Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
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
Or someone as NASA got a fun project greenlit. They threw it into the budget for the lulz, and it didn’t get cut. 😆
You’re most likely correct. They need a really fast plane to test sonic boom dampening at Mach 3+ speeds, and they can’t build a specialty plane yet.
Something something moon landing something area 51.
NASA, the famously underfunded organization that has to deal with that crap even today is pulling out military stealth fighters.
It’s not a fighter, the SR71 is totally unarmed. The SR stands for Stealth Reconnaissance.
Yeah that’s the important part for sure. 🙄
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.
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.
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?
A famous popstar paid people to smuggle live chickens into his hotel room every night. He paid other people to smuggle them back out.
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
Heck, just touching it destroys it
I wasn’t going to touch it, I was just pointing at it
Well… don’t point!
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.
Say vanta black again
But an unclear coat on it.
Checkmate.
No real reason, they just want to pump more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.
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
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.
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?
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?
Not me personally, we lived off-base and I was only about 12 when we left-- but my folks probably did for sure!
Funnily enough, I’ve been helping them clean out their kitchen so they can have it redone and the sheer volume of old squadron/hangar dance/etc mugs they have absolutely beggars belief. I’d bet there’s one or two in the hoard that corresponds to one of the dances you’re thinking of.
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
Manufacturing and design knowledge is mostly lost and rediscovered every few decades by the US. On one project or the other
Claude, reverse enginer plane, make no mistake.
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
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.
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.
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.
In the words of the nasa director themselves during the keynote speech “Are you sure that the silhouette we showed was an SR-71?”
NYPost
Cursed source
It’s either clickbait or bullshit.
I agree with the skepticism, however this one is being reported by real aviation news sites, Aviation Weekly specifically.
The confirmed news is an SR71 that used to be parked outdoors has been moved.
Investigative journalism and some theorizing goes further, I found The Aviationist article saying “according to Trimble’s reporting, NASA also contacted former members of the SR-71 program to determine whether they would be interested to participate in a potential return-to-flight effort.”
On one hand, this news is really fucking cool!
On the other, the motivation for this is guaranteed to be really fucking dumb!
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.
Cause this plane is so fucking cool ! If only ESA could do the same with Le Concorde
It was economically unviable and by now, woefully technologically outdated.
As a climate-conscious person, the concorde can stay exactly where it is and never move again thank you. That thing burned several times as much kerosene as a standard plane for the same journey with less cargo space, etc
As cool as they are this is the truth. Once spy satellites began transmitting digital images (the first few used film and dropped capsules back to earth to be developed) the SR71 began obsolete and too risky to fly.
Now we have satellites that are constantly observing the “hot spots” around the planet which is safer than having pilots fly across enemy airspace.
My guess is NASA is using these to test supersonic attributes since they have tons of data on the SR71 and NASA is currently developing supersonic planes that don’t create sonic booms.
What’s interesting about supersonic flight is that there’s been some developments on making supersonic flight more fuel efficient.
The F-22’s big strategic advantage is that it can supercruise at Mach 1.5, without afterburners, and although the details are not publicly known, the publicly known facts suggest that it’s about 3x as fuel efficient as the other fighters in the US arsenal.
If they can get supersonic flight to be more fuel efficient, and avoid sonic booms (an active area of research for NASA’s X-59 project), and we develop manufacturing capacity for huge amounts of synthetic sustainable aviation fuel from CO2 and water and green energy, then maybe we’ll be at a place where supersonic commercial flights can be both economically feasible AND environmentally responsible. Probably not in my lifetime, but still something I expect to happen in the next century or so.
That’s a lot of ifs.
And for what it’s worth, the concorde had afterburner-free cruising. It needed them for takeoff only.
And keep in mind that fuel prices are much higher now than in the 90-00s.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).
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
I think I know why…
Bitches love cannons
