Aviation is one of the great wonders of the world. Humans figured out how to roughly replicate what birds do naturally, and then it wasn’t long before we started making powered flight ridiculously fast. One of history’s most famous hot rods is the SR-71 “Blackbird,” which set an absolute speed record for jet-powered aircraft of 2,193.167 mph in 1976. The last Blackbird flew in 1999, but now, after 27 years on static display outdoors, the whole aircraft has disappeared, sparking rumors about a potential NASA secret project to bring it back. Supporting this rumor is a report that NASA has been trying to get a gang of SR-71 engineers back together, and oh my, I’m not sure I’ve rooted for a government project harder than I am right now.
Aviation fans have been captivated by some truly bizarre news circulating in the media right now. On September 24, Aviation Week reported that after 27 years of static display, a Lockheed SR-71A was removed from public display at the Neil Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in California. NASA has been quiet about the whole thing, which has led to aviation fans letting their imaginations run wild.
The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” is one of history’s most iconic aircraft. Developed as a long-range and high-altitude supersonic strategic reconnaissance aircraft during the Cold War, the Blackbird is famed for its ridiculous speed. This is an aircraft that tears across the sky at 85,000 feet and three times the speed of sound. To put that into perspective, the aircraft could survey 100,000 square miles of the planet per hour. Just a little over 50 years ago, the Blackbird also set a speed record that no jet-powered aircraft has been able to beat since.
The Blackbird is one of those planes that captures the imagination of all aviation fans, regardless of whether they care about mil-spec hardware or not. Understandably, people want to know just what NASA wants to do with a plane that has no airworthy examples, essentially no replacement parts, and so many of the people who worked on it have been retired for a while. But as Aviation Week reported today, it appears that NASA is fishing for folks who used to work on the SR-71. There’s a potentially good reason why NASA wants to get the gang back together.
Why The SR-71 Was Built
The SR-71’s story has been told perhaps a million times throughout history, and Lockheed Martin is a great resource to help bring you up to speed. From Lockheed:
Gary Powers’ U-2 aircraft was disabled. Hit by Soviet surface-to-air missiles, the plane fell from 70,000 feet to 30,000 feet before Powers could release himself and bail out of the damaged cockpit. It was May 1, 1960, and the Cold War was heating up. At Lockheed’s advanced development group, the Skunk Works in Burbank, work had already begun on an innovative aircraft to improve intelligence-gathering, one that would fly faster than any aircraft before or since, at greater altitude, and with a minimal radar cross section. President Eisenhower deeply valued the strategic benefits of the U-2’s airborne reconnaissance during these tense Cold War times. And now the call came from Lockheed’s customer in Washington to build the impossible – an aircraft that can’t be shot down – and do it fast.
Kelly Johnson, one of the preeminent aircraft designers of the twentieth century, and his Skunk Works team had a track record of delivering “impossible” technologies on incredibly short, strategically critical deadlines. The U-2 was but one example. The group was known for its unfailing sense of duty, its creativity in the face of a technological challenge and its undaunted perseverance. This new aircraft was in a different category from anything that had come before. “Everything had to be invented. Everything,” Johnson recalled. He committed Skunk Works to succeed in its toughest assignment to date: to have the innovative, challenging, envelope-bursting aircraft flying in a mere twenty months.
The speed of the new aircraft was to exceed 2,000 mph. Other planes of the era could, in theory, approximate that speed but only in short, after-burner-driven bursts. This new plane needed to maintain a record-setting speed for hours at a time. At such velocity, friction with the atmosphere generates temperatures that would melt the conventional airframe.
According to Lockheed, in summer 1943, the U.S. Army Air Tactical Service Command met with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation with a demand for a jet-powered fighter. In the United Kingdom, the Gloster Meteor took its first flight in March of that year, becoming the very first successful British jet fighter. It would go on to be the only jet-powered fighter in the Allies to engage in combat in World War II.
Germany was ahead of the Allies in this regard. Back in 1942, a Messerschmitt Me 262 took to the sky under jet power, becoming the world’s first operational jet fighter aircraft. The Me 262 would become known as being the most advanced fighter in the war.
America would put forth its own valiant effort into jet power. Lockheed engineer Clarence “Kelly” L. Johnson gathered a team and, together, they would design and build the XP-80 Shooting Star in 143 days, or seven less than was required by the Army. The Skunk Works would have its hands in so many projects, including the F-117 Nighthawk, the F-22 Raptor, the U-2 “Dragon Lady,” and more. Lockheed continues about the team’s work on the SR-71:
With anticipated temperatures on the aircraft’s leading edges exceeding 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, dealing with the heat raised a host of seemingly insurmountable design and material challenges. Titanium alloy was the only option for the airframe —providing the strength of stainless steel, a relatively light weight, and durability at the excessive temperatures. Titanium, however, proved to be a particularly sensitive material from which to build an airplane. The brittle alloy shattered if mishandled, which meant great frustration on the Skunk Works assembly line, and new training classes for Lockheed’s machinists. Conventional cadmium-plated steel tools, it was soon learned, embrittled the titanium on contact; so new tools were designed and fabricated—out of titanium.
