Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
Definitely aliens
I guess we can put to rest the idea that the US government has successfully reverse engineered UFOs. Because if they had, there would be absolutely no need to do this if we could fly anywhere in the world in minutes or seconds and invisibly.
Maybe they have done that, they’re just really slow, and not actually any better than what we have?
Or maybe thats just what they want you to think 🧐
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We have no way of knowing if they’ve overcome the obstacle of traveling long distances in space.
Yeah but why would they do it to come here? I mean, gestures vaguely at everything
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If we know that, so do they. If intergalactic travel is no different to them than driving across town is to you and me, why wouldn’t they?
Also why does increased activity in that sphere always correspond with batshit political times. Also why are all the UFO celebs obvious fucking grifters. Also…
To study us. You might as well ask why scientists bring wild animals in to study.
I’m enjoying this - “We’ve learned enough science now that we realize it’s more likely fantasy creatures would be visiting us than that technologically advanced sentients would be traveling interstellar distances to visit.”
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What’s really funny is the Blackbird was absolutely the cause of more than a few UFO sightings, some that have been confirmed in hindsight.
They want a jet that works. It’s not NASA’s SR-71, the SR-71 was made by Lockheed.
F35s are chronically grounded with software issues. They want a plane that works.
The F-35 has nothing to do with this, but just to correct anyone’s misconceptions, F-35 loss and readiness rates only sound bad because that kind of coverage gets clicks/views. When you add back in the context of comparison to other aircraft and the total number of airframes produced and hours flown, the F-35 is actually performing great.
The F-35 isn’t grounded, nor does it have anything to do with NASA.
Neither does the SR-71.
fucking Google F35 software issues, chronic problems. they can’t fix it.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-software-upgrades-stagnated-warns-new-report-ps-031726
Those links aren’t smoking guns.
The first details troubled rollout of software upgrades, “upgrades” being the key word. That’s really just the nature of complicated software development in general. The previous complete package of software is already up-to-task and running it longer than desired isn’t a huge issue.
The second says they can’t fix multiple problems simultaneously, which is again another common software development reality and a very different statement than not being able to fix things.
The third flat out says the opposite in that many fixes actually have been completed, just not all of them yet. It’s an adjacent issue, but the headline also frames the secret keeping as a bad thing when that’s just a sensible thing to do.
Nor would an SR-71 play anywhere near the same role as an F-35 lol. They’re apples to oranges.
they are both hypersonic aircraft.
They are not. The F-35 has a top speed of Mach 1.6. It’s a supersonic aircraft.
The SR-71 has a top speed of Mach 3.2 lol. Literally twice as fast as the F-35 but still well short of the Mach 5 required for hypersonic flight.
The F-35 also has a flight ceiling of 50,000 feet, while the SR-71 has an 85,000 foot ceiling.
The SR-71 served exactly one role: Hypersonic aerial reconnaissance. No weapons, nothing. Just fly higher and faster than anything else on the planet.
The F-35 is a strike fighter and air superiority fighter.
They’re really not comparable.
To test against the SR-72.
SS-72 Orangeturd
It’s fun speculation to assume this is for military reasons but remember nasa s a civilian agency. Perhaps it’s connected to their research on supersonic and hypersonic flights
Or someone as NASA got a fun project greenlit. They threw it into the budget for the lulz, and it didn’t get cut. 😆
You’re most likely correct. They need a really fast plane to test sonic boom dampening at Mach 3+ speeds, and they can’t build a specialty plane yet.
That’s my thought as well, they want data for something they’re building.
Its going to be the most basic grift possible, they’re going to read your credit card numbers.
They don’t need all this to do that. All those numbers are breached already anyway.
I envy your username and wish I had come up with it. Envy of your humour.
I don’t get it?
Call him “…3” for short!
Call him “…3” for short!
They fired all the people who knew how to build shit and now they are desperately sending a bunch of newbies to “reverse engineer” the plane and try to figure out how it works. /s
Claude, reverse enginer plane, make no mistake.
