NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
Sure, if it had any payload capacity. But it doesn’t.
Getting a machine up to that speed is hard, real hard. The margins are extremely small. So the moment you start adding additional moving parts to it, opening payload bays, weapons release mechanisms, a few 400 lb missiles… And don’t forget, all those additional components also take up additional volume, higher volume means more air displacement, which means more drag. Higher volume also means the area of the airframe gets larger, that means additional mass.
All of a sudden, that plane can’t hit mach 3 anymore and you don’t actually have an untouchable weapons delivery system anymore.
This is probably why a combat version of the aircraft was abandoned, it doesn’t really make sense.
Sure, if it had any payload capacity. But it doesn’t.
Getting a machine up to that speed is hard, real hard. The margins are extremely small. So the moment you start adding additional moving parts to it, opening payload bays, weapons release mechanisms, a few 400 lb missiles… And don’t forget, all those additional components also take up additional volume, higher volume means more air displacement, which means more drag. Higher volume also means the area of the airframe gets larger, that means additional mass.
All of a sudden, that plane can’t hit mach 3 anymore and you don’t actually have an untouchable weapons delivery system anymore.
This is probably why a combat version of the aircraft was abandoned, it doesn’t really make sense.
I was mostly going for a [email protected] thing tbh, because of exactly what you were saying