While friction would generate incredible heat at the leading edges of the aircraft, the ambient temperature outside the cockpit window would be -60 degrees Fahrenheit. Skunk Works’ Ben Rich spent untold hours tackling the problem of how heat could be dissipated across the entire airframe. Then he recalled a simple lesson from one of his university courses: Black paint both emits and absorbs heat. The aircraft was painted black, and soon earned its name: “Blackbird.” The original Blackbird was designated the A-12 and made its first flight on April 30, 1962. The single-seat A-12 soon evolved into the larger SR-71, which added a second seat for a Reconnaissance Systems Officer and carried more fuel than the A-12. The SR-71’s first flight was on December 22, 1964.
Reducing the size of the Blackbird’s radar image meant an even further reduction in the likelihood that the plane would be perceived and shot down. Though the initial test results were good, rumors of Soviet radar advances led the U.S. government to ask for an even smaller radar profile. Surfaces had to be redesigned to avoid reflecting radar signals, the engines moved to a subtler mid-wing position, and a radar-absorbing element was added to the paint. Then a full-scale model of the Blackbird was hoisted on a pylon for radar testing at a Skunk Works’ secret location in the Nevada desert. With tests carefully scheduled to avoid Soviet satellite observations, the results were impressive: The Blackbird model, more than 100 feet in length, would appear on Soviet radar as bigger than a bird but smaller than a man. The team had succeeded in reducing radar cross section by 90 percent.
A Real Muscle Plane
Lockheed notes that the SR-71 wasn’t just good at being a secret spy aircraft, as it was a total hot rod. At its peak, the SR-71A variant of the Blackbird had a pair of Pratt & Whitney J58/JT11D-20K turbojets that produced 34,000 pounds of thrust each when in afterburner. On July 20, 1963, the Blackbird achieved sustained flight at Mach 3 at an altitude of 78,000 feet.
Lockheed says that, at such speed, the aircraft covers 3,000 feet of ground per second. Pilots learn how to navigate through visual references when conditions permit. I know how to identify where I am by looking for Illinois’ Fox River, water towers, or the hospital near my local airport. I can also follow the roads I know. That’s essentially impossible when you’re covering more than a mile every two seconds. So, Blackbird pilots had to navigate by looking for much larger references, like the coasts, mountains, or very large bodies of water; places that’ll remain in view for longer than a handful of seconds.
That speed was mind-boggling, too. In 1974, a Blackbird set a record for the fastest flight between London and New York, which took only 1 hour, 54 minutes, and 56 seconds. In 1976, a Blackbird broke the record for sustained altitude in horizontal flight at 85,069 feet. That same day, a different Blackbird tore across the sky at Mach 3.3, or a calculated 2,193.2 mph. The Blackbird became the highest-flying and absolute fastest air-breathing manned jet, a record that remains unbroken today. The only planes that are faster are powered by rockets, don’t have a crew, or are Space Shuttles.
A total of 32 Blackbirds were built until 1968. That last aircraft was a pairing of a YF-12A tail and the front fuselage of an SR-71A, creating the one-off SR-71C. But the last SR-71 built on the line was USAF serial number 61-7980, which was flown by NASA as tail number 844. This Blackbird, which was completed in 1967, was fitted with a pair of Pratt & Whitney J58 turbojets, producing 32,500 pounds of thrust each.
Why NASA Wants Serious Speed
Tail 844 arrived at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California (today the Armstrong Flight Research Center) to do the kind of research that only an aircraft with some serious altitude and speed can do. NASA notes a few of the aircraft’s projects:
One of the first major experiments flown on the NASA SR-71 involved a laser air-data sensor. The sensor used laser light instead of air pressure to generate airspeed and attitude data such as angle-of-attack and sideslip, data normally obtained with small tubes and vanes extending into the airstream or from tubes with flush openings on an aircraft’s outer skin. These flights also provided information on the presence of atmospheric particles at altitudes above 80,000 feet, where future hypersonic aircraft will operate. The system used six sheets of laser light projected from the bottom of the airplane. As microscopic-size atmospheric particles passed between the two beams, direction and speed were measured and processed into standard speed and attitude references. An earlier laser air-data measurement system was successfully tested at Dryden on a modified F-104 testbed aircraft.
The first of a series of flights using the SR-71 as a science camera platform for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, was flown in March 1993. From the nose bay of the aircraft, an upward-facing ultraviolet video camera recorded data on celestial objects in wavelengths blocked to ground-based astronomers by Earth’s atmosphere. In another project, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles used the SR-71 to investigate the use of charged chlorine atoms to protect and rebuild the ozone layer.
