8 ms·
Rumours of SR-71 Blackbird Successor from Lockheed's Skunkworks
- xoa 3y agoIf you're at all interested in the history and development of these kinds of aircraft and the process that went into them, I cannot recommend enough the book "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed", by Ben Rich who was the second director. It covers the era of the U-2, SR-71, and the F-117 Nighthawk including the initial earliest development of stealth. Fascinating inside baseball about the politics of such things in the Cold War too, the various issues with different services. They did amazing work, and they did it on time and on budget, even as bureaucracy slowly got pushed in more.
- brightball 3y agoOne of my favorite books.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI got to see an SR-71 and a U2 at the (amazing) USAF museum in Dayton, Ohio. I was really surprised by how small both are.
- jankeymeulen 3y agoSmall? I saw an SR-71 at National Air and Space Museum near Dulles and I was amazed by how big is for a two-seater.
- bobbygoodlatte 3y agoThat museum might be my absolute favorite in the world. Absolutely stunning collection of aviation + space history on display
- hnbear 3y agoI loved Dayton. We finished the first big hangar and my said how cool it was and that we’d seen it and ut was time to go. Then I told her about the other 2 (3?) hangars. We got our 10k steps in before lunch, but it was amazing, and I’d go back any day. Putting the kids in the flight sim was cool. I told them it wasn’t that bad then my daughter promptly flew it fully upside down and we heard the screams from inside. Mostly fun screams. They begged to ride it again. We did it a bunch. My daughter got competitive so we had to fly together to get the days high score.
- bradknowles 3y agoI've yet to go to the Udvar-Hazy museum, but it is on my bucket list. What I've seen of it online is absolutely amazing.
- TylerE 3y agoYeah, 107ft long. Lotta airliners shorter than that.
- Merrill 3y agoThere is a SR-71 at the Cosmosphere museum in Hutchinson, Kansas.
- godelmachine 3y agoSR-71 and small? Are you sure?
- hef19898 3y agoThe F-117 was a true black project, no oversight, no official budget and hence close to no bureaucracy other than needed to develop and certify a combat aircraft for the USAF. It borrowed components from the F-15 and F-16 programs for example. The B-2 on the other hand, well, that was secret but official. And had a ton of bureacracy because of it.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWhat components on the F-117 are from other aircraft?
- hef19898 3y agoAccording to wikipedia: Avionic came from the F-16, F-15 and F/A-18 programs (unsourced claim, but very likely, those parts were purchased as spares for those aircraft). Engines are modified are modified F404s drom GE. That leaves the airframe, landing gear and some other bits and pieces like evironmental controls, but the avionics and engines account for the vast majority of aircraft costs.
- sidewndr46 3y agoIf what you're saying is correct (the parts were purchased as spares) then that is actually fraud.
- fouronnes3 3y agoThe article doesn't say, but I assume it would be uncrewed?
- short_sells_poo 3y agoI wonder how much further they could push these machines if they don't need to keep a squishy human alive inside.
- gpderetta 3y agoAnd also importantly don't risk pilots being captured. Self destruction on interception seems also desirable.
- melling 3y agoThe same could be said for space exploration. We spend a fortune accommodating humans.
- masklinn 3y agoThe problem is that without embedded human smarts such exploration is very limited, novel / unexpected situations are hard to predict or react to, and the latency between earth-bound command posts and non-orbital remotes makes that unusable for anything beyond batch orders. While hardly trivial, remote control within earth atmosphere has much more reasonable latency, and thus applicability.
- melling 3y agoYeah, complete bullshit that we tell ourselves. https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned-spaceflight.html https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned...
- snickerbockers 3y agoSpace exploration makes more sense because it's largely seen as a precursor to eventually establishing a colony in space, on the moon or on Mars. Whether that's actually viable is another discussion, but if NASA were to announce this is all just for the sake of curiosity and nobody's ever going to live in space then their funding will be gone in a week.
- yuppiepuppie 3y ago"Blackbird Successor" that happens to be a drone it seems like.
- Keyframe 3y agoFlight performance characteristics of vehicles are held back by meatbags in it and forces acted upon it.
