related, nobody ever looked at JPL and said that they needed a airshow pilot or astronaut in order to stop the layoffs.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I think this one was on its wheels. But presumably the key factor is that it was owned by NASA, which makes it I assume much easier for NASA to do...whatever with it.
The article says this one was on a pylon (with a spare engine on display on the ground below). Being owned by NASA is important, also being on a military base (the home of USAF test flight!) where it could be removed and easily wheeled into a large-enough hangar without anyone noticing for 5+ months.
Getting any of those planes outside of their museums would be logistically difficult, and of course it would immediately be noticed. And even if you can rent a hangar big enough, and secure it, then you're stuck at BFI/IAD/Wright-Patterson trying to do this impossible task.
The guy interviewed is actually the gentleman that was in charge of destroying all the spare parts at the end of the SR-71 program So he knows what he is talking about and is well known. Old interview here:
https://youtu.be/mQse_XLxcWM?is=JASvQNI_bVn_bAr7
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.
It’s almost certainly being done by clowns on the orders of one of the clowns in chief. Note that quote, “I would drop everything to work on that” said guy who did not in fact drop anything to work on that. Reading between the lines I can hear old Mr loaf belting out “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”
The unspoken part may be “if I was 10 years younger”, I knew one of the engineers who worked on the engines he’s still alive but almost a 100, I don’t think he’s up to the challenge of this particular boondoggle
There was something special about the 60s in the US. Your comment implies you might not appreciate how absurd the SR-71 was. The F-35 is our latest fighter jet. It has a top speed of 1200 mph, the SR-71 had a top speed of 2200 mph. The F-35 is capable of operating at around 50,000 ft, the SR-71 was capable of operating at 85,000 ft. The F-35 has a self fueled range of about 1350 miles, the SR-71 had a self fueled range of 2,900 miles.
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.
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.'
« what we must have 'secretly' concocted » — Secrets are often dirty, which is why they're secret. Not for public consumption. Like, what is the secret behind Wikileaks Bradley Manning's “conversion” into “Chelsea” after whistleblowing secret dirty videos showing the world how dirty it really is in there? In that military? Did they castrate him in custody?
Rather than wondering about “secret tech”, boyish fantasies fueled by Pentagon sponsored Hollywood movies glorifying guns and violence and blasting enemies (they always need enemies), ask yourself whether all of the stuff publicly and conspicuously trumpeted about (not only in past decades) did and does actually work and exist. ;)
The US also had two superlative poles of engineering excellence, Kelly Johnson's Skunkworks and Hyman Rickover's nuclear submarines. They've been since replaced by bureaucrats without an ounce of talent.
There were armed variants like the YF-12. So far as I understand, the main reason the game changed is because missiles improved. Not much point focusing on things like speed when some missiles are reaching mach 16, contrasted against the SR-71's mach 3.3. In that context you simply have to pray your counter-measures work, and if that fails, then hope your ejection seat works.
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 :-)
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.
Clown show is my guess too. There's no utility for it other than rattling windows and other airshow shenanigans for bragging press releases.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
Heh this sounds like someone’s passion project that is high enough up the food chain to demand it be done. I wouldn’t put it past Trump to flip through some old photos and then order NASA to restore the aircraft. I would take time off work and travel to see an SR-71 fly again but it doesn’t seem like the wisest use of NASA’s already too small budget.
Perhaps part of the plan is to starve NASA of resources. Congress keeps cutting funding for Earth-facing satellites in order to prevent "proof" that global warming exists.
Is this another Four Seasons Total Landscaping or when Tools For Humanity announced a partnership with Bruno Mars instead of Thirty Seconds to Mars?
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.
About two thirds through the article, I'm getting an utter sense of dread:
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.
SR-71 stories will always get my upvote! I don't care if my comment gets downvoted but this is my favourite plane and especially the stories that go with it.
The Speed Check story (for today's lucky ten thousand [0] who don't know):
Video
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
This super secret plan was "leaked" at the All-In summit run by a group of billionaires who grifted Trump's victory by lying to their audience and appearing on Russia/MAGA channels like The Duran.
Announced 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.
More like Mission: Impossible. Replete with a mini-doco about how Tom Cruise literally for reals skydove out of the Blackbird without a chute and landed on the enemy rocket in one take.
Not a trick to make an old plane fly again. The trick is holding it together and landing it.
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.
What? The SR-71 was a strategic reconnaissance aircraft. It was not, and never was, an interceptor. And the F-35 was never tasked with replacing an interceptor, but is a slow-ish multirole aircraft with a heavy emphasis on strike capability. And the USAF hasn't had an "interceptor" in decades (single mission, short range, high speed, point defense aircraft).
Makes sense, the SR-71 has never intersected with any interceptor program. And the F-35 is perfect for its role (whatever it is) which is very much relevant for the current theaters. There is no embarrassment whatsoever.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It is worth noting that MIL-STD-1553 can and has been retrofitted into multiple aircraft that were manufactured decades before it existed.
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.
The two things that make or break an airplane are the engines and airframe. Everything else can be swapped out. As long as the airframe can support the engine, structurally and aerodynamically speaking, there are no issues. Wiring and avionics can all be easily replaced. The control systems for the plane can be reworked too.
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.
You pose an interesting theory related to "if star wars was real they would have robots fly all the planes". In that, something our own nostalgia and hubris will ultimately lead us to always mostly demand manned aircraft.