[…]
In 1997 and 1998 the SR-71 carried the NASA/Lockheed Martin Linear Aerospike SR-71 Experiment (LASRE). The LASRE test apparatus was a half-span scale model of a lifting body with eight thrust cells of a linear aerospike engine, mounted on the back of an SR-71 aircraft during flight at high speeds and altitudes. Outfitted with the test fixture, the aircraft operated like a kind of flying wind tunnel that allowed engineers to gather aerodynamic data under realistic flight conditions.
NASA also used Tail 844 to research ways to reduce the sonic booms heard on the ground during supersonic flight. The Air Force would briefly reactivate 844 as part of its inventory in 1995. Then, on October 9, 1999, the SR-71 program came to an end when 844 made its final flight. Since then, the aircraft has been on public display outside at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. That was until it seemingly randomly disappeared sometime during the spring of this year.
The rumor mill has been running at full speed ever since Aviation Week broke the news of the plane’s disappearance on September 24. One of the most exciting theories has been that NASA is bringing the aircraft back to life. As The War Zone reports, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has been talking about rebuilding NASA’s X-plane experimental aircraft fleet to have more go-fast planes than just the X-59.
NASA’s old X-planes were the fastest aircraft in the world, and they date back to 1947 with the Bell X-1 (above), which was the first plane to break the sound barrier. Also in NASA’s setlist of super-fast planes is the North American X-15, the rocket plane that holds the record of being the absolute fastest crewed plane that isn’t a Space Shuttle. The X-15 most famously screeched across the sky to 4,519 mph in 1967.
The aviation world has seen renewed interest in supersonic flight, and some of NASA’s current research surrounds the Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst (below), which made its first flight in 2025. This aircraft’s mission is to evaluate the possibility of supersonic flight without sonic booms heard on the ground. It makes sense that NASA wants more X-planes in the sky.
Now, these cryptic statements don’t actually prove anything. The SR-71 could have been removed from display for maintenance, or maybe it will be moved to indoor storage. Likewise, there’s a possibility that the aircraft could be used for research into a new plane, rather than restored to operational condition. Aircraft that sit on display are sometimes temporarily removed for a cosmetic restoration, to be replaced with another aircraft for display, or some other totally boring reason.
NASA Might Be Bringing The Blackbird Back
Then, today, Aviation Week wrote a wild story that suggests that, hold on, the people who had the crazy theories about NASA trying to revive SR-71A 844 might be true. From Aviation Week:
Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago. The assignment: Help put a former NASA-operated Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air after a nearly 27-year hiatus. Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight. “I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”
It appears NASA is going to try.
[…]
Aviation Week confirmed that the agency approached Relja, Tim Conners, another former NASA SR-71A test engineer and others over the summer with job offers to work on the return-to-flight project for Tail No. 844. In meetings with the prospective rehires, Ash brushed aside all questions about why NASA wanted to go to the effort and expense of putting the Mach 3-capable SR-71A back in flight.
This just boggles the mind. It’s hard enough to wake a piston aircraft from a decades-long slumber. This SR-71A is 59 years old, hasn’t flown for 27 years, and has sat outside the entire time. Aviation Week notes that, when in service, spare SR-71A engines had to be run at least once every 180 days. These have sat for 27 years without being touched, and it’s unlikely they’ve even been lubricated. Making matters worse is that, in 2007, the Air Force and NASA destroyed $600 million in spare SR-71A parts after it probably seemed unlikely that the SR-71 program would ever be relaunched.
The SR-71A even used a special JP-7 jet fuel, had unique ground service equipment, and had distinctive fluids. The carts that NASA and the Air Force used to service the wings and the engines just don’t exist anymore.
All of these, from the parts and carts to the fuel and oils, would need to be recreated or substituted. That doesn’t mention what work the airframe itself would need after sitting in the open air for 27 years. Yet, as Aviation Week reports, NASA apparently thinks it can overcome all of this with engineering. There’s also another way, as spare parts could come from SR-71As living in museums. From Aviation Week:
Conners, a former colleague of Relja, tells Aviation Week that he turned down an offer to return to the SR-71A program, despite his hopes that it will succeed. Conners shares many of Relja’s concerns about feasibility.
“My first thought was, ‘My god, I would drop everything’” to help NASA achieve its goal, Conners says. “My second thought was, ‘How in the world are they going to do it?’” But he thought of a few possible solutions to the spare parts problem. Dozens of retired Blackbirds adorn flight museums across the U.S. and in the UK. Nine flew to their final destinations, so their engines are parked with those aircraft on museum display. “Those subsystems could be cannibalized,” Conners says.
Despite its pioneering design and still-unmatched performance even 60 years later, Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works, led by Kelly Johnson, produced an aircraft with an elegantly simple approach to electronics and key subsystems. “The architecture was as simple as they could make it,” Conners says.
Weirdly, NASA has been rather quiet and secretive about all this, even after Aviation Week‘s report. NASA has not yet returned my own request for comment.
