Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
“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 mean if it’s the fastest, why would it really be retired? It’d be like Michael Phelps retiring after his first gold medal.
They are expensive to fly and maintain and their primary purpose as a high-altitude spy plane has been taken over by satellites.
They are still really cool, we just don’t have a good use for them.
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:
I think the most likely explanation is something like this, they want data they can’t otherwise get.
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?
UFOs are most likely manmade, or probably something other-dimensional like angels or demons. The distances in space are too vast for visitors, the idea breaks down in more than one way once you dig into it.
I’m enjoying this - “We’ve learned enough science now that we realize it’s more likely fantasy creatures would be visiting us than that technologically advanced sentients would be traveling interstellar distances to visit.”
That isn’t a terrible representation. And not necessarily unscientific.
What’s really funny is the Blackbird was absolutely the cause of more than a few UFO sightings, some that have been confirmed in hindsight.
We have no way of knowing if they’ve overcome the obstacle of traveling long distances in space.
Yeah but why would they do it to come here? I mean, gestures vaguely at everything
Also, if they were billions of light years away and they looked at our planet from afar, they would see our planet billions of years ago. No reason to visit. What are the chances of a random visit?
Or maybe thats just what they want you to think 🧐
the ol’ reverse psychology
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.
Guy at NASA:
Who cares why - this plane is so fucking awesome it’s an end unto itself.
I agree.
Grandpa watched The Right Stuff last night, for the love of god someone disable his line to the Pentagon.
This is likely the majority of the reason anyway
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.
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
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.
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.
Terrorism is, by definition, by a non state actor. If a government does it, it’s just a war crime.
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.
International airspace isn’t out of bounds when there’s an active conflict going on.
To test against the SR-72.
Nasa’s plan: “Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible.”
I was worried at first, why do they need that right now? But looking over the specs, this would be like taking a classic corvette to a bank robbery. So this is for sure for show and possibly to add more sensors to record data they couldn’t previously record. Me thinks they want to make another that could maybe go to space proper and deploy something.
This is pure speculation, I’m not an expert.
To speculate further, the stated reason for attacking Iran was nuclear weapon development. Perhaps there are sensors to track that, that can’t operate from satellite
If it were about Iranian nuclear weapon development, it wouldn’t be NASA doing the surveillance. Although weather phenomena is in NASA’s purview.
We already had high confidence intel before the war Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But since then, Trump has expressed that a nuke is the only thing he would respect.
If there were, they’d probably be on the U-2.
Whenever nasa’s involved it’s always something to do with airflow dynamics or something. If it was the US military I would assume that though.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re trying to use it to concept test something related to aero for the x-37
We know that NASA is doing research on both supersonic and hypersonic airflow. There are extremely few existing aircraft they could use for hypersonic testing
X-Men did it.
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
Claude, reverse enginer plane, make no mistake.
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.
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?
Manufacturing and design knowledge is mostly lost and rediscovered every few decades by the US. On one project or the other
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 principal either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed
Given the US diet and healthcare system, I’d say many are definitely 6ft under
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.
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.
Vampire on an aircraft carrier.
It’s fun speculation to assume this is for military reasons but remember nasa s a civilian agency. Perhaps it’s connected to their research on supersonic and hypersonic flights
That’s my thought as well, they want data for something they’re building.
