Thread

NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

327 points · 403 comments · ilamont

walrus01 · 1790727565 · focus · HN ↗
I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71 (likely unmanned) that has been flying around at night from facilities like Groom Lake for years. Look at how long the RQ180 was flying around in semi-public and known about before it became seen in daylight by plane spotters in Greece. And a long time before that there were public relations approved photos of the Lockheed Martin Polecat.
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
edit: for those who haven't seen the RQ180: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+greece" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+gre...
edit 2 (apologies for the X link): <a href="https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193
1. King-Aaron · 1790728047 · focus · HN ↗
  I know it's probably a forbidden topic around these parts, but the 'tic tac' thing that those FA18 pilots saw several years ago may be indicative of what Lockheed etc are flying up there. It's a hot topic in conspiracy circles but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
  1. bigyabai · 1790729949 · focus · HN ↗
    If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.
    We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.
    walrus01 · 1790730024 · focus · HN ↗
    The Tacit Blue is kinda tic-tac shaped (with wings sticking out the sides), but it's also a historical museum artifact now and, as far as I know, was quite slow and cumbersome.
    ngc248 · 1790767419 · focus · HN ↗
    check these out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC97wdQOmfI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC97wdQOmfI and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnofCyaWhI0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnofCyaWhI0 . But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?
    bigyabai · 1790788621 · focus · HN ↗
    I've seen those. Exoatmospheric interception vehicles like that rely on the inertia of a rocket booster stack and the thinness of the atmosphere/gravity when it is released. They cannot accelerate to supersonic speeds at ground-level, and have enough drag that it's probably impossible to break the sound barrier without a payload fairing. I don't think the spheres or tic-tacs are a hard-kill interceptor.
    > But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?
    Would it? Testing your billion-dollar taxpayer project in sparsely the populated Syrian countryside seems like a great way for ISIS to get their hands on it. Or the Druze, or the PKK, or the IRGC, or any number of other outfits that would sell a crashed interceptor to China in exchange for air defenses and RPGs.
    I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the US prefers to test it's billion-dollar black projects in places where they cannot be stolen, damaged or interrupted.
    ngc248 · 1790943735 · focus · HN ↗
    The point is this Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle tech is form 1989, how the tech would have evolved 40 years later who knows.
    bigyabai · 1790960923 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. krapp · 1790736359 · focus · HN ↗
    >but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.
    Sure, I'd bet a lot of "black triangle" sightings are exactly that. But if the "tic-tac" lore is to be taken at face value, the implication is that the US military has invented antigravity technology, or reverse engineered it from alien spacecraft. I really don't think that's plausible. If the US had that kind of technology we would be so far ahead of the rest of known science that there would be no value in keeping it secret.
    King-Aaron · 1790745584 · focus · HN ↗
    I frankly do like to entertain much more exotic explanations for it, but the overall most prosaic explanation does land on exotic human craft being tested, and the observers not being fully aware of what they're seeing - The tic tac just being an example.
    The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion.
    ricksunny · 1790750988 · focus · HN ↗
    >The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion
    If everyone self-censors tabooed topics around here it’s not going to advance the tenor of the HN discourse.
    King-Aaron · 1790751932 · focus · HN ↗
    It's more that I'm currently having a real bad time and don't have the heart for the discussion.
    ricksunny · 1790752635 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m sorry. Hope whatever the difficulty is neutralizes.
    For what it’s worth, I do endeavor to pepper oblique references to the phenomenon on HN when it seems relevant to, sometimes suffering downvotes for it but who cares.
    King-Aaron · 1790755013 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks man, everything passes eventually but it's still rough.
    And yeah I do like seeing the odd reference to the phenomenon here, I'm just quietly hoping that it doesn't all spill out with the current administration and we end up with an Iron Sky scenario lol
    Tangurena2 · 1790792691 · focus · HN ↗
    Some of the "hovers then flies off at great speed" reports match how an SR-71 flight could appear to a ground observer. They took off almost empty of fuel (which isn't made any more), flew as slow as they could to a tanker aircraft (which flew about as fast as it could), refuel then accelerate to Mach 3. When the tanker + SR-71 flew roughly towards you, it looks like it is hovering. Then when it turns and accelerates away it looks like it tears off at a 90 degree turn.

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