Still, it does seem like NASA really wants to get the SR-71A flying again. That’s just ridiculous, silly, and impractical, and I’m here for it. The more logical reason to have pulled the SR-71A off display would have been to clean it up, or maybe study it for a future project. But I won’t complain about NASA taking the craziest possible route. Hey, NASA put humans on the Moon a handful of times, what’s getting a plane back into the air? If NASA needs a test pilot, I happen to know someone who has enough of a need for speed to gloss over the fact that this thing would probably be the NASA equivalent of every YouTuber’s car revival project.
Top Graphic Image: NASA
“Just a little over 50 years ago, the Blackbird also set a speed record that no jet-powered aircraft has been able to beat since.”
Isn’t it more the case that satellites, AI technology, and half a century of improved military capability across the board, mean that nobody needs or wants a machine that can beat this specific metric?
Yeah. The original temporary retirement and the permanent retirement were both famously due to political mudslinging and they probably would have been helpful if we had gotten one or two going just a few years later just like they probably would have been during Desert Storm, but I cannot imagine a cheap drone launched out of any of the countless airbases around the United States (or the super fancy stealth drone that has been rumored existed for the past 20 years) cannot exceed any capabilities the SR-71 once had which satellites still cannot do.
Sorry, but I can’t support this “Hey now, it’s 2026” stuff. The current frontline of military technology (drone warfare in Ukraine) is just WWI trench battles with modified children’s toys. That half-century of development has often resulted in stagnation if not regression. May the deity of one’s choice save them from believing in the superiority of current technology rather than demanding better versions of it.
One of the frostiest jokes of the Cold War was the unofficial slogan of the Minuteman missile: “World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less, or your next one is free.” Being able to put actual humans in a place with tremendous speed is a worthy capability. One of the biggest problems with the fantastic promise of AI is that it puts all the eggs in all the baskets. Firewalling is important. Distributed systems are key to a secure future. Analog alternatives are worth preserving.
The current frontline of military technology has been what has turned the half century of development on its head.
Nobody should be committed to buying $35 million attack helicopters long term and putting people with years of expensive training in them to fly if a guy with a controller that looks like it connects to an Xbox can drop one with a kamikaze drone that costs less to build than it costs to fly that chopper for a few hours (tanks are a somewhat shaky proposition too). Shooting multimillion dollar SAMs that take two years to make at incoming drones that cost as much as a Corolla and are thrown together in a month isn’t math that can keep mathing forever (assuming they are even working well in that role to begin with). Hell, the past 30 year US military doctrine of lobbing cruise missiles at a country in a shock and awe operation has shown to not accomplish much of anything if the country has been preparing for that exact thing for decades and can spool up enough of a long range deterrent that there’s hesitance to come any closer than the range of those cruise missiles.
Reactivating extremely expensive maintenance intensive planes that have been rotting away in museums for nearly three decades to continue fulfilling a role they had questionable utility at in the 1980s is very much in the “stagnation and regression” pile, if that is the plan.
Or – now stay with me here – in the midst of such an effort, engineers and techs refurbish a particular system or component, and have a light bulb moment of, “Hey, wait a minute – if they used to do THAT like THIS, then by now, I’ll bet we could take that and…” And a brand new technology is born.
Such an effort to what, though? I already noted the fact that there may very well be a reason to pull it from a museum to investigate something about it, whatever that may be. How it has deteriorated maybe, or whether there’s something of value in the planes that can be salvaged that isn’t of value when it’s sitting in a museum, or whatever. That’s altogether different from trying to reactivate one of them and get it flying again. If that is the case the question shifts to who is doing so. I can plausibly believe that NASA could find value in doing so because they didn’t use them for the same thing that the Air Force did.
But in response to a comment that seemed to be suggesting that the SR-71 being gone leaves some sort of capability gap in military use that we’ve gotten along without since 1998 across 3 wars but is suddenly a problem, that I don’t believe at all. In that case I’m much more liable to assume that this is another “The Navy really should have a fleet of battleships again” situation.
I agree with most of what you’re saying here. Lower stakes combat is better.
When the idea of police drones was first floated, I recoiled at the thought of every third cop being able to buzz one past my apartment. But after a few years of the police helicopters being a nightly feature outside, the safer, lower-cost, frankly quieter option seems like not such a bad deal. If an FPV drone crashes in a city, it’s not a huge deal. Copters crater harder.
As for the expensive drone or missile interceptors, that illustrates why the cheaper, more distributed side of asymmetric warfare is so comparatively effective in actual conflict. “Hey, wait a minute, they’re using giant RC planes instead of long-range missiles” is not too different from “Hey wait a minute, they’re using that antique spy plane instead of a multibillion dollar satellite network.”
I still think that tinkering with something like the Blackbird might help in the development of improved supersonic flight, and that’s what excited me about it. So much of the work has been done. This is being floated as a NASA project, not a Space Force one. Our moves into space warfare and the vulnerabilities that could come from that are probably the not-exactly-stated but easy-to-guess motive for reviving an older surveillance tool.
