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USAF Developing New "SR-72" Supersonic Spy?
Kadin2048 writes "According to an Air Force Times article, the famed Lockheed Martin 'Skunk Works' may be hard at work on a new supersonic spy plane (with 'artist concept') for the U.S. military, to replace the SR-71 'Blackbird' retired a decade ago. Dubbed by some the SR-72, the jet would be unmanned and travel at about 4,000 MPH at as much as 100,000 feet, with 'transcontinental' range. Some have speculated that new high-speed spy planes could be a U.S. response to anti-satellite weapons deployed by China, in order to preserve reconnaissance capabilities in the event of a loss of satellite coverage. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin would comment on the program, or lack thereof."
Given the size of the thing, and the speed and height it flies at, that's going to look a lot like a missile. Might not be the best thing for an already paranoid enemy to see.
I hate to state the obvious, but the article is pretty sensational... I can summarize:
Cower before our unmanned 6000mph stealthy black aircraft! If the Mach 6 shockwave doesn't get you, the nuclear handgrenades it carries will!I already have an SR-72.
p
http://www.apogeerockets.com/SR72_Darkbird_Kit.as
It doesn't go 4,000mph, though. It just sits there. I think I was ripped off.
I'm sure a lot of you guys already know this, but for those that don't...
The SR-71 Blackbird was originally named the RS-71, but it was renamed when Lyndon Johnson accidentally rearranged the letters during his 1964 announcement of the existence of the SR-71 (which he was supposed to call RS-71). Anyway... airplane history for ya'll.
When they SR-71 was retired, they claimed it was no longer necessary as satellites could do the job. I assumed they had a replacement aircraft in place.
that's clearly a submarine. And at 4000MPH, a flaming fast submarine too!
I was wondering when they'd have an official designation for Aurora.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
It's also vulnerable to psionic telekinetic mutants who could pull the thing to Earth and then disassemble it with their minds.
I hate printers.
Is this really even necessary? Un-mothball a couple SR-71s. Is there even anything that can bring one of those down?
Sorry, no dyslexia for LBJ :)
_ and_designation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird#Name
USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaisance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the Blackbird was to be announced by President Johnson on 29 February 1964, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the plane's designation.
I hope you get modded up to at least Insightful +3.
(My previous post had bad links. Sorry.)
http://www.cnw.mk.ua/weapons/airforce/razv/sr71/im age/sr71ff.jpg
http://perso.orange.fr/romain.g/sr71-1.jpg
Except there was never any suggestion that Aurora was "crew optional". Nothing solid provided by the article, but no one should be surprised if it turns out to be true.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
As in Mutually Assured Destruction, if the SR-72 were falsely interpreted as a nuclear missile. I doubt that would happen, but I believe that was the point of the "first post".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
*I* heard it was going to be used by Gooogle to do the next run of Street views...
Gentlemen, this may be the very first sighting of this new spyplane on Slashdot. Observe the shape made by the bold text under a resolution of 640*480 @ 60Hz.
Nobody ever thought the U-2 was immune to missles, they knew that it flew outside the engagment envelope of _current_ Soviet SAM systems but the CIA estimated that by sometime around 1960 Soviet SAM technology would advance far enough to make them vulnerable. When Powers was shot down in 1960 his flight was supposed to have been one of the last to go into Soviet airspace. Simply put they took a chance that they could pull it off one more time and lost.
...) to shoot them down.
Second its not enough to just detect the plane to shoot it down, you have to have a weapon that can engage it. The Soviets had known that planes (probaby US) were penetrating their airspace for some time, they just didn't have a weapon that could engage them yet. The higher and faster the plane flies the smaller the envelope of engagment (both in space and time). Altitude and speed don't make a plane invulnerable but they make them harder to hit and possibly invulnerable to _current_ air defence systems. Of course if there is a next-generation plane that can evade current missles then people will start work on next-generation missles (or laser, HPM,
It's a never ending game of cat and mouse.
If the headline ends in a question mark, it's not news.
Question everything
Does it matter? Well, the first to build a working waverider aircraft was a Scottish amateur rocketry group. Story has it that when NASA and Boeing engineers saw footage of the vehicle flying, they were staring at the screen in sheer envy. They'd got no further than theory. We also all know the story of the New Zealander who has jet-propelled go-karts and his own low-cost cruise missile. And the Gauss Rifle linked to above didn't look too complex, either.
