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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. fivefifty · 1790743578 · focus · HN ↗
  The 'SR-72' timeline makes for interesting reading, LM was talking about it for a while when it was their private concept then suddenly scrubbed all mention of it from their website a few years ago, which some suggest that it became an official government funded black project. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72
  Not sure why they would need an old SR-71 unless maybe they plan to test out something like new generation engines at very high speed, maybe with plausible cover to hide the newer more secret aircraft as flying at Mach 3+ tends to cover a lot of distance so it would be difficult to keep within secret test areas.
  1. PaulRobinson · 1790761362 · focus · HN ↗
    The SR-71 is mostly analogue. It has remarkable battlefield resilience including ability to operate when EMP and nuclear radiation are issues that would affect a lot of digital systems.
    Worried about how to navigate if the GPS systems gets knocked out by an adversary? SR-71 has an analogue system, use that. Worried about how an adversary could use cyberwarfar against your avionics? SR-71 has you covered, use all of that.
    And sure, you could take all the designs and hand them over to the SR-72 team at LM and say "yeah, all of that please", and they could figure it out, but you know what might be handy? A working SR-71 they could play with. And who knows, maybe the answer is to take an SR-71 in its entirety, and just upgrade a few parts to get the SR-72 performance (Mach 6) that you're after.
    imglorp · 1790774971 · focus · HN ↗
    > mostly analogue
    Crucially, the engine inlet spikes were computer controlled. And since it's an observation platform and not a bomber, is it going to be EMP hardened? That was probably classified at the time. /shrug
    <a href="https://saemobilus.sae.org/papers/sr-71-digital-automatic-flight-inlet-control-system-851977" rel="nofollow">https://saemobilus.sae.org/papers/sr-71-digital-automatic-fl...
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px9YLM6R6MM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px9YLM6R6MM
    Anyway, don't you think the modern platforms are prepared for a little ECM action?
    browsingonly · 1790785091 · focus · HN ↗
    The SR-71 mission set included trans-attack reconnaissance for SAC, where it would overfly a radiating Europe and USSR perform nuclear bomb damage assessment for follow-on strikes. Aside from nuclear bursts and leftover detritus from the ICBMs etc., it was anticipated to operate in an environment where nuclear-tipped SA-5 and other Soviet SAMs would be bursting here and there. It's EMP-hardened.

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