Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
Guy at NASA:
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.
Probably because the Pedo-in-Chief saw it in a movie. I swear that’s how he gets some of his stupid fucking ideas-- like the reopening of Alcatraz. You can’t tell me that moron didn’t just finish watching The Rock (nic Cage movie) when he decided that.
Well, Mayday did just come out in September, and that features an SR-71 ish spyplane
Next up: A base in the bermuda triangle
A prison for monsters, run by Amelia Earhart.
That sounds awesome
It’s actually a plot point in the Rick and Morty spin-off “President Curtis.”
His racist sidekick Musk was also obsessed enough to name one of his weird brood after that plane too.
The fun way to watch that movie is from the perspective that it’s really a bond movie that doesn’t focus on Connery
Never heard the Alcatraz one!
Just visited San Francisco for the first time a few weeks ago, and Alcatraz was dope. Thought it’s always been open to the public.
It has been open as a tourist destination, he wants to reopen it as a prison. I went there when I was a kid.
Ohhhh yeah fuck that shit
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.
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.
On one hand, this news is really fucking cool!
On the other, the motivation for this is guaranteed to be really fucking dumb!
There could be some legitimate uses (NASA operates U-2 spy planes over wildfires to this day) but it would not surprise me at all if it is for some dumb reason.
I’m really hoping it’s NASA doing some really cool science shit, otherwise you’d expect a military organisation to be doing this.
They’re conducting on-going research into aircraft designs that can go supersonic without producing a sonic boom (the thing that made supersonic jets impractical for cross-country flights along with the insane about of fuel they burn) so I’d guess they need a reliable supersonic jet to test against.
NASA probably has lots of data on the SR71 so it makes sense to use that to test new concepts on.
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?
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 the only way they can be sure it’s not full of AI slop.
They fired all the people who knew how to build shit and now they are desperately sending a bunch of newbies to “reverse engineer” the plane and try to figure out how it works. /s
Most of the people who knew how to build that plane are dead to be fair
I mean, it’s not that old of an airframe. I’m only middle aged and I saw the last time it flew in 1991. My dad just retired from the FAA a couple years ago and when he was in the military he maintained the flight suits for the SR71 and U2 programs.
The original engineers may have passed, but the crew and engineers responsible for the huge amount of maintenance for the airframe are still around and probably have more functional knowledge about the airframe than the designers.
Edit: 1999 not 1991.
Manufacturing and design knowledge is mostly lost and rediscovered every few decades by the US. On one project or the other
Only a few more years before the mesothelioma takes the last of the maintenance crew, that thing was genuinely filled nose to tail (proverbially, it was actually full of fuel) with asbestos
Seconding this; my dad worked on the U2 for 30-odd years and he’s still kicking!
Oh nice, were you guys stationed out at Beale AFB?
Sorry, I’m terrible about seeing my notifications. Yep, we were at Beale between 94 & 98, but overseas before and after that.
No worries, same here. We were there from 96-00, there’s a good chance we’ve run into each other before! There’s an even better chance that our fathers worked together in some capacity, it was a relatively tiny base and the U2 program was pretty small.
I think Beale was one of my favorite bases I’ve ever lived on, I used to go hiking in the foot hills basically everyday during summer. I feel like it was small and remote enough where you could get into a lot of shit as a kid without ever really getting in any trouble.
By chance did you guys ever go to one of the Christmas parties in the old skunk works building?
Claude, reverse enginer plane, make no mistake.
They would be pretty retired but this probably isn’t that far off…
I like the idea that one becomes more and more retired each year after they stop working.
So Space Cowboys 2, except
- Everybody passes the physicals just fine, but all decide to quit instead of going through the onboarding process
- The young punk bad guys in the movie are secretly trying to get an LLM to redesign it, but can’t because the Blackbird was a skunkworks program and some key
principalprincple either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed
EDIT: Spelling.
Given the US diet and healthcare system, I’d say many are definitely 6ft under
So Fogbank? With only difference being all fogbank engineers dying of old age rather than management incompetence.
Yeah but what everyone forgets is that knowledge can be relearned if you do it right.
And the issue of Fogbank was eventually solved by having modern day scientist study the problem (it was something like contamination of boron being used to make the fogbank material.)
The SR71 could be manufactured today if we wanted to. It wasn’t built with some magical spells that are forever lost to history. There are more people alive now that know how to machine titanium than there were when they built them originally. Its just a matter of investment in the labor and tooling to make them again, which probably isn’t worth it which is why they’ll keep flying the remaining planes.
One of the worse internet “I’m smart” thoughts is that “we’ve lost the ability to make insert outdated item because all that talent is dead.” Ok, so retrain new talent like every generation has to do anyways and maybe next time don’t pinch pennies and shutdown the factory with all these gods of manufacturing, instead bring in apprentices and have them learn from these masters.