I think the future is unmanned aircraft, remotely piloted by humans with autonomous assist. And eventually (10-15 years) autonomous unmanned aircraft.
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.
But then Luke wouldn't have been able to use the force!
> somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.
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.
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.
'nitpicking' is a weird way to describe 'expects new technology to be reliable, wants to use the tried and true technology until then'
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat
You can't launch with full fuel and full weapons.
"Make America Great Again" leans a lot into restorative nostalgia so it's unsurprising that ideas from the past are going to be presented as an idealized goal.
Please note that we are also spending money on getting F-14s flight worthy again, for no other reason than movie-brain and nostalgia.
It's literally called "The Maverick Act."
The current administration is so thoroughly enmired in nostalgia for the 20th century that I won’t be surprised when they restart production of the P-51.
I wouldn't be surprised if they bring back the Messerschmitt the way it's going.
perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
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.
>perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Satellites perform the mission today.
Satellites are predictable. The mission is unscheduled surveillance.
Most modern spy satellites are low observability. Combine that with overlapping coverage and the only thing you can predict is that there’s probably a satellite capable of looking at you right now.
> Despite them being complex, high-bypass turbofan engines ARE exotic technology.
Sure, I'll concede here. I think of "exotic" as "few people/nations understand it well enough" but including the manufacture and tooling seems like a no brainer inclusion.
Edit to my comment, I meant "Despite them being common," not "Despite them being complex."
Show me the UFO or it never happened!
I never saw extraterrestrial technology or any indication of extraterrestrials existing, other than gag stuff in hangars.
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.
Trump literally used it as a setup for his stupid Aliens == illegal aliens schtick.
That's obviously just soft disclosure.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Avro Vulcan
For anyone interested, they're referenced here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
Hopefully it won’t be leaking fuel anymore with modern engines
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.
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.
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.
Don't underestimate the J-58. This is as much if an extraordinary engineering feat as the SR itself.
I respect the J58's place in history, but it has no place in modern aviation. The ideas behind it still remain relevant, but the implementation is long, long outdated. I think it could be redesigned and reimplemented for cheaper that it would cost to resurrect and maintain the original J58.
> 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.
Why would you assume that?
Because Trump has a history of it.
See this comment for a quick set of links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910639
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.
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.
"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.
Don’t forget thick armor. A battleship with no guns and no armor is literally no battleship at all, hah.
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.
The Navy has been pushing for a large cruiser for literally decades now. The Trump-class is that under a different name. We're at the end of what we can cram in a hull that's nominally called a destroyer, especially if you want to host larger hypersonic strike weapons and ABM interceptors, plus the radars to manage the ABM battle.
Right but 'battleship'?
That's the same kind of silliness as calling the Russian Kirov class 'battlecruisers' in my opinion. It's not going to stand in the line of battle and exchange shells with other battleships is it?
There have been no battleship-versus-battleship combat since 1944. Airpower made them obsolete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf
Kirovs are the size of WWI battleships and exchange the heaviest AShM missiles made with other battlegroups, so yes?
At the end of the day the Navy is seeing Orange Man offer a them a check to build the cruiser they've wanted for decades. They'll finally have the space and power to do all kinds of things they can't pull off on a destroyer hull (even if said "destroyer" is really a cruiser in other clothing). If they have to call it a BBN or whatever to make Trump happy they'll do it.
The US Navy needs fewer Kirovs, Yamatos and Ticonderogas. When (not if) the US enters the Pacific theater, they will be going up against Chinese land-based strategic AShMs and potentially 50+ Type 052 destroyers. The moment the US enters any capital ship into this theater, it will be like a 21st-century Battle of Midway with hypersonics, SAR satellites and ballistic missiles.
The Trump-class is pretty clearly one of those interim study projects that only exists to fill a perceived gap in force composition. Unlike the USAF NGAD, I don't think the Trump-class will ever see the light of day, let alone a battle versus a peer-power.
a single hit from enemy anti shipping missles would likely blow the whole thing up.
I agree with the manipulating the nostalgia angle, the real plan just isn’t anything like an actual battleship, and the approval is also because they’re using ‘battleship’ to manipulate the nostalgia.
By the time they are ready, Trump will have long lost the ability to name anything.
I would be willing to wager that the US already has at least one high altitude, very fast research plane that incorporates all sorts of modern materials and technology, and therefore has no particular need for an obsolete aircraft from the 1960s that was primarily designed to solve 1950s problems.
At several points in time, the Pentagon proposed mothballing the SR-71 and relying on sat-recon. And each time, the aircraft-recon imagery people screamed bloody murder and insisted they needed the aircraft imagery. And then one day the Pentagon announced that they were shutting down the SR-71 ... ... and there was a thundering silence from the aircraft-recon intel people. Almost as though there was already a replacement for the SR-71 but nobody could talk about it.
And then NASA kept operating it as a research platform for another decade, until they also stopped. Almost as though it had lived out its useful life for that purpose.
Investing in the well-being of our society will severely impact our ability to mint billionaires and trillionaires.
> “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!
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.
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.
Are you trying to tell me that Space Cowboys isn’t real?
