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I would be willing to wager that the US already has at least one high altitude, very fast research plane that incorporates all sorts of modern materials and technology, and therefore has no particular need for an obsolete aircraft from the 1960s that was primarily designed to solve 1950s problems.

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At several points in time, the Pentagon proposed mothballing the SR-71 and relying on sat-recon. And each time, the aircraft-recon imagery people screamed bloody murder and insisted they needed the aircraft imagery. And then one day the Pentagon announced that they were shutting down the SR-71 ... ... and there was a thundering silence from the aircraft-recon intel people. Almost as though there was already a replacement for the SR-71 but nobody could talk about it.

And then NASA kept operating it as a research platform for another decade, until they also stopped. Almost as though it had lived out its useful life for that purpose.

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