Everything NASA’s ever done has been expensive. A lot of it has been maintenance-difficult, because extensive maintenance in space is hard to schedule. Has it been remunerative? Rarely in monetary terms, but certainly in the form new knowledge of our universe.
“Distributed systems are key to a secure future.”
This sentence is another data point in a long line of things I’ve read about lately that bring to mind how Commander Adama steadfastly refused to network the computer systems aboard the Battlestar Galactica, because the Cylons love exploiting networked systems as the weakness they are.
There is so much to learn from that show, if you watch it in the right frame of mind.
If we were living in any but the stupidest timeline, I’d be absolutely sure that they rolled the plane into a hangar to give it a good scrubbing and maybe start restoring it for indoor display.
But we’ve got a government that’s determined to vault us back to the 1950s not just socially but technologically as well, from ordering a stop-work on electromagnetic launch systems for carriers (“We’re going to use steam!”) to ordering a regression on vehicle efficiency.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some numbnuts in the Trump administration thinks we should resurrect the thing. It still won’t happen because the technical hurdles to get it operational again are so vast that either Trump will be impeached or the government will collapse before it could ever be completed.
The staggering infrastructure necessary to do this has to be rebuilt from scratch, and the plane(s) would have to go through a very extensive return to flight program, all of which would cost an absolute fortune that would have to be paid by a country that is in much worse financial shape than when they did it originally.
The absolute best case scenario is that they need to investigate something about it or are cleaning it up for redisplay. The actual act of getting a particularly maintenance-intensive airframe dating back to the late 1950s back in the sky after being mothballed for nearly as long as they were in service is so staggeringly idiotic that I cannot help but hope it’s not true.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking the whole time I was reading this. I’d love to see her fly again, but this sounds suspiciously like something Pete Hegseth wants because it’s cool and manly, not because it’s necessary or advisable. Thankfully it’s NASA, not the DoD, doing this (or at least it appears to be). Jared Isaacman seems to be the one guy in the administration with his head more or less screwed on straight.
I’m pretty sure that ol’ Kegsbreath’s idea of “reconnaissance” is stuffing a bunch of Alex Jones “vision” supplements down a jarhead’s throat and telling him to look that-a-way
Yes, exactly. We paid for all this back when marginal tax rates on the highest earners was 90%. Those rates kicked in on dollars earned above $200K for single earners – or $2.8M in todays dollars. Imagine if we taxed Elon Musk like this, that would pay for the whole thing, and he’d still have a morally obscene amount of money.
I have a Hot Wings SR-71 with the drone. Still one of the most beautiful aircraft ever.
If it’s NASA it’s not secret. They’re not the military. They already used the Sr-71 as a test bed previously.
NASA does classified stuff too.
I interviewed for a space shuttle job a few years before first flight and asked what guaranteed the program would continue. The answer was “Half the payloads are classified”.
The distinction is that NASA flies classified stuff on unclassified vehicles.
Yeah, funny how the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay was a nice size for the NRO KH-11 series.
Evergreen Air Museum in McMinnville, OR has a SR-71 and the D-21 drone that looks like a mini-me. Great museum
They have the same at Pima Air Museum in Tucson, AZ.
I visited Pima last Thanksgiving and spent a day there. Amazing place and 8 hours is the minimum to get a quick look at everything.
My wife wanted to go to see the Super Guppy. We saw the last operating one flying into El Paso years ago. Amazing that whale can fly.
The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS also has an SR-71 in the entry area, which shockingly you can walk up and touch.
HABU!
I remember seeing the SR-71 on display at the Abbotsford International Airshow in 1986. They also did a flyby, for which I don’t recall hearing a sonic boom, but you sure didn’t see it in the sky for very long.
The blackbird t-shirt I bought at the show was money well spent.
You wouldn’t hear a boom. It’s illegal to fly supersonic over land/populated areas because of the damage the sonic boom can cause.
For an airshow, I’d say you’re right and that milder heads prevail, but growing up just outside an AFB in the southeast, we would regularly hear booms in the 00’s, if not into the 2010’s.
And given the frequency we heard them, I don’t think the hotshots were particularly worried about what sort of talking-to they’d get once they touched down. Used to see AC-130s do drop drills too, miss those days. Now it’s just the occasional chinook or blackhawk convoy
Although, there was the case last year during the night where a blackhawk, in what appeared to be lights-out condition, was preceded in close proximity by 2 little bird escorts. Now that was a sight!
I guess you’re right. It’s banned for civilian flights, which is why Concorde never did it. Military flights get an exemption, apparently.
I also live near an AFB in Ohio, but all I ever see is cargo planes, mostly C-17s. Every now and then there’s a C-5, which is truly a sight to behold at low altitude. Hard to believe that behemoth can fly.
Yes, it’s really cool but this is 35 plus year old technology in a world of drone technology.
