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.
the sr-71 is definitely not a scramble-able plane:
it leaks fuel when on the ground (it shrinks when cold) so it’s stored empty,
it’s as aerodynamic as a brick when subsonic so it needs an insanely long runway, and
it has an always-on afterburner so it burns an alarming amount of fuel.
when they were doing surveys of iraq during desert storm they had to field a fleet of eight tanker planes over the indian ocean just so the damn thing would make it from japan to the gulf.
Edit: oh and those are specially designed tanker planes because of course it uses JP-7 so they needed separate tanks for that and their own fuel. they also needed to be able to refuel at like 850km/h or the blackbird would just drop out of the sky.
the sr-71 is definitely not a scramble-able plane:
when they were doing surveys of iraq during desert storm they had to field a fleet of eight tanker planes over the indian ocean just so the damn thing would make it from japan to the gulf.
Edit: oh and those are specially designed tanker planes because of course it uses JP-7 so they needed separate tanks for that and their own fuel. they also needed to be able to refuel at like 850km/h or the blackbird would just drop out of the sky.
love that plane.
Iirc it starts nearly empty and is only fueled up in the air, so basically no way around tanker planes.
that’s apparently not true, it would take off with half fuel because the landing gear could buckle under the full weight.
even with a full tank it could only go for about 90 minutes though so anything nontrivial did indeed require a tanker.
I’m sure a skilled politician could sell this as being basically the same ;)
still faster than launching a new satellite
we have over 15 thousand of the things up there now, surely someone must have seen something