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NASA mysteriously trying to pull world’s fastest plane, SR-71 Blackbird, out of retirement — and won’t say why (nypost.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I'd love to know what NASA has planned for it.

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[–] 27 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

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.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    They've been superceded.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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago

    And now they’re finding out the factory that provided the titanium or polycarbonate whatever got moved to Beijing in 2004.

    Not really. The USA still leads the way in manufacturing high end aerospace stuff and machining titanium.

    The reason the SR71 production line closed down was cause the government contract for them ended decades ago. Give the aerospace companies a new billion dollar contract and they'll crank out as many SR71's as you want. We do that with the 6th generation jets and they've done a pretty good job of fulfilling those orders.

    China is leader of the consumer grade manufacturing sector, no question of that, and I would say they're catching up. But the USA still has a sizable manufacturing base and whats left are niches like aerospace and medical.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago

    There are plenty of reasons to take one out,

    They could be doing non destructive testing on it

    They could have a hypothesis on how some phenonomen works and want to do a test on an already built product vs spending billions on a new product

    They could be working on a similar design and the original drawings (hand drawn) have an inconsistency that they want to compare to the real product

    it’s not like they are sending it on spy missions again, it’s nasa wanting to see it and it’s also possible they don’t even NEED the blackbird but a bunch of aerospace nerds found an excuse to pull out a plane that’s considered one of the coolest planes of all time

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