If this is a test bed for something that we have to have and can’t be tested any other way then yes let’s spend the billion plus on it .
If we as taxpayers find out later that this is vanity project for someone’s ego just chalk it up to the average American getting screwed again.
* its 60+ year old technology, the Blackbird first flew in 1964, but the design is based on the earlier A-12, which first took to the skies in 1962. Development work started back in late 1957.
Aviation operates on a different kind of timeline. Good ideas hang around.
The B-52 is still the backbone of the United States’ bomber force. It took its maiden flight in… as the name suggests, 1952. Russia’s TU-95 Bear has been flying for just as long and also remains in widespread service.
In a lot of ways, the Eisenhower administration marked America’s swan song, from exasperated victory at the end of WWII to his warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex as he bowed out. A colossal amount of money was thrown at defense in those years, and as time wore on those expenditures became more politically motivated and correspondingly less effective. That’s a big part of what Ike was warning about.
A lot has been spent on supersonic flight in recent years, and some important developments have happened, especially regarding the mitigation of sonic booms. But this is no longer the era of the space race and milspec toilet seats. Engineers are far more accountable to shareholders and politicians than ever. If reviving a celebrated supersonic plane comes even close to penciling out, it’s probably not a terrible idea. If our culture has anything to tell history, it’s that trying to make good on prior art is as safe a bet as a Marvel movie.
The B-52 stuck around and outlived all of the planes designed to replace it primarily because it is cheap to fly, easy to service and had a specific task to do that none of its proposed replacements could necessarily do better.
None of those things were true for the SR-71 even in the late 1980s when they were retired the first time (even if a lot of arguing was had over the last one); and there’s no way any of them would be true for it after they have all been sitting around outside for the past 30 years.
I see it as kind of a “horses for courses” problem. An old pickup can still be a pretty good pickup. Would an old F1 car still be a good F1 car? If we stopped developing F1 cars fifty years ago and let that technology stagnate, maybe so.
Agreed ,I made a mistake.
Thank you for correcting it.
Okay.
Medicare has averaged just plain LOSING at least $60 billion per year to waste, fraud, and abuse for years and years, by their own admission, even before DOGE ever peeked under the hood. Now, I learned mathematics as a student in a public school in Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s, so my numbers might be off, but I think $60 billion is a lot more than $1 billion, especially $60 billion just plain lost, with zero benefit to “taxpayers.”
Besides, you’re accusing Trump of all people of engaging in a “vanity project” being performed in secret, without him going before the world behind the presidential seal telling everyone how awesome it’s going to be, and how awesome he is for doing it.
You know good and well that’s not how he works. If it’s a vanity project, he will get the vanity first and finish the project later. Even if it’s a vanity project involving classified information, he would certainly say, “I’m doing something amazing that I can’t tell you about.”
The faceless bureaucrats of the deep state have set more pallets of your taxpayer cash on fire than any actual elected or appointed administration. While you focus on the big projects, they quietly rob you of billions and trillions, one $20 bill at a time, without you noticing.
Sidestepping all of… that, this isn’t really being done in secret. NASA have just ignored requests for comment.
There’s no way that’s going back up in the air.
I remember talking to Jim Goodall a short bit after he was able to acquire an A12 for the MN ANG static yard. The maintenance required just to keep it as a static was astounding. That’s even after they painted it with a “normal” paint instead of the radar absorbing stuff. There’s just no way it’s going to get airworthy again.
Really… if you want to know what’s up, reach out to him. He knows more about secret plane plans than anyone. He’s responsible for groom lake adding a bunch of the mountains around the facility to its grounds. I’m no longer in the area, and while I still have family in the 133rd he’s not attached to them anymore as I understand.
My guess is it will be a testbed for a new engine. Those J58 engines were very impressive for their day (probably ahead of their time would be more accurate) but the technology has greatly evolved, and resurrecting a Blackbird might be a whole lot less risky than building a bespoke airframe before knowing the new engine is going to work.
Computational fluid dynamics simulations in that realm probably still need to be verified, so actual flight testing would be necessary.
Just a guess.
If you’re just testing an engine, you put it on a stand in a hypersonic wind tunnel. You don’t need to dig up a 60+ year old airplane to do it.
It’s been awhile since I read up on hypersonic wind tunnels, but unless things have changed substantially, they worked by pressurizing a large volume of air and releasing it through a small aperture, where the air blasted through at very high speeds. Great for determining shock wave patterns, but very limited in size and duration. If I recall correctly, when they did this for the SR71 back in the day, the models where about an inch long and the air blast lasted a fraction of a second, but it gave them great photos of the shock waves the airframe would generate.
An engine for something the caliber of the SR71 would gulp a lot of fresh air, and would need to run for hours to properly heat soak the engine. I have a hard time imagining there’s a wind tunnel that could provide that much fresh air at the necessary speeds for that kind of duration.