But what about the profit margins and the shareholders?!?!? PE firms can’t milk successful companies to death for $$$$ if they actually invest in talent.
Absolutely, and although they did re-invent Fogbank, it took almost 100 millions, makes me wonder what would it cost to keep the knowledge from disappearing in the first place
Nothing about producing nuclear weapons, let alone miniaturized thermo-nuclear devices optimized to get the most efficient reaction during detonation is cheap. And the knowledge wasn’t necessarily lost, that is impossible to determine since we’re dealing with highly classified secrets regarding the construction of a nuclear weapon.
It’s possible that while making fogbank they merely got a contaminated batch of boron. Let’s say, for example, you find your grandma’s recipe for apple pie. But when your mother tastes it she says it’s a little off. You then eventually realize that you used apples that weren’t ripe yet, or that grandma used apples that were beginning to get soft. Thats not really the same as “lost knowledge” it’s more an experience gap.
Clickbait always makes these things sound like we’ve lost this information and now we’re screwed because it can never be relearned and no one knows anything oh no doom and gloom. Truth is lots of knowledge, through-out history, has been “lost” and then “rediscovered” primarily because this info becomes less valued/important and eventually someone needs it again so they rediscover it. Happened alot with mathematical theories and concepts, like calculus.
No one wants to lose knowledge but no one wants to pay to keep it alive the proper way (master/apprentice system that ensures these tricks of the trade are continually passed on) so we favor a system where specialized experts (scientists) are called in to solve these issues and rediscover the tricks of the trade using the scientific process. Either way you pay for the knowledge but we wanted to save money and shutter a bunch of cold-war era defense companies when the cold-war ended. The consequences of that are when you want to resume making nuclear weapons of the quality America demands you have to hire those scientists to figure out all the pesky details like fogbank.
Makes sense. Also agree on the last part
Based on their work on the X-59, I wonder if they just want to collect sensor data on its sonic boom characteristics, and feed that into a model for sonic booms.
They don’t need to be able to build something in order to be able to learn something from that thing in operation.
“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.
I like its lines, but realistically, I don’t know what you’d use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.
We know, from Trump’s probably-ill-advised tweet back in 2019, that we can do 10-centimeter resolution from reconaissance satellites like USA-224, near the physical limitations of light resolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224
Perigee altitude: 270 kilometers (170 mi)[1]
Apogee altitude: 986 kilometers (613 mi)[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
During missions, the SR-71 operated at high speeds and altitudes (Mach 3.2 at 85,000 ft or 26,000 m)
The SR-71 operates at a tenth to a thirtieth USA-224’s altitude, so assuming comparable imaging systems (which I could believe) and that there aren’t stability or thermal issues (which I’d be less-certain of) it can get ten to thirty times the resolution of a KH11 satellite from the lower altitude. I’m not sure how much utility there is in reconnaissance to getting 1 cm or ⅓ cm resolution images instead of 10 cm.
I can think of a couple of reasons to use the SR-71 again.
- Concern that a crash in space could lead to a cascade of crashes, disabling all sattellites.
- (On demand) capacity. I could imagine that the SR-71 can cover an unplanned spot faster than sattellites. Also, with the wars in Ukraine and Iran they’re maybe finding out that they don’t have enough imaging capacity.
- The imaging angle, a plane can image almost horizontally, they can look under bridges, through windows etc.
- A ten times increased resolution could be useful for recognizing details, maybe it’s even good enough to recognize people though it might be pushing the limits of facial recognition. It’s also the kind of resolution where they can read some text, e.g. identifyers on shipping containers or military vehicles.
the sr-71 is definitely not a scramble-able plane:
- it leaks fuel when on the ground (it shrinks when cold) so it’s stored empty,
- it’s as aerodynamic as a brick when subsonic so it needs an insanely long runway, and
- it has an always-on afterburner so it burns an alarming amount of fuel.
when they were doing surveys of iraq during desert storm they had to field a fleet of eight tanker planes over the indian ocean just so the damn thing would make it from japan to the gulf.
Edit: oh and those are specially designed tanker planes because of course it uses JP-7 so they needed separate tanks for that and their own fuel. they also needed to be able to refuel at like 850km/h or the blackbird would just drop out of the sky.
love that plane.
Iirc it starts nearly empty and is only fueled up in the air, so basically no way around tanker planes.
that’s apparently not true, it would take off with half fuel because the landing gear could buckle under the full weight.
even with a full tank it could only go for about 90 minutes though so anything nontrivial did indeed require a tanker.
nearly empty
half fuel
I’m sure a skilled politician could sell this as being basically the same ;)
still faster than launching a new satellite
we have over 15 thousand of the things up there now, surely someone must have seen something
Can’t they do all that with drones?
