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SR-72
- jameskilton 13y agoSo given Lockheed's track record on the F-35, we'll see this finally cancelled around 2040 (the first $1 trillion aircraft program) when everyone else has built similar planes better, faster, and more reliably.
- Iftheshoefits 13y agoHow else are we going to keep those efficient, upstanding private contractors in business?
- melling 13y agoHow many other planes have they built? Saying other companies have built equivalent planes is incorrect. Trying to build one plane for everyone was probably not the wisest thing to do.
- michaelfeathers 13y agoAlmost like the story of commercial operating systems.
- wil421 13y agoPeople easily remember the bad projects but the f-22 program didn't have the same problems.
- javajosh 13y agoI mean hey if we're going to be throwing away huge sums of money on useless military gear, it may as well look cool. OTOH maybe we'd be better served by underwriting all college tuition?
- cinquemb 13y agoOr both? I mean, that's what government boondoggles are for, right? Maybe if we send the under/unemployed grads with all the expensive military gear to war, we'd solve more problems?
- paulannesley 13y ago“At this speed, the aircraft would be so fast, an adversary would have no time to react or hide.” “Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour” … sounds lovely.
- jswanson 13y agoThey expect delivery 'by 2030'. I wonder if satellites and newer weapons wouldn't be able to intercept its flight path by then. You probably wouldn't have to match its speed to bring it down, just throw up a cloud of junk in its way.
- dredmorbius 13y agoOr heat its skin. A laser defense weapon, coupled with the black titanium skin, likely already close to its thermal limits, might produce results of interest to a defender.
- ZanyProgrammer 13y agoIn the meantime, its going to take a lot of time and money to develop those weapons as well. I mean, you're talking about hypothetical countermeasures that don't even exist as a solid concept yet.
- sp332 13y agoTrue, but we have 16 years to figure it out.
- dredmorbius 13y agoNot entirely true. LAWS has been in active tests and is, I believe, being deployed now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBDF0Tm0kuY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBDF0Tm0kuY
- danielweber 13y agoCould this be used for space launch?
- callesgg 13y agoNo more than any other air breathing engine driven plane.
- d34b4c29 13y agoIma banana, Im glad i didn't recognize that its design needed natural oxygen to propel itself. There goes my dreams of reaching the asteroid belt.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSee Pegasus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket) Unlikely though. Pegasus benefits from the exceptional payload capacity of the B-52 and L-1011 airframe and power plant.
- RK 13y agoI'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part: A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030.
- andrewfong 13y agoBy comparison, the SR-71 was first proposed around 1960 and operational by 1966. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird
- JetSpiegel 13y agoProgress!
- javajosh 13y agoThis is one of the most perplexing things about our modern world - the seemingly exponential increase in the length of time it takes to get anything done, especially large, technically complex projects. This is true for the Saturn V, for the World Trade Center, dams, highways, high speed rail, etc. It makes me wonder where these "productivity improvements" really are, especially the ones that computers presumably give us. Perhaps AutoCAD and MS Word and email make us feel more productive, but are actually slowing us down. Or perhaps all of it just increases the velocity of money through the economy, which particularly helps those whose income is proportional to transaction rate (banks, brokers, and governments).
- blakesterz 13y agoThat's a good question, I think, thought I'm not sure, the answer is people are now far more expensive, adding more people means less money is made. Let's use your dams example. They built a bunch of big dams in the 50s and 60s and each one had more than 10,000 people working on it. They were mostly publicly financed, so more or less not built to make money. They didn't worry about adding a few more (or a few hundred more) people to the job because they were cheap. Now, the people that do this work are really expensive, and adding a few more means the people in charge make less money. Another big thing is probably rules and regulations and laws, far fewer back then. Good? Bad? I dunno.
- andrewfong 13y agoPart of what made the SR-71 incredible was Kelly Johnson's ability to keep the team small, fast, and focused in designing it. Not sure if that's the case here.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- subb 13y agoThe SR-71 was developed using 20th century technology. It was envisioned with slide rules and paper. It wasn’t managed by millions of lines of software code. And it wasn’t powered by computer chips. All that changes with the SR-72. Oh oh.
- dredmorbius 13y agoAye. Complexity isn't your friend.
- prisonblues 13y agoOh dear. Thought you were spoofing them, until I clicked through.
- callesgg 13y agoWhen I read that I was not so sure what the person who wrote that actually wanted to say. Cause it sounds a bit like: The SR-71 was built with solid engineering and hard work, this on the other hand is a pice of shit.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dublinclontarf 13y agoYou only think that because you're(I assume) a programmer, which is how most programmers feel about their code.
