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. stickfigure · 1790728108 · focus · HN ↗
  > I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71
  Makes me wonder if this whole operation is just public cover for something like that.
  1. walrus01 · 1790728166 · focus · HN ↗
    Or something as mundane as cleaning up and fixing something that's been out in the weather for 20 years so it doesn't look shabby at the front gate of their base.
    Waterluvian · 1790728281 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t know anything but I can’t imagine they need specialists if it’s just a cosmetics job for a monument.
    walrus01 · 1790728549 · focus · HN ↗
    Or the whole "retired guy in his late 70s gives a quotation to aviation week" is a red herring intended for US adversaries, which seems like a fairly basic ruse, but might have been put together as a coordinated plan. It could have its own value of sending opposing nation state intelligence agencies and air defense people down a man-hour wasting dead end of investigating something that'll never happen.
    HelloNurse · 1790761616 · focus · HN ↗
    There might be a side dish of catching foreign spies by waving a carefully prepared objective in front of them, not only confusing them.
    A less generic strategic possibility: hiding something new and useful in the middle of crazy engineering, supply chains and training for the useless SR-71 restoration.
    dreamcompiler · 1790728777 · focus · HN ↗
    If they were doing that they would say so. In fact if they were smart they would say that regardless of the true story. The fact they aren't saying that means they're either stupid or playing 4D chess. I know which I'd bet on.
    walrus01 · 1790729841 · focus · HN ↗
    Another theory is that some smart people already know better, and they know they're going to waste many millions of dollars investigating its feasibility, but they've been given an order from Whiskey Pete and have to at least go through the motions of writing a study/detailed report on why it's not possible to reactivate in a reasonable amount of time or budget. Never underestimate how often the US military will send a group of subordinate people to do what is effectively busy-work.
  2. tclancy · 1790728649 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith. If they’re truly trying to relight these things, my heart goes out in advance to the neighborhood in the Southwest that burns down before they rethink it.
    sippingabonedry · 1790731072 · focus · HN ↗
    > The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith.
    If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds, you might realize that regardless of the administration publicly in charge, the government is always doing stuff behind closed doors that your brain could not even begin to comprehend how they pull it off.
    Stories like this hilariously implausible "grizzled old man casually leaks secret program to Aviation Week" is like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.
    stickfigure · 1790733177 · focus · HN ↗
    On the other hand our commander-in-chief (engineering expert that he is) has ordered the Navy to switch back to steam catapults on an already half-built carrier. That will also require bringing back 70 year old retirees. Pretty sure Trump would switch back to coal if he could find any living boilermakers.
    Sometimes bad ideas are just stupidity.
    walrus01 · 1790735888 · focus · HN ↗
    Political scientists are well acquainted with madman theory, but have we defined "dementia theory" yet?
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
    Irrational and volatile as a play-act is one thing, actually being irrational and volatile is a whole other ball game...
    ajb · 1790755048 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess I'm the past, rulers old enough for that also usually collected enough other health issues to be largely inactive. I can think of a few cases where countries had to wait a year or so for the old ruler to die, but not another case where they were still active while demented. Maybe Ivan the terrible? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_Ivan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_...
    lostlogin · 1790749323 · focus · HN ↗
    > Pretty sure Trump would switch back to coal if he could find any living boilermakers.
    He has been propping up coal.
    <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0209r62k5o" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0209r62k5o
    jasomill · 1790759009 · focus · HN ↗
    My god, this reads like The Onion.
    <a href="https://theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-1819572893/" rel="nofollow">https://theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-prin...
    not_kurt_godel · 1790735797 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    lostlogin · 1790749349 · focus · HN ↗
    Someone is thinking of the children.
    lostlogin · 1790749227 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds
    You realise that government agencies including the pentagon have been gutted, and filled with conmen and frauds?
    It would be funny for the rest of the world if we didn’t also have to pay for the people America elected.
    drstewart · 1790768397 · focus · HN ↗
    The rest of the world should maybe try take care of its own problems first, starting with the active wars in Europe.
    Too bad all's they can do is sit back and condemn things, by your own admission.
    netsharc · 1790776621 · focus · HN ↗
    High oil price -> Iran war -> who started that? -> can we ask them for compensation?
    Refugee crisis -> Middle East chaos -> Let's look back 20 years and see who decided to go into Iraq with a giant force of incompetence (or as that fuckwit said "Unknown unknowns") and created insurgent forces that grew into ISIS, etc? -> Can we ask them for compensation?
    When grandparent said "The rest of the world has to pay", I don't think they'd disagree with the 2 above examples...
    MentalM · 1790802521 · focus · HN ↗
    > I don't think they'd disagree with the 2 above examples...
    I think that is very easy.
    "If Muslims get their nuclear weapon (chemical weapon, Jerusalem, that particular abandoned piece of desert, any other random crap, choose whatever you like) they WILL DESTROY THE WORLD. How we can see, the world is still existing. So compensation? That would be pretty nice of them, we are ready to start getting compensation at any moment".
    lostlogin · 1791207010 · focus · HN ↗
    Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
    Tanjreeve · 1790752549 · focus · HN ↗
    >If you set partisan politics aside for 90 seconds
    About the people who gutted every major agency and meddled constantly making forces less effective in the name of the most partisan of partisan politics? Most people won't and that is a completely self-created problem.
    dTal · 1790786104 · focus · HN ↗
    That USA government - the mythical "deep state" one with all sorts of hyper-competent stuff happening behind closed doors - is dead. To the extent that it ever existed, Trump credits himself with killing it.
    adastra22 · 1790731571 · focus · HN ↗
    This is Isaacman we're talking about. He is about as good faith as they get (low bar, I know, but for real this time).
  3. adventured · 1790731775 · focus · HN ↗
    The SR-71 is because they need to test for speed.
    That serves a huge number of things both offense and defense: engagement, radar, missiles, trying to boost the speed capabilities of new planes & weapons. And it applies both to manned and unmanned planes.
    Russia is less of a concern now, however China is coming on very fast in terms of leveling up their military capabilities. I'd be very surprised if the US military isn't looking to push its capabilities around increasing speed generally, just as it does any other aspect. There hasn't been a significant leveling up in US Air Force speed capabilities in many decades (since the F22 supercruise three decades ago?).

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