No if you want accuracy you need to watch Armageddon
Sometimes things really are delusion until they become reality. Isaacman built up Draken International, "an American provider of tactical fighter aircraft for contract air services including military and defense industry customers." [0] Its fleet includes 1960's vintage aircraft like the Mirage F1. He also is privately undertaking a restoration of a Pavina Tornado. [1] Additionally he has donated restored or to restore early missile artifacts to a space museum. [2]
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-...
Yeah, compare that statement to Thomas Zurbuchen's assumption that solving engineering problems was a 70% social and 30% technical issue...
A couple of questions/observations:
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.
So titanium alloys are not completely resistant to all forms of corrosion. 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.
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.
> 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.
Do you mean the magnesium pizza box?
"decades" is a stretch.
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.
The A-12 was not developed from scratch, whether in terms of its design, production facilities or in-house expertise.
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.
"Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer."
Lockheed had no experience with titanium prior to OXCART. 95% of the first 6,000 sheets of titanium had to be scrapped.
It was the first production design to incorporate low-observable shaping.
It was 50% faster than anything Lockheed had previously tried to build, and four times faster than the U-2.
And they literally did all that between April 1958 and April 1962.
So, yes, it was designed from scratch as nothing useful from prior projects read across to it.
The A-12 was built in an era when the aerospace industry was flush with knowledge and active R&D into mach 3+ flight - everyone was convinced that it was the future. Today's industry is heavily optimized for subsonic airliners and fighter jets that have top speeds of "only" mach 1.5-2. No one in the west has built a mach 3 aircraft since the 60s and not in Russia since the early 80s. The knowledge isn't _lost_ (well, we hope) but there is a lot that will need to be relearned, and we all know how even the best documentation is usually missing a lot of details.
Risk tolerance perhaps? But also our increased capabilities make it harder to keep things simple. Should it be radar-opaque? Of course! Capable of autonomous flight? Duh! Carrier landings? Well sure, that might be needed. Refuel midair? Obviously. Sigint to the gills? Seems useful…
The original definitely could refuel midair.
Sure, my point was more that the original was carefully optimized, today it’s easier to just check all of the boxes.
Not a mechanical engineer here, but I reckon close to a decade would be pretty realistic for full operational restoration. Even a small amount of lost critical maintenance knowledge could cost the whole airframe.
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.
“I’d compare it to a really old codebase.”
Yes, you are not a mechanical engineer.
What, it's a good analogy for this audience. I know enough to have an opinion though. You'll never see me using a thread to locate a part. And I know taste isn't the only difference between red and blue loctite!
If you think my reply was off-base, give me a bit more than this mate.
Complexity and knowledge grow over time. It's likely that the last SR-71 and the processes and materials behind it were much more complex than the first. You have to recreate not only the first unit, but decades of added knowledge, skill, and complexity.
> Surely we can match that with our 70 years of advanced knowledge and equipment? I don't think we can, because: > ... we don't have Kelly Johnson.
or the engineers from that time who had an intuitive knowledge of how this should all be designed. You can't teach a computer intuition.
What are your thoughts on creating processes and systems to maintain continuity of this institutional knowledge across programs and talent generations? How do you keep this muscle memory strong over decades besides keeping folks building and working? Or would you say that is the only way?
> 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
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!
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
How does SpaceX's 3D printed raptor engine factor into your analysis?
The one that keeps failing?
Does it? SpaceX doesn't publish official numbers, but nextspaceflight.com has the Falcon 9 at 99.5% success rate, which seems a bit better than "keeps failing" to me.
https://nextspaceflight.com/rockets/3/
The Raptor v3 had a 7% (3/39) failure rate on yesterday's Starship Flight 14. As others have mentioned, Falcon 9 uses the Merlin engine, which is a completely different, much lower complexity engine.
I actually agree with your point overall, but Falcon 9 uses the Merlin, not the newer raptor 3 for starship which is more 3d printing and has had some teething issues (no definite causation, and I expect they’ll get it sorted).
Falcon 9's don't fly raptors
Just to clarify one thing, Edwards AFB still has a lot of those highly-skilled engineers. Edwards has a huge machine shop with all the fancy tools and the engineers in there job is mostly making one-off replacement parts for planes. NASA and the Air Force are still flying all sorts of test planes out there and they often need some part they can no longer get from the manufacturer. They drop the spec for the part and it gets made, sometimes it takes a long time, but I promise there are skilled people on that base who can make it.
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
No doubt there are highly skilled engineers there, but saying "those" might be a stretch. It is possible someone there has worked on an SR-71A, but it last flew 27 years ago. It was originally introduced 60 years ago. A lot of the knowledge about this plane has most likely unfortunately passed on. That isn't to say people can't learn, but it is a tougher starting point. Honestly, almost like starting over I would guess.
USAF has a lot of TOs (technical orders) that include things like schematics for the aircraft and its components. I'd be surprised if that data has disappeared or was incomplete for the SR-71. IME, TOs have been getting worse and systems from the time of the SR-71's period of service were generally better documented, though not perfectly.
> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost
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.
> The skills can be acquired by new people.
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.
US corporations are allergic to paying for training in any form.
Everytime it’s come up people always argue that if you train the employee they’ll just leave for more money once they’re skilled.
Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay, or even making a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years in exchange for the training costs is never an option.
They’d rather have the position stay empty or outsource outside the country even if that has associated issues with shipping costs or quality control.
> Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay
But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
> a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years
Literally shudders. Employer has no practical way to ensure adequate quality of work from their employee. Generally it is not a problem, because employer can get rid of those workers one way or another, but when you have spent money upfront... Shudders.
Thank you for reinforcing my point that no US corporation wants to pay for training.
> But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
No, they spent their time without even having a partially trained employee and just having empty positions. If they are still outcompeting you, access to labor wasn’t your problem.
You can structure a contract so that the company has the right to fire for performance still. It’s how moving bonuses are normally done with a “you’ll work here for X year/s or return the bonus”
> The skills can be acquired by new people.
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.
> The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
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.
> You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
The original tooling to build the aircraft were destroyed back in 1968.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251084
Sure you "can" have a new F1. But you could also make a brand new design using current capacity manufacturing that will also do the job for a lot less. So why would you do the former?.
If I recall correctly while reading Ben Rich's book he said the tooling was cut up in to pieces and sold for scrap metal.
To give you an idea how ridiculous this is: to start each engine, they made a cart out of two Buick V8 engines tied together - so four V8 engines to start the plane. Those V8 engines were long since out of production, so at one point they went around the country, to every junkyard, buying up every one of those V8s they could find, so they would have spares to start planes up in different places. If an SR71 had an issue and landed at an unusual airport, they had to fly the start cart and other equipment to that airport to start the plane again. Everything about this plane is expensive and one-of-a-kind. It's a hot rod that goes to space.
Rather than re-engineer the cart to use a different block? I mean, I guess when a part reaches end-of-life, your first move is to buy as many as you can, before you try to re-engineer things so it isn't needed, but... horsepower is horsepower. Torque is torque. It shouldn't be that hard to replace...
They did eventually replace the Buicks.
> 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.
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.
So they LS swapped the SR71 lmao
Can the plane just carry....the starter ?, it's another 200-300kg of payload, may affect the max range, etc, but much more convenient.
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.
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.
They would have to make the plane bigger. The SR71 is already an enlarged version of the A-12, made bigger to support more fuel, a heavy camera, and an extra pilot. It needed something like 900lb-ft torque per engine; even modern electric motors would add enough weight that it would be problematic.
There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.
For military planes, every bit of weight you can shed up front increases some operational capability of the plane. In this case, not carrying an extra 200-300kg of weight for starters meant 200-300kg more spy equipment /could/ be carried along on the mission.
Most jet planes do carry a starter with them (in the tail usually) so the fact the SR-71 doesn't suggests the tradeoffs wasn't worth it
Military fighter jets quite often had external starters to save weight.
The weight corresponds to a significant amount of fuel or missiles etc., or significantly better radars or other systems.
Granted there are likely many obstacles to getting this airframe flying again, but the V8s probably isn't one of them. All those V8s did (and I've seen them in action) was turn a shaft. There's an infinite number of alternate options available to turn the same shaft.
> 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/
Aware. I've seen one being fueled, started, and flying.
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.
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.
> 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!"
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
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+.
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.
This is essentially the thought process behind the Hermeus Quarterhorse which is already a thing that exists and is in active development:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hermeus+q...
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This feels like the steam catapault kerfuffle from earlier this year. Maybe I'm missing some vital reason these retired technologies must be revived, but it's not inspiring when our military doctrine is "let's go back to what worked 60 years ago"
My speculation level is at full but the SR-71 program was the gold standard and I think it's good to tap those responsible for it. They were doing some incredible stuff 60 short years ago and dismissing it as "old" is folly.
The SR-71 wasn't randomly retired, though. The tactical need to go really fast at a high altitude disappeared because you can now get the same intel from satellites and stealth aircraft. The real question is why do you suddenly need that capability again?
Planning for the possibility that access to space may become denied, and wanting a backup option. If the enemy takes out your spy satellite, how else are you going to get photos of the warzone?
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.
Those responsible are mostly dead...
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.
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
He just has to put his name on everything doesn't he?
I mean, Obamacare was just the nick name for the Affordable care act, but Don actively just has to have it put up there.
Obamacare was the branding by the ACA's enemies, both to try to make it less popular and tie the President to its unpopularity.
It was amusing to watch videos of people denouncing Obamacare while demanding politicians "keep their hands of my ACA".
This is shit we used to make fun of the USSR for doing. We are the USSR during the gerontocracy phase right now.
Yes, like the graphic at the top shows multiple rockets launching simultaneously from the ship. Is this even something that came from what the navy needs or is it just an ego trip?
It’s not just military, the whole administration is based on going back decades: medicine, economics, pollution, women’s rights.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Based on the war in Ukraine S-400s aren't really able to intercept much at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
The astro-inertial navigation systems in the SR-71 and ICBMs predate GPS by a lot.
https://www.twz.com/17207/sr-71s-r2-d2-could-be-the-key-to-w...
I suspect everything comparable of late has been orbital, which begs the question what is it they’re worried about with orbital? Satellite warfare is already accelerating if the rumors are true, is it that this is untouchable still? Is there some new camera sensor where eliminating that extra atmospheric diffraction or slowing down (lol) is needed?
I am sure that the orbital capabilities are also vastly improved from what the public has ever seen. But I think there's likely a high degree of tactical value in having something that can keep station over a certain active conflict area (as an RQ180 can, maybe flying in a racetrack pattern at altitude, with sensors aimed down).
