Rumours of SR-71 Blackbird Successor from Lockheed's Skunkworks
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Why the SR-71 was retired over the U-2 which is still in service today:
> For a mission over a target in the Middle East with the planes based in England, [the SR-71] needed to have multiple airliner size aircraft in the air to support it. > It was not capable of taking off with a full load of fuel (or rather, not advisable for many reasons), so in order to take off, there had to be a tanker waiting in the air to top it off once it got airborne.
> It would then make a high speed run to the target zone where it would meet up with another tanker before doing its Mach 3 run over the target. It would then need to tank up again once the recon run was done for the trip home, and then there would still be a tanker in the air on standby in case it needed gas before landing or in case it needed to divert for weather or something.
> So that’s a minimum of 4 airliner sized support aircraft, including all of their parts, fuel use, and crew, flying out of a minimum of 2 different bases just to make a single SR-71 operational mission happen.
> And that’s on top of all the crew, fuel, parts and mechanics just to operate the SR-71.
This sounds like dev hell, and yet a viable dependable product. I wonder how many big corps operate the same behind the scenes.
Sometimes you want extreme performance at any cost. But a lot of the time you want a good enough performance at low cost.
The amount of supporting resources and length of maintenance breaks etc affect cost, or the amount of aircraft you need to get in order to be able to do the mission.
If you have 20 aircraft but 15 are being maintained, you only have 5 flyable ones, you still had to pay for acquisition of all the 20, and have to pay for the ongoing maintenance for the 15.
If you have 10 but only 5 are maintained at any given time, you have the same flying capacity of five aircraft but your total costs are likely going to be much less as you only had to acquire ten aircraft and only have to have maintenance people enough for 5 at a time.
This is really hard to explain to a lot of people in the software industry by the way. They say a feature is complete, my job is done. But if it's extremely hard to configure, deploy, monitor, maintain etc then it might turn out to be a net negative.
It's the whole iceberg that counts, not the tip.
Why can't it be 2 support aircraft? Is the SR-71 mission too long for the tanker to stay in the air? The tankers can also service other aircraft so they aren't necessarily put in the air exclusively for the SR-71.
It's still an expensive plane though.
The thing that made it obvious to me that there was a replacement for the SR-71 was that when they retired the aircraft, they didn't retire any of the tankers. That meant there was now some other unknown aircraft flying that also used JP-7, and it must therefore be the replacement for the SR-71.
Note that JP-7 is so hard to light on fire that if you throw a match into a bucket filled with JP-7, the match will get snuffed out. You've got to be a lot hotter than a match to light that stuff.
The same is not true of JP-7.
J57: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J57
CFM56: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFM_International_CFM56
As far as I know only the A-12 family and the X-51 used JP-7 given it needed Triethylborane (TEB) to ignite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP-7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane
More on the KC-135Q/T
An hour later, you would hear a giant rumbling coming from the flight line. It would get louder and louder until it was all you could hear. As the SR shot off into the distance, you could slowly make out the din of all the car alarms on base.
They would sometimes need 4 tankers and they would shoot off in pairs. I was told they always had two tankers per fill up. They would grab some from one and then some more from the other.
Back in the 90's it was estimated that each SR flight had a cost of at least a million dollars with fuel costs, wages, etc.
The B-2 on the other hand, well, that was secret but official. And had a ton of bureacracy because of it.
Avionic came from the F-16, F-15 and F/A-18 programs (unsourced claim, but very likely, those parts were purchased as spares for those aircraft).
Engines are modified are modified F404s drom GE.
That leaves the airframe, landing gear and some other bits and pieces like evironmental controls, but the avionics and engines account for the vast majority of aircraft costs.
I was really surprised by how small both are.
We finished the first big hangar and my said how cool it was and that we’d seen it and ut was time to go.
Then I told her about the other 2 (3?) hangars.
We got our 10k steps in before lunch, but it was amazing, and I’d go back any day.
Putting the kids in the flight sim was cool. I told them it wasn’t that bad then my daughter promptly flew it fully upside down and we heard the screams from inside. Mostly fun screams. They begged to ride it again. We did it a bunch. My daughter got competitive so we had to fly together to get the days high score.
I can't think of any other situation where the US has violated airspace regularly like that while not being in a state of war. Seems incredibly dangerous/provocative. For instance the US doesn't fly over North Korea or Iran even though I'm sure it could.
We had a couple Chinese balloons over the US and it was a major diplomatic incident that ruined relations for about a year
I find it hard to believe the US can go back to flying planes over Russia/China/etc. without stirring up some major issues
Can you imagine if at their whim Chinese supersonic jets flew over LA or NYC? It'd be basically a declaration of war
US flew its planes over pretty much all of Middle East, while not being in a state of war with any of the countries. And probably many, many other countries that did not have technology to even know they are being overflown.
Are they regularly flying over Syria?
The Iranians jammed and stole a drone (lol) but from what I understood it was flying near the border and not over Iran
They flew over Yemen and bombed their own citizen, but Yemen doesn't have a functioning government
Very strange though, why does it need to be reusable? It clearly is a sensible platform as it looks like the Chinese have built a similar thing, but I just don't understand what it's really doing and why it has to be done that way. V.interesting!
Don't be too confident in that statement. The Russians built a copy of the space shuttle despite the inherent unreasonableness of that platform.
Some people speculate that it is designed to take foreign satellites offline. Perhaps part of that mission is bringing them back to Earth to be analyzed.
Pure speculation, of course. Removing their solar panels so that they fit in the bay and then actually getting them inside seems complicated.
Also there is the 'RQ180' that has been spotted flying near the Philippines that is most likely spying on China to some extent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/09/07/americas-ne...