I could be wrong about that, but I would note that when we did the testing for hypersonic missile systems, we fired them through the air on the nose of a booster rocket. That wouldn’t have been necessary if we had a full scale hypersonic wind tunnel.
If such a beast exists, it must be very secret, or I think I’d have seen a write up about it somewhere in the news feeds Google sends me, as tech like that would be right up my alley.
Not secret at all. Even Purdue has one openly: https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/engine-testing/us-hypersonic-startup-tests-engine-in-wind-tunnel.html
9.5 inch aperture, runs for about 10 seconds. Not nearly enough to heat soak a full size engine.
How about 5 minutes and almost 4 feet?
Nope. Still not enough. That can give you proof of concept testing, but not verification of sustained operation .
Except that that’s at Mach 5+, which, assuming the theory that they’re using the Blackbird to test a new engine is true, is much faster than they need to push the wind.
The SR-71 is aerodynamic heating-limited to somewhere in the Mach 3 range. Go too fast and it melts. So this hypothetical engine must be designed for Mach 3-ish conditions, which means the wind tunnels don’t need to work nearly as hard.
Either way, yes, I’m sure eventually you’ll need to push the thing through the air, but it would be cheaper to design a drone (or just buy one from Kratos) to run that test than it would be to restore an SR-71 to flight capability and then spend the money actually flying it.
The SR71 was limited by engine inlet temperature, not airframe temp. If the stories are correct, it went to around Mach 3.5, but even then the issue was with the engine not the airframe. New engine, different limiting factors.
Perhaps the airframe was capable of more than that all along. Somewhat similar technology got the X-15 to over Mach 6.7, albeit with rockets instead of an air breathing engine.
They’re probably already past the drone stage, and perhaps what they came up with for a manned system looked a lot like the SR71 anyway.
Again, just my guess, and obviously we disagree on how far fetched the concept is. Time may very well prove me wrong.
Maybe they preheat it lol
Just order up some JP-7 and triethylborane, check for popped rivets and Bob’s yer uncle.
Note: The Green Flame by Andrew Dequasie is not quite as entertaining as Clarke’s Ignition! but fun in a Derek Lowe “Chemicals I won’t work with” sense.
I knew Isaacman was the right choice
Anyone interested should read
Skunk Works by Ben Rich
and
Sled Driver by Brian Shul (SR-71 pilot)
A really good section is copied here
https://fighterjetsworld.com/air/the-story-of-sr-71-blackbird-that-outran-gaddafis-sams/12791/?amp=1
“The spikes are full aft now, tucked twenty-six inches deep into the nacelles. With all inlet doors tightly shut, at 3.24 Mach, the J-58s are more like ramjets now, gulping 100,000 cubic feet of air per second. We are a roaring express now, and as we roll through the enemy’s backyard, I hope our speed continues to defeat the missile radars below. We are approaching a turn, and this is good. It will only make it more difficult for any launched missile to solve the solution for hitting our aircraft.” …
“The gravity of Walter’s voice tells me that he believes the signals to be a more valid threat than the others. Within seconds he tells me to ‘push it up’ and I firmly press both throttles against their stops. For the next few seconds, I will let the jet go as fast as she wants. A final turn is coming up and we both know that if we can hit that turn at this speed, we most likely will defeat any missiles. We are not there yet, though, and I’m wondering if Walt will call for a defensive turn off our course.” …
“It is a race this jet will not let us lose. The Mach eases to 3.5 as we crest 80,000 feet. We are a bullet now – except faster. We hit the turn, and I feel some relief as our nose swings away from a country we have seen quite enough of. Screaming past Tripoli, our phenomenal speed continues to rise, and the screaming Sled pummels the enemy one more time, laying down a parting sonic boom.”
yes, “skunkworks” is a good book, particularly insightful from an engineering management perspective.
one of the historical gems in it is that Dick Cheney directed that all of the specialized tooling (developed to support titanium alloy fabrication) for the sr-71 be destroyed so that none could be adapted to other uses.
he’d probably directed that from a “secure, undisclosed location.”
I posted the same 2 books here 12 hours later, oops.
Good luck actually getting your hands on Sled Driver if you’re the sort, as am I, that still prefers paper books. As I’m sure you know but others likely won’t, the thing had been out of print for two decades, so any copy you find is enthusiastically kept or righteously priced! Seriously these dang things run the gambit from $400-$1000. A real-life copy of the Necronomicon wouldn’t cost that much!
I have a copy. But yes, it’s out of print and very expensive.
There is a pdf version online floating around.
I bet those old SR-71 engineers get a few all expenses paid trips out to Nevada out of this. Or at least a few steak dinners somewhere nice. Being able to ask questions and get advice from these folks is incredibly helpful. Definitely not full time but as consultants a few days here and there.
Also, the high desert is as perfect an outdoor storage environment as one can wish for. Low humidity and consistent weather year round. That plane is probably in decent shape despite being outside for 27 years.