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 problem is that "can loiter over an area" and "SR71-like" are fundamental contradictions.
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?
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.
>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.
Also the SR71 can barely loiter at all. It has a turning circle at altitude and speed of 80 miles
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.
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/
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...
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.
I think you are confused. Spy satellites do not use geostationary orbits.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Both of these only work because the channel size is extremely narrow.
The antenna on the commercial satellites that do two way S/L-band to handheld stuff (or INMARSAT BGAN size terminals) from geostationary is massive, I've no reason to believe that a high budget billion dollar NSA satellite at MEO or higher altitudes wouldn't have a similarly gargantuan unfolding antenna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)
The ground units do not have any sort of narrow beam capability, thus you don't need to be anywhere near the satellite to intercept them. I have a low end satellite device: Garmin InReach (text only, provides tracking and emergency communications in the middle of nowhere.) It has a preferred orientation, not a required orientation.
The NSA does have comparable things. You can even find amateur photos of them in this day and age. But they are not in GEO.
Why do you think I am confused? Is this a form of internet condenscension, or are you able to diagnose my mental state based a single comment? No, I don't think I'm confused.
Because GEO is about 100x further than LEO, which means the signal is about 10,000x weaker. Also the risk to geo communications from having multiple birds in the same slot is huge and treaty violating. Why put that risk and insane demand when you can still get global coverage from a dozen or so birds in high polar orbits?
Nobody does what you are saying, because physics, which leads me to believe that you are confused.
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
Those are geosat communications, not surveillance. Surveillance is not happening in GEO.
Well there's also the X-37B Orbital "Test Vehicle" that performs some long-run missions. Satellite warfare? Observation instrument tests? Who knows!
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.
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
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).
> 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.
The attacking bird needs to raise apogee to GEO anyway - after that the plane change is relatively cheap. They might not even raise perigee.
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.
Even for LEO. Plane changes are expensive - and you've got to then wait potentially many orbits to get a collision. To shorten that timeframe you'd change your apogee or perigee anyway.
Raising the apogee, then changing the inclination there is relatively cheap - and you can adjust the plane change and apogee to time a collision. Remember - there is no need to recircularize. Just collide. If the goal was to recircularize then I don't know if raising the apogee would be worth it, maybe for extreme cases. But not for a collision.
Plane change is extremely expensive--but you only need to match inclination at launch. Put your interceptor at a different elevation, wait until the planes align.
More like, you can just launch couple rings of sand into the polar orbit of Starlink altitude ranges. It'll wipe them all off like a window wiper over few days or so. Or the killer sat could have thrusters to rendezvous with each one, but it'll be more complicated with the size of Starlink constellation.
You forgot lasers
Yeah, China can probably do that too in a WW3 situation. A nuclear PSU wherever low enough latitude with a telescope next to it shooting up anything moving it sees. LEO satellites can't avoid covering everywhere on Earth where latitude is lower than its inclination. It probably has to be articulating and tracking, not like fixed Minecraft beacons, but even that will do its job eventually.
or space based lasers, there's no atmosphere to dampen the pulse
Orbital is becoming less reliable due to escalating threats
There are some mission profiles that simply don't work from orbit. You need too much resolution and frame rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
Imagine implementing the above from LEO.
So you have these LEO Internet satellite constellations with thousands of satellites that have a number of satellites above any place on Earth at any given moment...
The optical system required to achieve this is infeasible to deploy at the scale required to compensate for concerns like orbital motion at 15+ fps.
Yeah, that would be the main issue for optical imaging. Still rapid change detection could be doable and of course sigint.
This has got to be a trump thing. "Big beautiful ramjets!" And so on
Yeah it seems most likely it's because someone connected to the administration just thinks they're cool.
Trying to find reason behind so much of this shit is a fools errand. Vibes based presidency.
I’d much rather have them invest in this than half the shit they’re doing
While I agree, these "military projects" are probably grifts, Russia style.
Por qué no los dos
> I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71
Makes me wonder if this whole operation is just public cover for something like that.
The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith. If they’re truly trying to relight these things, my heart goes out in advance to the neighborhood in the Southwest that burns down before they rethink it.
This is Isaacman we're talking about. He is about as good faith as they get (low bar, I know, but for real this time).
> The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith.
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.
> If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds
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.
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.
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...
> 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".
>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.
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.
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...
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_...
> 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
My god, this reads like The Onion.
https://theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-prin...
That USA government - the mythical "deep state" one with all sorts of hyper-competent stuff happening behind closed doors - is dead. To the extent that it ever existed, Trump credits himself with killing it.
[flagged]
Someone is thinking of the children.
Or something as mundane as cleaning up and fixing something that's been out in the weather for 20 years so it doesn't look shabby at the front gate of their base.
I don’t know anything but I can’t imagine they need specialists if it’s just a cosmetics job for a monument.
Or the whole "retired guy in his late 70s gives a quotation to aviation week" is a red herring intended for US adversaries, which seems like a fairly basic ruse, but might have been put together as a coordinated plan. It could have its own value of sending opposing nation state intelligence agencies and air defense people down a man-hour wasting dead end of investigating something that'll never happen.
There might be a side dish of catching foreign spies by waving a carefully prepared objective in front of them, not only confusing them.