Most of the people who knew how to build that plane are dead to be fair
I mean, it’s not that old of an airframe. I’m only middle aged and I saw the last time it flew in 1991. My dad just retired from the FAA a couple years ago and when he was in the military he maintained the flight suits for the SR71 and U2 programs.
The original engineers may have passed, but the crew and engineers responsible for the huge amount of maintenance for the airframe are still around and probably have more functional knowledge about the airframe than the designers.
Seconding this; my dad worked on the U2 for 30-odd years and he’s still kicking!
Oh nice, were you guys stationed out at Beale AFB?
Sorry, I’m terrible about seeing my notifications. Yep, we were at Beale between 94 & 98, but overseas before and after that.
No worries, same here. We were there from 96-00, there’s a good chance we’ve run into each other before! There’s an even better chance that our fathers worked together in some capacity, it was a relatively tiny base and the U2 program was pretty small.
I think Beale was one of my favorite bases I’ve ever lived on, I used to go hiking in the foot hills basically everyday during summer. I feel like it was small and remote enough where you could get into a lot of shit as a kid without ever really getting in any trouble.
By chance did you guys ever go to one of the Christmas parties in the old skunk works building?
Not me personally, we lived off-base and I was only about 12 when we left-- but my folks probably did for sure!
Funnily enough, I’ve been helping them clean out their kitchen so they can have it redone and the sheer volume of old squadron/hangar dance/etc mugs they have absolutely beggars belief. I’d bet there’s one or two in the hoard that corresponds to one of the dances you’re thinking of.
Manufacturing and design knowledge is mostly lost and rediscovered every few decades by the US. On one project or the other
Only a few more years before the mesothelioma takes the last of the maintenance crew, that thing was genuinely filled nose to tail (proverbially, it was actually full of fuel) with asbestos
Based on their work on the X-59, I wonder if they just want to collect sensor data on its sonic boom characteristics, and feed that into a model for sonic booms.
They don’t need to be able to build something in order to be able to learn something from that thing in operation.
They would be pretty retired but this probably isn’t that far off…
I like the idea that one becomes more and more retired each year after they stop working.
Given the US diet and healthcare system, I’d say many are definitely 6ft under
So Space Cowboys 2, except
- Everybody passes the physicals just fine, but all decide to quit instead of going through the onboarding process
- The young punk bad guys in the movie are secretly trying to get an LLM to redesign it, but can’t because the Blackbird was a skunkworks program and some key principal either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed
So Fogbank? With only difference being all fogbank engineers dying of old age rather than management incompetence.
Yeah but what everyone forgets is that knowledge can be relearned if you do it right.
And the issue of Fogbank was eventually solved by having modern day scientist study the problem (it was something like contamination of boron being used to make the fogbank material.)
The SR71 could be manufactured today if we wanted to. It wasn’t built with some magical spells that are forever lost to history. There are more people alive now that know how to machine titanium than there were when they built them originally. Its just a matter of investment in the labor and tooling to make them again, which probably isn’t worth it which is why they’ll keep flying the remaining planes.
One of the worse internet “I’m smart” thoughts is that “we’ve lost the ability to make insert outdated item because all that talent is dead.” Ok, so retrain new talent like every generation has to do anyways and maybe next time don’t pinch pennies and shutdown the factory with all these gods of manufacturing, instead bring in apprentices and have them learn from these masters.
But what about the profit margins and the shareholders?!?!? PE firms can’t milk successful companies to death for $$$$ if they actually invest in talent.
Absolutely, and although they did re-invent Fogbank, it took almost 100 millions, makes me wonder what would it cost to keep the knowledge from disappearing in the first place
Nothing about producing nuclear weapons, let alone miniaturized thermo-nuclear devices optimized to get the most efficient reaction during detonation is cheap. And the knowledge wasn’t necessarily lost, that is impossible to determine since we’re dealing with highly classified secrets regarding the construction of a nuclear weapon.