Although amateurs are very unlikely to be building supersonic or hypersonic spy planes in the near future, none of this looks so complex that it could not be done by other nations in comparable time. Don't think it won't happen - too many potential benefits. Variants will also inevitably be adopted by commercial space planes, as it's so much cheaper than using vanilla rocketry and should be much more reliable.
To me, the only question I think worth asking at this point is who will be there first? Lockheed-Martin, China or Rutan? (And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Laser defenses" are hardly worth losing much sleep over. In order to hit a target moving the speeds this thing moves and at the height it travels, you will not only need one very powerful laser, but a damn good targeting system. Even then, the laser can only hit what is in its horizon, with stuff on the horizon being extremely difficult to hit and taking even more power. Any such laser would be pretty damn big, pretty damn obvious, consume a very noticeable amount of juice, and be a big fat plump target.
Fears of laser defenses hardly justify much worry. Conventional missiles are probably far more worth worrying about, but even then you are talking about a very fast, very long range missile that probably looks more like a ballistic missile then a normal missile. And if they hit one? Oh no. They just killed a robot. The alternative is to use much larger and slower manned vehicles or rely on satellites... which China has shown it is capable of knocking down.
That does highlight the one area in which you'd want a pilot, though, and that's to make sure that no real technology falls into the enemy's hands.
That's what the C4/Thermite is for. Debris isn't worth much when all that's left won't even fill a teaspoon.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Seriously.
The SR-71 is easily the baddest mofo of any item in either the Smithsonian's downtown Air & Space or Air & Space II in the big hangar out by the airport [which is where the SR-71 sits, right smack in the middle of the floor, dominating everything else around it].
Badder than the Wright Bros' biplane, badder than Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis, badder than Apollo 11, badder than the Space Shuttle.
Just one great big Samuel Jackson Pulp Fiction Bad Mofo of an airplane.
the SR-71 is a famous example of something very advanced remaining classified for a long time. By the time the public saw them, they were practically retired. I'd guess that this vehicle exists now in classified form, and by 2020 we'll "officially" know they've built and flown them.
stuff |
I don't care if there are better solutions or if it's expensive or bad for the environment or whatever. The engineer in me just thinks that the SR-71 was too cool to be taken out of service. I look forward to the SR-72.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If it's intended as a satellite-replacement in case of reconnaissance satellites being destroyed by ASAT weaponry, wouldn't there be some issues in remotely controlling an aircraft with "transcontinental" range without relying on communications satellites that would also presumably be destroyed by the point this aircraft is needed?
I'm confused.
They used the lasers to light up the satellite, and smacked it down with a missile (kinetic).
They also have the ability to blind some satellites cameras with lasers.
They do not have the ability to destroy satellites with lasers.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
I, for one, welcome our new psionic telekinetic mutant overlords.
Redundant. Flak is a German-style contraction for Flugabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft cannon.
Guess that makes me a German Nazi...
rj
You know, at 4000mph I really don't think C4 or Thermite would be needed. I think friction would do the trick if there were to be any unplanned aerodynamic manipulations.
Who is John Galt?
You obviously didn't follow my suggestion to research hypersonic IR seekers. Come back when you learn to read. Further, try learning a little about compressible fluid dynamics before trying to comment on such a topic. THAAD is just one "famous" application for such technology, but there are numerous other projects around the world for lower-tier interception that use IR for final stage guidance that would be applicable. Finally, THAAD does not operate in a "vacuum"...and it must deal with the same thermal envelope problems due to its speed. Such heating has more to do with Mach number than the density of the surrounding air...altitude is largely irrelevant since the Mach number "auto-adjusts" to the altitude due to the relationship of the speed of sound to density. THAAD is not just a out-of-the-atmosphere interceptor..it is designed to engage targets both endo- and exo-atmospherically including short-range ballistic missiles. The IR seeker was designed to function in a an environment exceeding Mach 7 inside the atmosphere...
- a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs= 4KB&q=thaad+ir+seeker&btnG=Search6 70
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox
http://www.arnold.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123051
In any case...as I said before...this proves the concept...it *is* possible despite the previous poster's assertions...but I doubt a missile-based defense system would be the most viable against the proposed "SR-72"...energy weapons from perhaps an airborne platform would be my first choice for flexibility and probability of kill.
Try doing a little research before calling someone stupid, next time. Your comment drips with ignorance in the subject.
That artist's rendering image just makes me so excited. Pretty impressive design there. Very imaginative too! It's like they took a picture of an SR-71, cut off the wings and moved the vertical stabilizers to the fuselage. Wow! Almost as cool as this image of the fabled Miata SR-71.