A less generic strategic possibility: hiding something new and useful in the middle of crazy engineering, supply chains and training for the useless SR-71 restoration.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
Non-Google, non-Musk link: https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/06/incredible-footage-eme...
Didn’t satellites with superior optics and realtime video streaming … kill the need for an SR71 update?
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.
For visual and SAR, sure, but there are other missions like electronic warfare and signals intelligence that are still well served by aircraft.
Not by a mach 3+ aircraft. Good luck getting signals through the plasma of your own wake!
Plasma is electrically conductive. Modulate it as needed, in realtime.
Enjoy the dynamically phased plasmarray.
I don't think the Blackbird has the sort of engine that likes being "modulated".
What do the engines have to do with plasma around the hull, or rather its leading edges, caused by supersonic speed, which never ever even enter them?
And if you're thinking of the exhaust, why would that matter at all for signals reception and transmission, with the exception of a small cone from right behind?
Those wouldn't likely fall under NASA's remit and budget, though?
No, but in Trumpistan, does it matter?
I wonder if people are 1. proud, 2. in awe, 3. regretful, 4. spiteful of the people (engineers, technicians, administrators, executives, and back office people) who make secretive kinetic hardware like this under USG contract / prospective contract.
In strictly military technology terms, an ISR platform isn't a kinetic anything, though it would enable the targeting of something kinetic.
Yes. Though some ISR platforms are more adaptable than others. (i.e. you’re not the only one here with lived DIB experience..)
But an easy illustrative reference is the Predator drone loosing Hellfire missiles during the War on Terror.
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.
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.
“Yes we know, Mrs Lincoln, but how did you like the show?”
Classic HNer fixating to something technical because it’s safer than engaging on moralistic lines with broader topic at hand. And this is how unaccountable military technical monstrosities get built.
"Never liked participatory theater & this one finally ruined it to me for life."
I was referring to the rq180 or similar design which is very much not a supersonic aircraft.
There is no need for a spy plane in a world where we have tons of spy sats and drones.
I know it's probably a forbidden topic around these parts, but the 'tic tac' thing that those FA18 pilots saw several years ago may be indicative of what Lockheed etc are flying up there. It's a hot topic in conspiracy circles but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The point is this Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle tech is form 1989, how the tech would have evolved 40 years later who knows.
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>but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
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.
Some of the "hovers then flies off at great speed" reports match how an SR-71 flight could appear to a ground observer. They took off almost empty of fuel (which isn't made any more), flew as slow as they could to a tanker aircraft (which flew about as fast as it could), refuel then accelerate to Mach 3. When the tanker + SR-71 flew roughly towards you, it looks like it is hovering. Then when it turns and accelerates away it looks like it tears off at a 90 degree turn.
I frankly do like to entertain much more exotic explanations for it, but the overall most prosaic explanation does land on exotic human craft being tested, and the observers not being fully aware of what they're seeing - The tic tac just being an example.
The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion.
>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.
It's more that I'm currently having a real bad time and don't have the heart for the discussion.
I’m sorry. Hope whatever the difficulty is neutralizes.
For what it’s worth, I do endeavor to pepper oblique references to the phenomenon on HN when it seems relevant to, sometimes suffering downvotes for it but who cares.
Thanks man, everything passes eventually but it's still rough.
And yeah I do like seeing the odd reference to the phenomenon here, I'm just quietly hoping that it doesn't all spill out with the current administration and we end up with an Iron Sky scenario lol
You’re not going to apologise for posting a Google link?
If you haven't already read it Ben Rich's Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed is truly excellent read. Highly recommended.
Yes! Best book ever on how a high technology startup operates. If you are wondering how to create an "internal startup" - that's your guide. It's a people system - so you need to find the people!
There is an SR-71 on display in Seattle's Boeing Museum of Flight. One of my most favorite memories of it was taking my late Belarussian grandfather to that museum and having one of the docents there, a retired airforce person about my grandfather's age, tour us around, with me translating. I already knew a bunch of BlackBird's lore, but the docent/tour guide was pulling out all the stops to impress my grandpa and was talking about various overflights of USSR, and I my grandfather's smile crinkled up and he said "oh I remember we finally shot that guy [Powell] down, and all the papers were trumpeting about it" and he and the tour guide started laughing and slapping each other on backs! I miss my grandfather. He was a good one!
Hm, Powell was in a U2, not SR71 and supposedly the SR71 never flew over Russia, only close to it.
Both planes were developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works.
I’m with the old guy on this, too long since it last flew.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fuel it needs is no longer made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP-7
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).
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.
Why would you go after long retired folks though?
Agreed, I can't imagine much scientific/engineering value that NASA would get from restarting the SR-71A by itself. There's an easier way to simulate the Blackbird's flight characteristics without having to magic the damn thing back into the sky.
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.
Back in the 1990s, SWRI had access to one of the operational SR-71s in order to test satellites before launch. At the time, vacuum chambers left enough air inside them that bolting the satellite inside the nosecone and flying it at 85,000 feet in an aircraft that cost about $200,000/hour to fly was a better test to ensure that the satellite will survive/operate in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Research_Institute
Why would they choose SN 61-7980? I get that it was the last one off the line, but it's been sitting out in the weather at Edwards, not even in the boneyard. SN 61-7964 has been out of service about as long, but it's been inside at the Strategic Air Command museum - it's got to be in better shape.
