NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
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.
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.
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.