It’s possible that while making fogbank they merely got a contaminated batch of boron. Let’s say, for example, you find your grandma’s recipe for apple pie. But when your mother tastes it she says it’s a little off. You then eventually realize that you used apples that weren’t ripe yet, or that grandma used apples that were beginning to get soft. Thats not really the same as “lost knowledge” it’s more an experience gap.
Clickbait always makes these things sound like we’ve lost this information and now we’re screwed because it can never be relearned and no one knows anything oh no doom and gloom. Truth is lots of knowledge, through-out history, has been “lost” and then “rediscovered” primarily because this info becomes less valued/important and eventually someone needs it again so they rediscover it. Happened alot with mathematical theories and concepts, like calculus.
No one wants to lose knowledge but no one wants to pay to keep it alive the proper way (master/apprentice system that ensures these tricks of the trade are continually passed on) so we favor a system where specialized experts (scientists) are called in to solve these issues and rediscover the tricks of the trade using the scientific process. Either way you pay for the knowledge but we wanted to save money and shutter a bunch of cold-war era defense companies when the cold-war ended. The consequences of that are when you want to resume making nuclear weapons of the quality America demands you have to hire those scientists to figure out all the pesky details like fogbank.
It’s the only way they can be sure it’s not full of AI slop.
Vampire on an aircraft carrier.
Mysterious, won’t say why, what are they hiding the shocking truth they aren’t telling you….
Is it aliens? It’s gotta be cause of aliens.
A famous popstar paid people to smuggle live chickens into his hotel room every night. He paid other people to smuggle them back out.
Probably because the Pedo-in-Chief saw it in a movie. I swear that’s how he gets some of his stupid fucking ideas-- like the reopening of Alcatraz. You can’t tell me that moron didn’t just finish watching The Rock (nic Cage movie) when he decided that.
Next up: A base in the bermuda triangle
A prison for monsters, run by Amelia Earhart.
That sounds awesome
It’s actually a plot point in the Rick and Morty spin-off “President Curtis.”
Well, Mayday did just come out in September, and that features an SR-71 ish spyplane
Never heard the Alcatraz one!
Just visited San Francisco for the first time a few weeks ago, and Alcatraz was dope. Thought it’s always been open to the public.
It has been open as a tourist destination, he wants to reopen it as a prison. I went there when I was a kid.
Ohhhh yeah fuck that shit
His racist sidekick Musk was also obsessed enough to name one of his weird brood after that plane too.
The fun way to watch that movie is from the perspective that it’s really a bond movie that doesn’t focus on Connery
They did it back in the 90s to do some research. Probably the same this time.
I mean it flew in operations up until 1990 and its last actual flight was in 1999.
We can’t really build stuff like that anymore. The people who designed it had an intuitive grasp for aeronautics. You can’t teach intuition to a computer.
I mean that’s just a silly claim, the HTV-2 drone has literally gone mach 20, which is nearly 10 times faster than the SR71. Plus the SR72 project is currently in development with aims to be nearly twice as fast as the SR71.
Twice??? Is it manned?
Supposedly it’s supposed to be optionally manned.
Yes, we can build such stuff these days. There is no shortage of engineers in the USA, there is a shortage of employers willing to pay well.
There is no shortage of experienced machinist, in fact we have far more advanced manufacturing capabilities than we did in the 1950’s. We just have a smaller industrial footprint than we did in the 1950’s but there are plenty of companies that can machine titanium (in fact there are more machinist nowadays that know how to machine titanium because its more common than it was in the 1950’s.)
The shortage is in investors willing to invest in talented labor and the tooling to make the aircraft. The idea that we “lost” these skills is a general misunderstanding of how things work and reddit-tier click-bait “i’m smart” type headlines.
Yes, we can build a lunar lander even thought all the guys who built the original are dead. It would be a better lander than the originals. Yes, we can build rocket engines as good or better than the F1’s on the Saturn V. In fact SpaceX developed engine technology that far surpasses the F1’s for their boosters and just because they didn’t make 5 gigantic ones (opting for 33 smaller units) doesn’t mean they aren’t a better platform. The Saturn V couldn’t land it’s booster to be reused later on.
They’re selling it to Disney to use in the new X-Men movies.
