Thread · HN Continuity

The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here.

Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes.

But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.