You need to deliver the drones to the location of interest though. And regularly bring fresh ones I guess. A stealthy and fast as fuck delivery platform would make sense.
I don’t think the SR-71 has much cargo space if that’s what you’re suggesting.
Imagining an SR-71 crewmember now opening a little hatch and awkwardly shoving little drones out, to see them instantly torn apart in the winds at the slowest speed it can go, 850 km/h.
realistically, I don’t know what you’d use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.
Well, what does NASA do?
I think it’s a pretty safe bet that NASA wants it to test something about aerodynamics at extremely high speeds. Perhaps they want it to deploy some experiment at mach 3. Sometimes you just don’t know if your simulation models are correct, and you need to try something in the real world.
I suppose it’s also possible they want it to get some close up footage of a rocket during launch or reentry.
But I think the most likely answer is still that they just need something that goes very fast.
The thing is sounding rockets do exactly that and are still in service (vs somehow unfucking an ancient plane that hasn’t been serviced in decades with tooling that no longer exists) and there are multiple companies out there operating supersonic drones for high speed tests of whatever you wanna do.
I dont see the value in bringing the blackbird back into service. I think its more likely that they want to freshen up the paint and park it at some press conference / event.
Well, you can control your airspeed and attitude in an airplane, solid rockets just make a ballistic arch and they only accelerate, they can’t maintain a speed.
So if you want to test how air behaves in a particular regime, you can’t actually maintain that regime with a sounding rocket, so the best you can get is a snapshot.
Honestly, if what they’re working on is dialing-in their computer models, the more precise data they can get, the better. It makes sense to maintain a speed for a minute, so you can get a really good running average on your measurements of air pressure, heating, drag, etc. They may want to conduct the same tests at different altitudes and airspeeds, and probably all in level flight. To control all those factors, that’s near impossible to do with a rocket.
Again, I don’t know what they’re doing, what their actual plans are. I’m just saying there are absolutely plausible reasons to use this aircraft.
Satellites are too predictable, plus too infrequent. If there are two spy satellites that cover Iran, for example, Iran can easily know when and what direction, then presumably take some effort to cover whatever they want to hide.
A reconnaissance plane can show up without warning, any time, loiter for at least minutes, take pictures from different angles, in addition to sharper imaging. We can speculate they may also have sharper non-optical imaging, such as thermal or radar
Ok, but what if there are several satellites that cover iran at all times? What if they would need to hide from most directions all of the time? Because I think that’s basically the situation right now. The whole world is being monitored from multiple angles all of the time by several different governments. At that point, reconnaissance aircraft in general seem a little redundant.
I think the only real utility they offer is the ability to swap out sensors between flights and upgrade old cameras to the new cutting edge options whenever they’re available.
My money’s on hegseth wants the sonic booms when he’s giving a speech about how manly the army is. Considering they have that unmanned x-37B for spy satellite stuff, and it would be a massive amount of money to bring back the blackbird, while NASA is having its budget cut, it is 100% going to be for some self serving promotion.
I would just like to point out that while not confirmed, it has been speculated since the mid-2000s that the actual imaging resolution of the satellites is closer to 2mm. Or as the joke goes, we’ll figure out what brand of cigarettes you smoke by reading the filter.
I would say that that’s purely speculation. Physics won’t allow it. The diffraction limit basically limits the best resolution to about 10 cm (assuming an altitude of 200 km, blue light and a humongously large lens with a diameter of 1 m). It’s likely that they’re quite close to the diffraction limit and maybe they have even more extreme hardware than I would guess, but a two orders of magnitude better resolution isn’t happening anytime soon I think.
This is not my area of expertise at all. With that said, multi spectrum multilens sub visible light sensor array.
NASA flies U-2 spy planes over wildfires. They might be able to do the same thing with the SR-71. I really don’t know, that’s my best guess for a realistic use case.
The reason they got rid of surveillance jets is that satellites can do it without any risk to a pilot and on a 24 hr basis.
Perhaps they’ve decided that satellites can’t be relied on. Kessler syndrome contingency?
During the Cold War, it had to overfly Russian airspace to be able to see far enough. They were within their rights to shoot at unauthorized aircraft in their airspace.
However, it could see a lot higher percentage of Iran without overflying, and Iran can’t legally shoot at something in international airspace
International airspace isn’t out of bounds when there’s an active conflict going on.
Blackbird didn’t overly the USSR. The U2 did, and they learned the hard way that Soviet missiles went a lot higher than anyone thought.
