this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Got all the way to 71 by 1966, but then 59 years to get to 72? What've those skunks been doing?
Sexually harassing cats and talking with French accents.
J’accuse!
There was more of an attempted rape vibe going on there. Sexual harassment was just the icing. Get your Warner Brothers silliness straight.
If those cats didn't want it they wouldn't have been wearing those paint stripes. /s
This new plane is a hypersonic weapon delivery drone, barely related to the SR-71 aside from the speed it can travel.
As to the sixty years thing, satellites made spyplanes nearly entirely obsolete and traditional aircraft with stealth technology covered the remaining cases well enough that there wasn't a need for more speed. Research went into making missiles better instead, and this is designed to be a launch platform for those missiles.
yep. you could hide from radar, but thermals or acoustics would give you away. if you're trucking mach 5 leading edge friction alone might give you away even if you're coated with RAM and aerogels and magic dope.
I suspect it's just Lockheed wringing more 'magic' out of the skunkwork's legacy. I don't doubt the aircraft will be awesome, but like the f22, it'll be limited by physics and budgets and we'll wonder what the competing runner-up would do better/cheaper/faster.
See: YF23 heh.
That said I really do hope the Skunworks is still making magic we just aren't cleared for, and maintain the Kelly Johnson / Ben Rich legacy of hits.
Then why do we still operate the U2? SR-71 was operated all the way until 1999. Hubble was launched in 1990 so the large mirrors for spy telescopes had to have been in use well before that.