I'd wager a plane in a museum is stripped down internally and nothing more than a shell, while a plane on an actively protected military installation is more likely to be complete (or more complete), thus easier restorable.
The opposite usually. Museums are sticklers for originality. They'll bribe some congressman's mistress to get a meeting so they can get assurances the ATF will behave "favorably" so they can import part of a half parted out anti-aircraft system from Chad ur Uruguay or some shit because that's the only place the obscure gun variant they need for the coaxial machine gun in their tank is still available. Or they'll buy the fuselage of some obscure plane that was only sold to the Indian Coast Guard because it shares all the cockpit instrumentation with some 100 series fighter they're trying to undo the 'nam era mods to and restore to it's 1950s SAC trim.
The SR-71 on display at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Air and Space Museum located near Dulles Airport in Virginia does not have its engines in the nacelles. The rest of the exterior looks complete, but other internals could very well also be missing and the exterior would still look identical.
The Mojave dessert, where Edwards is located, is used as a boneyard.
It belongs to NASA.
Fun fact: the US could not produce enough titanium to manufacture them, so the CIA set up shell companies to buy some from the Soviets.
As time goes on, Warhammer 40k will become a better and better guide to current events, apparently. Only one question: after recovering this lost standard template constructor pattern, how will the rites be learned to appease such a venerated machine spirit?
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71000...
A-12 (Oxcart) pilots say that the SR-71 was the station wagon version :)
Nasa reported they're not restarting the actual plane, it would cost too much money, they're making a new one based on the SR-71
That doesn't explain why they took the SR-71A off display. What would they need the actual plane for? They must have enough engineering diagrams to build up computer models for whatever new plane they would design.
Why call up the old engineers?
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
I'm also too young to have ever seen one, but I've always liked the SOP for evading an incoming missile: accelerate.
A restart so secret that everyone and their dogs know about it.
people behave like engineers grow on trees.
or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
> 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.
See also - mega rail projects that start from nothing (cough HS2).
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.
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Hands down, the best looking plane that ever took to the skies.
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
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.
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.
NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.
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...
There is a reasonably high chance Jared Isaacman will try to fly this himself.
I mean... Whomst Amongus wouldn't?
Generations of aviation enthusiasts will look back on the legendary risk management of NASA and wonder how it was entrusted to a MiG-29 aerobatics pilot.
This doesn't make much sense. NASA famously has killed two shuttle crews through bean-counter/suits mis-management. Why would having someone who has flown to space (twice) and both flies and manages the maintenance and restoration of fast jets be worse?
Kash Patel might have experience hiding his alcohol abuse and taxpayer-funded vacationing, but that doesn't qualify him as an espionage expert fit to lead the FBI. NASA's problems are funding-related, nobody ever looked at JPL and said that they needed a airshow pilot or astronaut in order to stop the layoffs.
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.
What conflicts of interest? Why would installing someone with some flare for showmanship be a bad thing if the issue is funding?
> 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...
> 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.
Your reply provides no factual evidence to your claims on Issacman.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There's obviously valid answers to your questions, but good luck getting the clearance to know the answers.
As a SR-71 fan, I fully support the decision.
And as a connoisseurs of project management disasters, I'm going to get popcorn.
What are the chances it's then mothballed and turns up registered to Draken International 6 months later.
Why would that happen?
Reading the article, this does seem ill-advised.
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.
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.
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/...
I think this one was on its wheels. But presumably the key factor is that it was owned by NASA, which makes it I assume much easier for NASA to do...whatever with it.
The article says this one was on a pylon (with a spare engine on display on the ground below). Being owned by NASA is important, also being on a military base (the home of USAF test flight!) where it could be removed and easily wheeled into a large-enough hangar without anyone noticing for 5+ months.
Getting any of those planes outside of their museums would be logistically difficult, and of course it would immediately be noticed. And even if you can rent a hangar big enough, and secure it, then you're stuck at BFI/IAD/Wright-Patterson trying to do this impossible task.
The guy interviewed is actually the gentleman that was in charge of destroying all the spare parts at the end of the SR-71 program So he knows what he is talking about and is well known. Old interview here: https://youtu.be/mQse_XLxcWM?is=JASvQNI_bVn_bAr7
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.
It’s almost certainly being done by clowns on the orders of one of the clowns in chief. Note that quote, “I would drop everything to work on that” said guy who did not in fact drop anything to work on that. Reading between the lines I can hear old Mr loaf belting out “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”
The unspoken part may be “if I was 10 years younger”, I knew one of the engineers who worked on the engines he’s still alive but almost a 100, I don’t think he’s up to the challenge of this particular boondoggle
There was something special about the 60s in the US. Your comment implies you might not appreciate how absurd the SR-71 was. The F-35 is our latest fighter jet. It has a top speed of 1200 mph, the SR-71 had a top speed of 2200 mph. The F-35 is capable of operating at around 50,000 ft, the SR-71 was capable of operating at 85,000 ft. The F-35 has a self fueled range of about 1350 miles, the SR-71 had a self fueled range of 2,900 miles.
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.
No one questions the technical achievements of the SR-71. It doesn't make any sense to try to resurrect them though.
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.'
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
« what we must have 'secretly' concocted » — Secrets are often dirty, which is why they're secret. Not for public consumption. Like, what is the secret behind Wikileaks Bradley Manning's “conversion” into “Chelsea” after whistleblowing secret dirty videos showing the world how dirty it really is in there? In that military? Did they castrate him in custody?
