Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
NASA has always been into atmospheric research and vehicle design. Pulling out a SR-71 is going to be faster and cheaper than building a new thing and they have a history of using hand-me-downs. I’m glad they are doing stuff, though this administration is probably focused more on “coolness” and bribes for profits. Getting the Blackbird is cool and the secrecy could be actual national security or free research for a buddy. I’d love to see more long lead space projects, deep space probes, inner planet landings, and outer planet orbiters.
It’s the only way they can be sure it’s not full of AI slop.
I love the blackbird / a-12 / yf-12 family. They’re truly the pinnacle of pre-computerized engineering in many ways. Most of the design was completed before 1960 - a mach 3 aircraft, made with slide rules and deeeeep institutional knowledge. People joked that Kelly Johnson could see air, he was so good at designing aircraft and anticipating problems.
that said: why bring it back?
it’s gotta be a successor - I don’t know if we could bring the airframes back to operational status, and the fuel situation is wacky. does anyone even make jp7 anymore? panther piss?
and even if you could bring it back to operational status, and supply the specialized tankers (most tankers fuel from a common supply they run off of, but the jp7 carrying tankers for the sr-71 have a separate tank just for the blackbird) and train everyone up, the blackbird is visible from hundreds of miles away on modern radar. It was stealthier than most of it’s peers but never a stealth aircraft like the f117.
This all tells me: it’s gotta be a new toy.
OK - so, Trump thinks they are cool and wants them back in action despite having better technology already in place. This tracks because of his dumb Trump-class battleship in development, which will be closed down soon after being commissioned because it’s a dumb idea.
It’s like the entire US government is running a Make a Wish foundation scheme for Trump.
It’s sad that that is the most likely explanation. No grand strategic vision, no plan, just being nostalgic for the eighties.
The NY Post is a diseased maga rag and should never be used as a source.
How can it be the fastest plane if it’s not even painted red?
In the words of the nasa director themselves during the keynote speech “Are you sure that the silhouette we showed was an SR-71?”
Guy at NASA:
X-Men are real!
Don’t you guys see it: If really crazy stuff happens and satellites are taken out of the sky, youre going to see to do some old-school reconnaissance.
“If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen,” he told Aviation Week. “They went to the Moon, you know.”
That is SO funny.
NASA is researching quieter supersonic flight, and I can’t help but think of how the (also Lockheed Martin) X-59-
-has a extreme wing profile/nose, not unlike SR-71:
8700 lbs max doesn’t seem like a lot, are they counting on the parabola for most of the acceleration I wonder?
Its not very big. 8700 lb of fuel is 25% of its MGDW, which seems pretty normal to me?
I think the most likely explanation is something like this, they want data they can’t otherwise get.
Machine learning + fluid dynamics?
Turbulence at the trans-sonic barrier is one of the most difficult and poorly understood problems in modeling even today - Heisenberg famously said he’d ask god two questions: why relativity, and why turbulence? - and as a result experimental results really are the best way of determining even the base parameters of the behavior of a system under those conditions.
I wonder what would happen if you painted a blackbird with Vantablack paint?
If it flew at night would you be able to see it?
Would it stand out as darker than the darkness?
They want to fly it counter-clockwise around the Earth to turn back time and save Harambe.
Everything fell apart after Harambe. Save us NASA.
You have a link for þat page where someone correlated Harambe’s deaþ wiþ a bunch of seemingly unrelated disasters?
Stop trying to make thorn happen. Thorn isn’t going to happen.
C’mon, they ain’t hurtin’ n’body. A couple ‘a archaic characters that distinguish this user in their post is a call back to the Internet of old. Yer pappy’s internet. It’s nice to see in these days of, hell, “super intelligence” an’ bean memes. Let the [insert gender here] have a lil’ fun with language. Might even do ya some good to encounter them thorns from time to time. Yeah I reckon it’ll make ya read them posts with intention.
They inspired me to bring back æ. Like archæology. You can’t even notice unless you squint
You totally can. But it’s better than thorn by a lot
Back in my day, we kept our dipthongs where the belonged… between the covers.
Aw leave them, it’s a great little bit of fediverse culture.