Well at least the U2 did fly over.. unless Gary Powers' parachute caught a nasty updraft
I don't think that US & Russia has any arms reductions treaties still in force, but the Open Skies Treaty is still there.
Countries and regions where the U2 is known to have operated. Some of these were friendly, somewhere hostile, some were at a time of war,
The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Norh Korea Cuba Afghanistan Iraq Poland East Germany Malta Cyprus Egypt Israel Indonesia India Horn of Africa
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...
Only the U-2, and only while it was a secret program. The Soviets could have protested the overflights at any time before shooting down Gary Powers, but didn't because not being able to get aircraft or missiles near it embarrassed them.
It's set in the 60s with the pilot flying a new supersonic spy plane and dodging Soviet interceptors, eventually crashing guess where.
He goes into a lot of detail about the plane, and specifically the different modes the engines have as the speed increases, which although fictional sounds very much like what they've actually done here. I think he acknowledged help from an aerospace expert in the plane design.
Starlink(-like) communication has a low enough latency (25 and 60 ms) and is nearly unjammable. There are too many satellites to destroy, unless the enemy resorts to outright Kesslerization. In the rare cases where the communication is dropped, some fallback programming / AI can at least return it home.
And to me it still seems possible that someone could come up with some jamming technology that prevents drones from communicating with satellites or base stations - and if someone does, you don't want your entire air force to be disabled.
1 - Is China capable of taking down 5000 satellites, and can they do it quickly enough to matter?
2 - Can China take out the satellites faster than they can be replaced?
3 - If a "major" conflict erupts that calls for the destruction of Starlink (et al.), some of the first "strikes" by the other side will be to reduce China's ability to take out satellites. Do they have the redundant capability to take out Satellites continually?
The U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon, has poured so much money into Starlink that they likely already have contingency plans to deal with this exact scenario.
I imagine having a man in it while going mach 5 would increase the turn radius dramatically..
Is there any indication this thing will be able to do anything current methods cannot for a fraction of a fraction of the cost?
You can have an extremely high end satellite in LEO but it may only pass over the desired target once per day. You can put it in GEO and have it see the whole area but it's going to be so far away it's going to be limited in what it can see. You can build more satellites so that one of them passes over areas of interest more frequently but you can't make a Starlink sized reconnaissance satellite constellation if you're putting super high end hardware in each one. Those sensors cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each.
Reconnaissance aircraft are a dramatically more economical way of finding mobile targets than massive LEO constellations of super high end sensors. Instead you just put the high end sensor in an aircraft and have it overfly the area you're trying to surveil. This is why many countries are dramatically increasing investment in them. Actually knowing where things are is critical to destroying them.
Plus the people you're surveilling might discover its timing, and just put everything in garages or under tarps at the necessary times.
If you want to somehow alter the timing, you have to burn irreplaceable fuel and reduce the lifetime of the satellite-investment.
I really don't see how they could be reality. Do you have any specific arguments or sources for this claim?
> Those sensors cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each.
What sensors are you talking about that cost hundreds of millions and requires multiple?
>What sensors are you talking about that cost hundreds of millions and requires multiple?
Nearly all sensors worth putting on a satellite in a military context are going to cost at least $10 million and those would be pretty low quality and of limited usefulness. The NRO regularly launches individual satellites with sensors which cost >$1 billion dollars. Their yearly budget is >$6 billion despite having almost no personnel. High end sensors are very very expensive. You need multiple because, as previously stated, if you only have 1 you might be waiting an entire day for it to orbit over the correct place on the earth. You can build 1,000 of those and get near real time tracking but it's going to be absurdly expensive. Much cheaper to just fly a single aircraft over the correct part of the earth you're interested in. The sensor payloads that RQ-4s carry still cost >$100 million but you can just fly them exclusively over areas of interest meaning you don't need nearly so many of them. They're also a lot closer to the ground meaning that an equivalent quality sensor can see a lot more than it would be able to from LEO.
And while satellites have obsoleted spy planes for many purposes for a while now, one thing they can’t do is go on demand to any arbitrary location
You have a point there, but only marginally, as current rocket tech is making rapid deployment of satellites a breeze. I'm not talking about Musks or the Chinese reusable rockets - the military doesn't care as much about economics and had the ability to rapidly launch satellites from planes for a long time.
This is also almost certainly unmanned.
But there have also been lines of satellites created for doing radio captures, also pointed down.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquacade_(satellite)
what's the benefit of a supersonic missile system vs a high subsonic missile platform, what are the drawbacks, cost, availability, size, handling.
Also what are the drawbacks - operationally - like increased visibility, decreased range, decreased payload?
While hardly trivial, remote control within earth atmosphere has much more reasonable latency, and thus applicability.
https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned...
You can just never spend enough tax dollars on dismembering the poor...
Or at least, upgrading the current icbm and detection systems seems like it should be a priority in conjunction with these cool birds. Especially after their recent failures.
Edit: Launching an ICBM is going to cause a huge alarm - how do the other side know that rocket is being used for reconnaissance rather than an attack?
Same for hypersonic reconnaissance airplane - expensive and no much sense to use. Either satellite or small slow low altitude reconnaissance dron, which could fly for hours to provide realtime image of the battlefield.
And yes, there are many suitable targets for an ICBM than can deliver a batch of hypersonic - and they don't even need to be nuclear.
It is not a weapon for a war, there is no usage of ICBM on the battlefield.
Was the sr71 equipped with weapons ? If the sr72 also is a reco aircraft it wont deliver anything
Instead of one such vehicle you afraid to loose it is much better to have tens or hundreds of long endurance drones for realtime reconnaissance. And satellites of course.