- H8crilA 3y agoFor hypersonics it's more about not melting the airframe, regardless of whether there are any people inside or not. That's why I'm skeptical for such vehicles - unless they're disposable, of which there already are plenty (like the penetration aids installed in MIRVs). China seems (seems!) to be leading the pack here with their anti-aircraft-carrier programs.
- ponector 3y agoI'm sceptical as well. Expensive and with small amounts of missions applicable. Instead of one such vehicle you afraid to loose it is much better to have tens or hundreds of long endurance drones for realtime reconnaissance. And satellites of course.
- willis936 3y agoSounds nice, but from talking with jet pilots it is quite easy for humans to push the machines past their limits. All of the cool stuff in Top Gun Maverick would have required the planes to get airframe service after every flight. Where you gain benefit from removing humans is the reduction in weight from life support and HMI systems and in the prospect of reducing reaction times.
- varjag 3y agoCombat mission flights, like industrial deep sea diving couple decades ago are now in ripe position to be automated away.
- cpursley 3y agoWhile neat tech, it seems hypersonic icbms like the Sarmat make more economic sense these days vs expensive and overly complicated delivery or spy vehicles. Or at least, upgrading the current icbm and detection systems seems like it should be a priority in conjunction with these cool birds. Especially after their recent failures.
- ginko 3y agoIn case you're wondering why you're downvoted: This is a spy plane, not a delivery vehicle. The closest competitor would be satellites, but as the article mentions, there's limitations to those.
- cpursley 3y agoFair, I was grouping it with the new bomber (in terms of expensive airplanes when there are other effective yet kinder to the taxpayer solutions).
- lm28469 3y ago> vs expensive and overly complicated delivery vehicles. Was the sr71 equipped with weapons ? If the sr72 also is a reco aircraft it wont deliver anything
- ponector 3y agoICBM makes no sense to use. There are no targets suitable for ICBM. Same for hypersonic reconnaissance airplane - expensive and no much sense to use. Either satellite or small slow low altitude reconnaissance dron, which could fly for hours to provide realtime image of the battlefield.
- cpursley 3y agoThat's what I'm saying, drones and sat is cheaper than a glide vehicle (as cool as they are). And yes, there are many suitable targets for an ICBM than can deliver a batch of hypersonic - and they don't even need to be nuclear.
- Garvi 3y agoI would argue this is obsolete technology (extremely high-res satellite cameras, low altitude drones) primarily intended for poaching of public funds. Is there any indication this thing will be able to do anything current methods cannot for a fraction of a fraction of the cost?
- jghn 3y agoWhat makes you sure this isn’t a drone? And while satellites have obsoleted spy planes for many purposes for a while now, one thing they can’t do is go on demand to any arbitrary location
- Garvi 3y agoI understand it is a drone. You have a point there, but only marginally, as current rocket tech is making rapid deployment of satellites a breeze. I'm not talking about Musks or the Chinese reusable rockets - the military doesn't care as much about economics and had the ability to rapidly launch satellites from planes for a long time.
- sgt101 3y agoChallenging to control a drone at hypersonic speeds & low altitudes (sub orbital) I think, the behavior of the air as a plasma around the craft will mean that it will probably have to be fully autonomous, which if armed could be quite a challenge ethically.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tetris11 3y agohttps://theaviationgeekclub.com/u-2-vs-sr-71-former-usaf-avionics-technician-explains-why-the-dragon-lady-still-flies-spy-missions-while-the-blackbird-had-been-retired/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/u-2-vs-sr-71-former-usaf-avi... Why the SR-71 was retired over the U-2 which is still in service today: > For a mission over a target in the Middle East with the planes based in England, [the SR-71] needed to have multiple airliner size aircraft in the air to support it. > It was not capable of taking off with a full load of fuel (or rather, not advisable for many reasons), so in order to take off, there had to be a tanker waiting in the air to top it off once it got airborne. > It would then make a high speed run to the target zone where it would meet up with another tanker before doing its Mach 3 run over the target. It would then need to tank up again once the recon run was done for the trip home, and then there would still be a tanker in the air on standby in case it needed gas before landing or in case it needed to divert for weather or something. > So that’s a minimum of 4 airliner sized support aircraft, including all of their parts, fuel use, and crew, flying out of a minimum of 2 different bases just to make a single SR-71 operational mission happen. > And that’s on top of all the crew, fuel, parts and mechanics just to operate the SR-71. This sounds like dev hell, and yet a viable dependable product. I wonder how many big corps operate the same behind the scenes.
