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.
They’ve been superceded. Any military role they had is now done better and safer by satellites.
Unless you want to study a flight of a fast moving object in the atmosphere (something NASA may want to do as a research agency) there is no need for the SR71.
Sure, they thought they didn’t need the capability anymore, that satellites would keep making it more and more obsolete and here we are, when they realize those satellites will last as long as it takes for a missile or hunter killer to intercept it in a real peer nation war.
And now they’re finding out the factory that provided the titanium or polycarbonate whatever got moved to Beijing in 2004.
That or this is all a very stupid PR stunt, or they just wanted to strip it for parts, who the hell knows?
Shit, if you told me Trump just sold it to the Saudis and pocketed the cash that’s believable too.
We didn’t directly trade with them then, and we wouldn’t now. If the government wanted it, they’d just do the same thing and use intermediary countries and shell companies.
The thing they aren’t mentioning is that the only reason to try and take a sixty year old plane out of mothballs is that they can’t make them anymore.
They’ve been superceded. Any military role they had is now done better and safer by satellites.
Unless you want to study a flight of a fast moving object in the atmosphere (something NASA may want to do as a research agency) there is no need for the SR71.
Sure, they thought they didn’t need the capability anymore, that satellites would keep making it more and more obsolete and here we are, when they realize those satellites will last as long as it takes for a missile or hunter killer to intercept it in a real peer nation war.
And now they’re finding out the factory that provided the titanium or polycarbonate whatever got moved to Beijing in 2004.
That or this is all a very stupid PR stunt, or they just wanted to strip it for parts, who the hell knows?
Shit, if you told me Trump just sold it to the Saudis and pocketed the cash that’s believable too.
All the titanium for the current ones came from Russia. They’re even harder to trade with now than they were in the cold war
We didn’t directly trade with them then, and we wouldn’t now. If the government wanted it, they’d just do the same thing and use intermediary countries and shell companies.