The reactions make me think of this.l video essay on World of Warcraft.
I’ve come around to this poster actually, next time people moan about them I’ll start using the long s!
I’m ƿyþ you!
I think it’s kinda cute, tbh. Too bad the comment itself an obnoxious bit of trolling.
Is that trolling? It must be going over my head because I thought that was a real question :(
It’s possible that I was overly quick to judge, but the comment seems to be gone now so I guess we’ll never know. 🤷
For me the comment is still there, weird
Ask an Iraqi if they think the timeline went bad in 2016.
That’s the problem with rolling back time, at no time was it going great for everybody. Someone somewhere sometime was having a bad time. Maybe the 90s wasn’t that bad, maybe. No, wait, the Rwandans and the Bosnians weren’t having a good time. Shit.
It’s this and many other things that have led me to believe an alternate canon where Superman is just a real dummy.
Krypton didn’t blow up, his parents just did a Joe Dirt on him. Dumbass probably moved one of their moons as well so they just left him on the church doorstep called Earth.
Isn’t superman only super because of energy from the sun?
Have you heard of Captain Hero? You basically described him, lol
*unzipping noise
This timeline is fucked, may as well use our resources to create better ones
The reason they got rid of surveillance jets is that satellites can do it without any risk to a pilot and on a 24 hr basis.
Perhaps they’ve decided that satellites can’t be relied on. Kessler syndrome contingency?
During the Cold War, it had to overfly Russian airspace to be able to see far enough. They were within their rights to shoot at unauthorized aircraft in their airspace.
However, it could see a lot higher percentage of Iran without overflying, and Iran can’t legally shoot at something in international airspace
You can’t visually see over the horizon and even then you have blocked lines of sight, etc. A satellite has no such restrictions.
Satellites do have such restrictions. While you may expect the angle to be higher than for an aircraft, a satellite will not be directly overhead most of the earth. You’re still limited by angle and shadow, as well as time and frequency. Unless the target is high enough priority to reposition the satellite, it will be an oblique angle at a predictable time. While that angle will on average be higher than an aircraft, the aircraft can find different angles, at different times, with as much frequency as you like.
Perhaps some things are more visible to an aircraft from the east than a satellite from the north, or perhaps the target has camouflage procedures at the known satellite schedule but an aircraft is more likely to catch them operating
The biggest issue with satellites is they are on a schedule. The soviets knew the schedule and would move things like trucks around when they knew it wasn’t overhead.
You might like this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Black_(book) It goes into detail on the keyhole satellite program and such. He says he used publicly available info and so couldn’t be accused of violating classified restrictions.
Thanks. I’ll take a look for it. Not listed as an e-book at my library so I might have to look for a physical copy
Blackbird didn’t overly the USSR. The U2 did, and they learned the hard way that Soviet missiles went a lot higher than anyone thought.
Good point - I’m probably remembering fiction, but also Soviet Union attempting to target the aircraft
…. And we have the incidents of overflying Swedish airspace, and I think Danish
International airspace isn’t out of bounds when there’s an active conflict going on.
Any country involved in a shooting war is within their rights to shoot at any object they have reason to believe is a military target, regardless of where that object is.
Outside their airspace, in international waters, inside another country, on the fucking Moon - the limits are technological, not legal.
If the object isn’t a military target, then they aren’t within their rights to shoot at it no matter where it is. Not that that has stopped attacks on civilians in the past (e.g. Russian ballistic missile attacks on apartment blocks, US drone strikes of fishing boats), only that the laws of war forbid such things.
Didn’t you hear? The war is over. We “won”…… TACO sez, “ I didn’t say it, I declared it”
I chuckled the other day when I heard that the planned attack on the UK airbase used by the US for attacks on Iran, is being blamed on Iran, and also being called terrorism.
I don’t think it’s terrorism when it’s a legitimate military target that takes place during war time. While it is possible for terrorism to exist during a war (you know, something like bombing schools, hospitals, residences, etc), an attack on an enemy’s base doesn’t fit.
All the Arab countries condemning Iran for attacking US bases and US military personnel conducting the war on Iran from their land is just as comical.
Terrorism is, by definition, by a non state actor. If a government does it, it’s just a war crime.