Good point - I’m probably remembering fiction, but also Soviet Union attempting to target the aircraft
…. And we have the incidents of overflying Swedish airspace, and I think Danish
Any country involved in a shooting war is within their rights to shoot at any object they have reason to believe is a military target, regardless of where that object is.
Outside their airspace, in international waters, inside another country, on the fucking Moon - the limits are technological, not legal.
If the object isn’t a military target, then they aren’t within their rights to shoot at it no matter where it is. Not that that has stopped attacks on civilians in the past (e.g. Russian ballistic missile attacks on apartment blocks, US drone strikes of fishing boats), only that the laws of war forbid such things.
I chuckled the other day when I heard that the planned attack on the UK airbase used by the US for attacks on Iran, is being blamed on Iran, and also being called terrorism.
I don’t think it’s terrorism when it’s a legitimate military target that takes place during war time. While it is possible for terrorism to exist during a war (you know, something like bombing schools, hospitals, residences, etc), an attack on an enemy’s base doesn’t fit.
All the Arab countries condemning Iran for attacking US bases and US military personnel conducting the war on Iran from their land is just as comical.
Terrorism is, by definition, by a non state actor. If a government does it, it’s just a war crime.
Didn’t you hear? The war is over. We “won”…… TACO sez, “ I didn’t say it, I declared it”
You can’t visually see over the horizon and even then you have blocked lines of sight, etc. A satellite has no such restrictions.
Satellites do have such restrictions. While you may expect the angle to be higher than for an aircraft, a satellite will not be directly overhead most of the earth. You’re still limited by angle and shadow, as well as time and frequency. Unless the target is high enough priority to reposition the satellite, it will be an oblique angle at a predictable time. While that angle will on average be higher than an aircraft, the aircraft can find different angles, at different times, with as much frequency as you like.
Perhaps some things are more visible to an aircraft from the east than a satellite from the north, or perhaps the target has camouflage procedures at the known satellite schedule but an aircraft is more likely to catch them operating
The biggest issue with satellites is they are on a schedule. The soviets knew the schedule and would move things like trucks around when they knew it wasn’t overhead.
You might like this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Black_(book) It goes into detail on the keyhole satellite program and such. He says he used publicly available info and so couldn’t be accused of violating classified restrictions.
Thanks. I’ll take a look for it. Not listed as an e-book at my library so I might have to look for a physical copy
The thing they aren’t mentioning is that the only reason to try and take a sixty year old plane out of mothballs is that they can’t make them anymore.
They’ve been superceded. Any military role they had is now done better and safer by satellites.
Unless you want to study a flight of a fast moving object in the atmosphere (something NASA may want to do as a research agency) there is no need for the SR71.
Sure, they thought they didn’t need the capability anymore, that satellites would keep making it more and more obsolete and here we are, when they realize those satellites will last as long as it takes for a missile or hunter killer to intercept it in a real peer nation war.
And now they’re finding out the factory that provided the titanium or polycarbonate whatever got moved to Beijing in 2004.
That or this is all a very stupid PR stunt, or they just wanted to strip it for parts, who the hell knows?
Shit, if you told me Trump just sold it to the Saudis and pocketed the cash that’s believable too.
And now they’re finding out the factory that provided the titanium or polycarbonate whatever got moved to Beijing in 2004.
Not really. The USA still leads the way in manufacturing high end aerospace stuff and machining titanium.
The reason the SR71 production line closed down was cause the government contract for them ended decades ago. Give the aerospace companies a new billion dollar contract and they’ll crank out as many SR71’s as you want. We do that with the 6th generation jets and they’ve done a pretty good job of fulfilling those orders.
China is leader of the consumer grade manufacturing sector, no question of that, and I would say they’re catching up. But the USA still has a sizable manufacturing base and whats left are niches like aerospace and medical.
There are plenty of reasons to take one out,
They could be doing non destructive testing on it
They could have a hypothesis on how some phenonomen works and want to do a test on an already built product vs spending billions on a new product
They could be working on a similar design and the original drawings (hand drawn) have an inconsistency that they want to compare to the real product
it’s not like they are sending it on spy missions again, it’s nasa wanting to see it and it’s also possible they don’t even NEED the blackbird but a bunch of aerospace nerds found an excuse to pull out a plane that’s considered one of the coolest planes of all time
All the titanium for the current ones came from Russia. They’re even harder to trade with now than they were in the cold war
We didn’t directly trade with them then, and we wouldn’t now. If the government wanted it, they’d just do the same thing and use intermediary countries and shell companies.
But you could sell the titanium and buy gold ornaments at Home Depot.
That was during the cold war in the 60s and 70s things are different now. I am not sure how different, but they are.
In the words of the nasa director themselves during the keynote speech “Are you sure that the silhouette we showed was an SR-71?”
