Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
OK - so, Trump thinks they are cool and wants them back in action despite having better technology already in place. This tracks because of his dumb Trump-class battleship in development, which will be closed down soon after being commissioned because it’s a dumb idea.
It’s like the entire US government is running a Make a Wish foundation scheme for Trump.
Let’s hope you’re right. Because of the implication.
It’s sad that that is the most likely explanation. No grand strategic vision, no plan, just being nostalgic for the eighties.
sixties
iirc they still were flying in the 80s
true
The man tweets everything that comes into his head. If Trump came up with this, he’d have told everyone.
He probably saw X-Men on cable or something.
I love the blackbird / a-12 / yf-12 family. They’re truly the pinnacle of pre-computerized engineering in many ways. Most of the design was completed before 1960 - a mach 3 aircraft, made with slide rules and deeeeep institutional knowledge. People joked that Kelly Johnson could see air, he was so good at designing aircraft and anticipating problems.
that said: why bring it back?
it’s gotta be a successor - I don’t know if we could bring the airframes back to operational status, and the fuel situation is wacky. does anyone even make jp7 anymore? panther piss?
and even if you could bring it back to operational status, and supply the specialized tankers (most tankers fuel from a common supply they run off of, but the jp7 carrying tankers for the sr-71 have a separate tank just for the blackbird) and train everyone up, the blackbird is visible from hundreds of miles away on modern radar. It was stealthier than most of it’s peers but never a stealth aircraft like the f117.
This all tells me: it’s gotta be a new toy.
Just remember NASA are the ones doing this, not the air force. I don’t think they want to use it as a spy plane, and if they were designing a successor, you’d expect it to be the air force, or someone like DARPA doing this.
yet another reason to not bring the sr71 back - nasa used them for decades for testing, dunno what else they’d need it for.
Did they? Never knew that. I’ll take your word for it as well.
yep used it to test aerospike ramjets iirc
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/nasa-sr-71-blackbird-844-comeback/
Thank you and thanks for the good read
Testing for something or other.
They’ve done this before. It’s not new to NASA
NASA has always been into atmospheric research and vehicle design. Pulling out a SR-71 is going to be faster and cheaper than building a new thing and they have a history of using hand-me-downs. I’m glad they are doing stuff, though this administration is probably focused more on “coolness” and bribes for profits. Getting the Blackbird is cool and the secrecy could be actual national security or free research for a buddy. I’d love to see more long lead space projects, deep space probes, inner planet landings, and outer planet orbiters.
Yeah it doesn’t surprise me, they’ve done this before and it’s no surprise they won’t say why.
Tbh I was surprised they didn’t take them after the military was finished with them, there’d be no better high speed platform to use.
They did keep one for quite a while.
NASA is researching quieter supersonic flight, and I can’t help but think of how the (also Lockheed Martin) X-59-
-has a extreme wing profile/nose, not unlike SR-71:
8700 lbs max doesn’t seem like a lot, are they counting on the parabola for most of the acceleration I wonder?
Its not very big. 8700 lb of fuel is 25% of its MGDW, which seems pretty normal to me?
I think the most likely explanation is something like this, they want data they can’t otherwise get.
Machine learning + fluid dynamics?
Turbulence at the trans-sonic barrier is one of the most difficult and poorly understood problems in modeling even today - Heisenberg famously said he’d ask god two questions: why relativity, and why turbulence? - and as a result experimental results really are the best way of determining even the base parameters of the behavior of a system under those conditions.
How can it be the fastest plane if it’s not even painted red?
It’s really really really really really dark red
The first one was red but once they got everything right, they would just make photocopies every time a new one was needed. And as we all know, red ink comes out black in copies.
My friend has the red one in his garage. They let him have it because he saved Obama’s life once.
They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.
It’s painted with the intention of redness.
It’s the only way they can be sure it’s not full of AI slop.
“If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen,” he told Aviation Week. “They went to the Moon, you know.”
That is SO funny.
In the words of the nasa director themselves during the keynote speech “Are you sure that the silhouette we showed was an SR-71?”
The NY Post is a diseased maga rag and should never be used as a source.
Do you know how hard it is to find a concise article about this that isn’t paywalled?
is archive.ph an option for paywall problems?
I guess we can put to rest the idea that the US government has successfully reverse engineered UFOs. Because if they had, there would be absolutely no need to do this if we could fly anywhere in the world in minutes or seconds and invisibly.
Maybe they have done that, they’re just really slow, and not actually any better than what we have?
Or maybe thats just what they want you to think 🧐
the ol’ reverse psychology
Who cares why - this plane is so fucking awesome it’s an end unto itself.
Grandpa watched The Right Stuff last night, for the love of god someone disable his line to the Pentagon.
No, “grandpa” grew up reading the X-Men and later learned what a marvelous piece of extreme engineering this plane actually is. I’ve seen variants at aerospace museums. They are truly beautiful to behold.
This is likely the majority of the reason anyway
I agree.
Don’t you guys see it: If really crazy stuff happens and satellites are taken out of the sky, youre going to see to do some old-school reconnaissance.
It’s just trump living in the past we have drones now even if satellites were taken out
If that was the reason, wouldn’t it be the USAF and not NASA pulling them out of retirement?
boomer nostalgia is a disease, and it isn’t more complicated than that
lawl as long as you got your hate in, which isn’t an addiction, btw, all good
I understand that you think recognizing the impact of boomer culture on our society is ‘hate’, but also maybe you’re just mad.
I don’t hate the boomers, not anymore.
That doesn’t mean that boomer nostalgia isn’t a disease.
While there’s truth there, the SR-71 still holds the records for highest sustained speed and altitude of any publicly-known air-breathing aircraft 60 years after they were adopted.
I wonder what would happen if you painted a blackbird with Vantablack paint?
If it flew at night would you be able to see it?
Would it stand out as darker than the darkness?
Vantablack is quite fragile and would quickly disintegrate at high speeds
Put a clear protective coat on it
Then it’s not venta black anymore and will have a glossy coating. Part of what makes venta black venta black is the matte texture of it. Slapping a clear coat on top of that now makes the surface shiny and reflective, so now some of the light isn’t being absorbed by the venta black paint. And now you’ve ruined the point of venta black, and it’s no longer venta black.
But an unclear coat on it.
Checkmate.
A matte clear coat
Say vanta black again
Heck, just touching it destroys it
Perhaps NASA is doing it to make a trophy that might impress the imbecile emperor in hopes of securing funding for space science.
Like in Rainbow Mars when the Time Travel Bureau has to go on safari to capture extinct pets for their imbecile emperor.
Is that an actual movie? Sounds like the sequel to Idiocracy. Or a sequel to current real world events. I’ve been having trouble telling apart these things.
Rainbow Mars is the title of both a short story and the collection of short stories that contains it.