Fun facts:
The A12 program was still classified when it was retired, and many of those pilots went to the SR-71 program. Which confused existing pilots, since the new guys somehow had hundreds of flight hours already.
JP7 wont burn on the ground- throw a match in the barrel.
The SR71C has an issue yawing left
It was supposed to be RS71- The president flubbed the announcement, but whos going to correct him? And the plane at the announcement was hot enough from the flight that it set off the fire sprinklers at the event.
The planes had to take off with nearly empty tanks due to weight, then immediately refuel
The engine carts that started the jets were powered by buicks- first 430 wildcats, then 455s.
The soviets knew the planes shape based on thermal images- the tarmac would be different temperatures, even though the planes were wheeled inside for satellite passes.
The SR71 sitting at Udvar Hazy in Dulles made the trip from (I think) San Diego to Washington in about 61 minutes. That fusilage is about 3/4 fuel tank. Fastest air breathing aircraft of all time. Love it.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night
Habu lives
Ran when parked…
As Beavis once said:
Boiyoiyoing
I am almost more curious if the SR-71 is being used for a template for another X-plane prototype rather than being restored to airworthy condition itself.
I suspect it might have the same problem the Concorde or Space Shuttle would have if they were restored to service: it would simply be simpler to create a bespoke new machine with modern equipment than try to make ancient (and in questionable condition) stuff work after decades of being idle, if you could even recreate the stuff out of production for decades.
This reminds me of a story of a Buick engineer Joe Turlay sent to develop the Rover V8 engine from the Buick engine: the knowledge he brought saved Rover an untold amount of money when it was developed. He semi-joked that he wasn’t really earning his keep, but Rover staff pointed out his knowledge had saved them untold time and effort in producing the engine many times his salary over.
A completely new test plane but without having to relearn hard lessons already learned by the SR-71 team? I could see it.
Much of the SR-71 team is dead. They started designing it in 1957. Even assuming the Skunkworks snatched people straight out of their aero-E degree, the youngest would be around 90 today.
True, but the plane operated until 1989 for the USAF, and until 1999 for NASA.
Even though the original team is long gone, the knowledge of its operations (and likely its challenges/problems) still is quite alive, as the Aviation Week article interview indicates.
These things will always be astounding to me. And gorgeous. It’s amazing what we could accomplish when we taxed the rich.
US aerospace engineers seem to have a natural aesthetic sense. Us Brits have made some lovely aircraft, but nothing so nearly aesthetically perfect as an SR-71 or F-16.
I’m sure the engineers who designed the Saturn V would tell you it is all function and no frippery, including the white and black graphics and
U
N
I
T
E
D
S
T
A
T
E
S
lettering, but they just looked wonderful on the launch pad.
If you want to go pre-jet era, you had the Spitfire and I’d put that high up on any list for machine beauty, especially the versions with the elliptical wings.
Very true, I especially like a late model Spitfire, and we have produced some wonderful-looking aeroplanes, including the V- bombers, the Vickers VC-10. ( be still, my beating heart), the TSR-2 (????), both Typhoons, etc.
But I don’t get the same feeling that I get from so many US. planes that, given the opportunity to tweak the angle of the leading edge of a tailfin and the length of a cockpit so that they’re in perfect balance aesthetically, a US engineer will take it.
They’re not all beauties, but I can’t argue that we don’t have some fine looking aircraft. Maybe it’s the old saying that if it looks right, it flies right? Probably, with all the money going to development (spread out over multiple states to please the constituents of multiple senators), they have to make sure they look good.
“Probably, with all the money going to development (spread out over multiple states to please the constituents of multiple senators), they have to make sure they look good.”
That was in the back of my mind, too.
Uhh… I guess it wasn’t that secret.
Also, DO IT! I’m sure it’ll start right up.
If they need a dwell meter, I’ve still got one in the garage.
And this:
Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago. The assignment: Help put a former NASA-operated Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air after a nearly 27-year hiatus. Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight. “I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”
It appears NASA is going to try.
How did real life manage to write the next Jerry Bruckheimer script word for word?
I’ll watch that movie.
Same here, whatever Maverick sequel is cooking up needs to take a back seat to this.
Ya know what, maybe this is why!!
I would have thought Clint Eastwood
I think he’s busy with the upcoming Texas-based production “Red-Dyed Redemption 3”
Edited to add we are way overdue for a Space Cowboys sequel.
Space Cowboys meets Firefox, a whole new movie that also has lots of stuff we’ve seen before, so studio execs will like it
Yeah! Or they could do an Armageddon clone, except instead of professional drillers that have to train to be astronauts NASA has to now recruit a bunch of old school hot-rodders in order to figure out how to make the Blackbird hit Mach 5.
I know Battleship has a lot of issues as a movie, but I freaking love that they had actual WWII sailors manning the ship at the end (spoilers?).
It can’t be harder to duplicate a plane than to design and build one. I doubt they are going to fly the old carcass but use it for some 3d printing of parts.
Science rules, and so does aviation!