- WhatsName 3y agoAs the saying goes NKAWTG - Nobody Kicks Ass Without Tanker Gas
- jprd 3y agoMost of them. It is Excel workbooks all the way down.
- Gravityloss 3y agoThere's a term "hangar queen" for aircraft that fly a little and need a lot of maintenance. Sometimes you want extreme performance at any cost. But a lot of the time you want a good enough performance at low cost. The amount of supporting resources and length of maintenance breaks etc affect cost, or the amount of aircraft you need to get in order to be able to do the mission. If you have 20 aircraft but 15 are being maintained, you only have 5 flyable ones, you still had to pay for acquisition of all the 20, and have to pay for the ongoing maintenance for the 15. If you have 10 but only 5 are maintained at any given time, you have the same flying capacity of five aircraft but your total costs are likely going to be much less as you only had to acquire ten aircraft and only have to have maintenance people enough for 5 at a time. This is really hard to explain to a lot of people in the software industry by the way. They say a feature is complete, my job is done. But if it's extremely hard to configure, deploy, monitor, maintain etc then it might turn out to be a net negative. It's the whole iceberg that counts, not the tip.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoI'm guessing it will be a drone. So no reason to ask for a speed check: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36041845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36041845
- The_Colonel 3y agoI have trouble seeing use-cases for newly developed manned combat aircraft. Starlink(-like) communication has a low enough latency (25 and 60 ms) and is nearly unjammable. There are too many satellites to destroy, unless the enemy resorts to outright Kesslerization. In the rare cases where the communication is dropped, some fallback programming / AI can at least return it home.
- hef19898 3y agoFunny enough, re manned combat aircraft, both new initiatoves still forsee pilots. Local sets of eyes are just so damn useful.
- GhostVII 3y agoHaving a person in the plane does make shooting it down (or not shooting it down) much more meaningful, which can be important. For example in the South China sea, flying a manned aircraft around is a much stronger statement than flying a drone around. And to me it still seems possible that someone could come up with some jamming technology that prevents drones from communicating with satellites or base stations - and if someone does, you don't want your entire air force to be disabled.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoThat's assuming radio, and not directional maser/laser-beams, I guess?
- nradov 3y agoChina wouldn't hesitate to shoot down all of the Starlink satellites in any major conflict.
- contrarian1234 3y agolooking back, it's interesting that the US casually flew planes over the USSR I can't think of any other situation where the US has violated airspace regularly like that while not being in a state of war. Seems incredibly dangerous/provocative. For instance the US doesn't fly over North Korea or Iran even though I'm sure it could. We had a couple Chinese balloons over the US and it was a major diplomatic incident that ruined relations for about a year I find it hard to believe the US can go back to flying planes over Russia/China/etc. without stirring up some major issues Can you imagine if at their whim Chinese supersonic jets flew over LA or NYC? It'd be basically a declaration of war
- a4000 3y agoThey were definitely flying drones over Iran in the recent past and probably still do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... Also there is the 'RQ180' that has been spotted flying near the Philippines that is most likely spying on China to some extent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/09/07/americas-new-stealth-drone-appears-to-be-operational-near-china/?sh=245c4e9a1621 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/09/07/americas-ne...
- jasfi 3y agoSatellites make fly overs redundant, especially of the quality the US must have today.
- fallingmeat 3y agoAlso, hermeus.com
- andy99 3y agoThe article reminded me of the old and probably obscure roman de gâre "The North Cape" by Joe Poyer. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3430608 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3430608 It's set in the 60s with the pilot flying a new supersonic spy plane and dodging Soviet interceptors, eventually crashing guess where. He goes into a lot of detail about the plane, and specifically the different modes the engines have as the speed increases, which although fictional sounds very much like what they've actually done here. I think he acknowledged help from an aerospace expert in the plane design.
- mgarfias 3y agoThere have been rumors of such since the early 90s.
- johnea 3y agoGreat, just what we need, more deathworks from Lockheed... You can just never spend enough tax dollars on dismembering the poor...