Rather than wondering about “secret tech”, boyish fantasies fueled by Pentagon sponsored Hollywood movies glorifying guns and violence and blasting enemies (they always need enemies), ask yourself whether all of the stuff publicly and conspicuously trumpeted about (not only in past decades) did and does actually work and exist. ;)
The US also had two superlative poles of engineering excellence, Kelly Johnson's Skunkworks and Hyman Rickover's nuclear submarines. They've been since replaced by bureaucrats without an ounce of talent.
F-35 can shoot stuff, unlike the SR-71.
There were armed variants like the YF-12. So far as I understand, the main reason the game changed is because missiles improved. Not much point focusing on things like speed when some missiles are reaching mach 16, contrasted against the SR-71's mach 3.3. In that context you simply have to pray your counter-measures work, and if that fails, then hope your ejection seat works.
Bullets are slower than the SR-71 - it would shoot itself down if it had a gun.
Newton disproved that more than a century ago.
Did you mean Einstein? But it was only a “thought experiment” …
I was wrong, it was actually already Galilei: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance
who described that a motion happens in relation to its inertial system.
Fact is, the claim that the SR-71 would fly into its own fired bullets is absolutely ludicrous.
« claim … ludicrous » — Without knowing much about physics, I totally agree.
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 :-)
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.
The story is almost certainly a leak. The amateur hour reporting can be ignored.
Clown show is my guess too. There's no utility for it other than rattling windows and other airshow shenanigans for bragging press releases.
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.
> It sounds like a clown-show…
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?
I wish this were the case; if it were for cool points the F-117 would be back!
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...
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.
If you’re gonna have an Air Farce we’ll have to tariff you guys, eh?
Cue video of the helicopter coming to get Clint Eastwood in Firefox!
Come out of retirement for one last job!
> 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.
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.
I bet they're trying to build a 72 but want to instrument a 71 with modern sensors to get there.
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.
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?
The people involved know all about those things, and probably knew them since 10 years old.
Which thing? The steam catapult? Or the shelf life of a titanium airplane that drinks odd fuel?
Heh this sounds like someone’s passion project that is high enough up the food chain to demand it be done. I wouldn’t put it past Trump to flip through some old photos and then order NASA to restore the aircraft. I would take time off work and travel to see an SR-71 fly again but it doesn’t seem like the wisest use of NASA’s already too small budget.
Perhaps part of the plan is to starve NASA of resources. Congress keeps cutting funding for Earth-facing satellites in order to prevent "proof" that global warming exists.
But why? Someone got a woody after seeing topgun darkstar (fair). But why.
While they're at it they should try re-flying the Valkyrie...
Do Aero Arrow next! ;-)
Is this another Four Seasons Total Landscaping or when Tools For Humanity announced a partnership with Bruno Mars instead of Thirty Seconds to Mars?
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.
It's for a new Pepsi promotion
That's a lotta Pepsi points esp. in this economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico%2C_Inc.
They finally going to make good?
About two thirds through the article, I'm getting an utter sense of dread:
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.
You're absolutely right
But, why?
I wish someone would tackle this question; reviving the SR71 seems like a thing for enthusiasts without any imaginable practical purposes
SR-71 stories will always get my upvote! I don't care if my comment gets downvoted but this is my favourite plane and especially the stories that go with it.
The Speed Check story (for today's lucky ten thousand [0] who don't know):
Video
or Text [1]The boomer blew them off, said he's too old to help restore civilization. Kids these days...
Wtf is with that sites do not track!?!! It’s hidden behind an unstyled link to turn off extra trackers…
This super secret plan was "leaked" at the All-In summit run by a group of billionaires who grifted Trump's victory by lying to their audience and appearing on Russia/MAGA channels like The Duran.
Announced 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.
Bet Tom Cruise will be offering to allow him to use it for an upcoming movie thrilla
Top Gun: Blackbird?
More like Mission: Impossible. Replete with a mini-doco about how Tom Cruise literally for reals skydove out of the Blackbird without a chute and landed on the enemy rocket in one take.
That will have to wait until Trump turns his attention to making the CIA "cool" again.
I wouldn’t mind, as long as the plane flies again.
It’s a true marvel of engineering.
Not a trick to make an old plane fly again. The trick is holding it together and landing it.
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.
OTOH, a pilot in their 70’s can be bold and still die of old age.
Sorry, “the rest” is literally “there are no old, bold pilots.”
It'd be incredible to have an SR-71 flying again, just simply __because__!
The new planes (F-35) were supposed to supersede interceptors like the SR-71 (that's their multirole goal). If it can't, this is an embarrassment.
What? The SR-71 was a strategic reconnaissance aircraft. It was not, and never was, an interceptor. And the F-35 was never tasked with replacing an interceptor, but is a slow-ish multirole aircraft with a heavy emphasis on strike capability. And the USAF hasn't had an "interceptor" in decades (single mission, short range, high speed, point defense aircraft).
Makes sense, the SR-71 has never intersected with any interceptor program. And the F-35 is perfect for its role (whatever it is) which is very much relevant for the current theaters. There is no embarrassment whatsoever.
There was a YF-12 interceptor prototype that was a variant of the SR-71 prototype (A-12).