- Crito 13y agoI think it is not an unreasonable observation that when a project encompases the state of the art of a wide variety of engineering disciplines, code is not given the same treatment or respect that hardware is. On one hand you have every single metal part being x-rayed to verify internal consistency; on the other hand the software development is a shitshow that needs to be whipped into shape in order to be done on time, let alone work well. Look at the history of the development of the AGC as an example. And which part of the LEM gave Armstrong and Aldrin trouble during the descent? And that is a success story, in the end it mostly worked.
- ChristianMarks 13y agoDestabilizing.
- thearn4 13y agoSR-71 was built for one mission only: Fly-over the Soviet Union and take pictures. At the speeds that it operates, you can't really do much else. And recon satellites do this much more effectively now, and are extremely hard to take down. Proponents of hypersonic aircraft research have been fighting an uphill battle for this very reason.
- robotresearcher 13y agoThe other thing you can do at that speed is intercept enemy planes. The SR-71 was developed from an interceptor project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12
- avar 13y agoThat's not an accurate description at all. Both the SR-71 and the YF-12 were developed from the A-12, which was purely a reconnaissance aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12 The whole concept of using the "Blackbird" family of planes as interceptors was an experimental offshoot that was quickly cancelled, the SR-71 certainly wasn't developed as some byproduct of an interceptor, it it was the other way around, the interceptor was a failed offshoot of the reconnaissance aircraft.
- robotresearcher 13y agoYou are right. I read the first paragraph of that page too quickly, and got the order wrong. The main point was that interceptor is the other role for very fast plane, including the active service MiG-31 (around Mach 2.8).
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago>>> The SR-71 was developed using 20th century technology. It was envisioned with slide rules and paper. It wasn’t managed by millions of lines of software code. And it wasn’t powered by computer chips. All that changes with the SR-72. Errr, replacing slide rules with millions of lines of software is not always progress. HN is probably the most fertile ground for finding counter examples around
- tdicola 13y agoWhat's the deal with all the SR-71 posts in the past few days? They're a cool relic of the cold war age but what has happened recently with them that's warranted all the attention? Also if you're really enamored with them you should definitely check out the national airforce museum in Dayton, OH: http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/ http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/ You can see one up close, along with all kinds of other planes, jets, and missiles. Admission is free, and expect to spend at least a full day walking around the place.
- rawicki 13y agoIt's just the snowball effect. Every post about SR-71 encourages more people to learn something about it and that sometimes results in another post to HN.
- Blahah 13y agoI'm amazed there are so many people interested in military equipment. Is this a USA thing? Would love someone to explain the appeal.
- rbanffy 13y agoI wouldn't call the fastest airplane ever built to be just "military equipment". It's probably one of the greatest engineering achievements ever and it's still unsurpassed. It's also a beautiful machine.
- afhsfsfdsss88 13y agoI am genuinely curious. Didn't satellites and drones make this obsolete as a concept?
- ceejayoz 13y agoNo reason this couldn't be a drone, and no reason it'd necessarily be a recon craft - being able to hit a target anywhere with weapons with only a couple of hours notice would make acting on intel easier.
- amiramir 13y agoIt is a drone: "Envisioned as an unmanned aircraft, the SR-72 would fly at speeds up to Mach 6 ..."
- nraynaud 13y ago"We're committed to bombing more weddings, quicker, farther away"
- Hoozt 13y ago'MURICA! Let's make a metal projectile move realy fucking fast through the air!! So fucking amazing angineering shit stuff thing! Fuck yeah!!
- d34b4c29 13y agoSpace exploration may be possible in these.
- rbanffy 13y agoWhat would be the key advantage of a Mach 6 drone? At that speed, it's hardly stealth (it'll be very hot) and its payload is not exactly remarkable. At best, it's a reusable missile booster stage. I get there are political problems on putting conventional precision warheads on top of ICBMs (a conventional attack would look exactly like a nuclear one) but I can't see what this drone brings to the table compared to a missile launch. An adversary would still have little to no time to react before being hit. The only difference is that with an ICBM, if you know about the launch, you know about the arrival time and, with this plane, you'll have to see its IR signature (shouldn't be hard if you can already detect an ICBM launch) and guess it's about to attack (which isn't hard either because I doubt the SR-72 can maintain Mach 6 for long periods). It would, perhaps, be smarter to use B-52's to launch sub-orbital missiles with precision conventional warheads. They should be far less conspicuous than a drone doing Mach 6.