I wonder does anyone remember Project Tagboard, the Lockheed D-21 unmanned drone that could fly at around 2,700 mph to fly a pre-programmed course before ejecting its camera pack? While the idea worked it was not a paragon of reliability and the project was cancelled in 1971.
However, thanks to technology improvements since then, this new drone could probably work, thanks to better materials, fly-by-wire systems, and GPS navigation for more precise control of flight path. It would probably be launched off modified B-52 bombers like the D-21 drone.
In the excellent "Skunk Works" about Lockheed Martin's special projects division, Ben Rich discusses the problem of masking the heat signature from air friction against the airframe of a plane flying Mach 6, saying it would show up like a meteor to a thermal detector. At that speed you can't shoot it down, but the observed can detect it thermally. I recall that he said they put additives in the SR-71's fuel to reduce the heat signature of its exhaust.
It seems that the U2 and SR-71 overflights may have had a calming effect on US military actions, as they allowed the US to better understand the USSR's level of alert, and prevented overreaction to a false belief that the USSR may have been massing for an attack.
IMHO, recon assets are probably the best bang-for-buck that the taxpayer gets from the defense budget. You don't always have a satellite where it needs to be to see something *when* you want...that's where these come in. Good recon can prevent wars...or at least help keep wars small (dependent on the cowboy factor in the whitehouse, of course). Far different from the nuclear stockpile...recon assets have immediate benefit and impact on national security while being used in an active role. As others have surmised...I'd be surprised if this thing wasn't already operational. I never bought the story that the air force was going to rely 100% on satellites for strategic recon...especially since the Soviets demonstrated ASAT weapons decades ago. The recent tests by the Chinese in that arena have only refocused the public on a long-existing threat to our global surveillance capabilities via our satellite systems.
As this is slashdot, I'll throw out what I've heard without siting a source. I hear the USSR shot plenty of missiles at the blackbird, but at that altitude, the missiles turned into flying bricks, unable to turn effectively. Designed for that altitude, the blackbird simply had to make a slight turn to avoid a missile.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I'm not so sure that this craft will be invulnerable to surface to air missiles such as the S-300V (SA-12b) fielded by Russia, China and India. The SA-12b has a range of between 100 and 200 km and a speed of 2.4km/s (Mach 7.24) and is known to have a limited anti-ballistic missile capability. Any craft travelling at mach 6 is not going to be very manoeuvrable (less than a missile in any case) and if it were to come in range of the SAMs would very likey be shot down. It is also an interesting coincidence that the SR-71 was slowly retired as later variants of the S-300 became operational as it would have made intercepts possible even over international waters where the SR-71 usually operated (The limits of view at 80 000 feet altitude is about 640km so there good information could be gathered without endangering the crew and craft, and satellites could actually get closer to the target than the SR-71 could), but you can be sure that the SR-71 was never operated over any area where there were active and hostile S-300s.
That said, tracking a target at mach 6 is no easy task. If the plane deploys some stealth or good ecm it will be no easy target. But invulnerable I seriously doubt. In the same manner that Russia upgraded its S-27 Topol M ICBM to manoeuvre in order to make targeting by the US ABM interceptor missiles, I am pretty sure that both China and Russia would be able to develop a counter to the SR-72 relatively cheaply, probably by improving the S-300 system.
I think the real use of a system such as this would be against countries like Iran, which the US fears is going to threaten Israel.
Do they even have self destructs I wonder? In Blackhawk Down (the book) they actually had guys go back and chuck in themite grenades into the helicopters. And in Iraq I heard the same thing about disabled M1A1s. I even heard of the USAF dropping napalm on downed equipment to destroy it. But all this is from journalists, so maybe it was bullshit.
Seems like if you had a self destruct, the guys that abandoned them would just have set a timer before they left. Maybe the safety issue makes it stupid idea in practice.
I dunno really. On one hand I think military stuff is full of explosives anyway, so a few small charges to destroy sensitive stuff is no problem, on the other I can see that it might be hard to do this if the inside is packed tight with soldiers and equipment, and maybe there are high tech ways to accomplish most of the effect of a self destruct if the computers reformat themselves and keys get revoked back at base. You certainly don't see the bad guys being able to use captured hardware, and it's not like al Qaeda will be able to reverse engineer it like the Russians could.
In that case, lobbing a thermite grenade is just to destroy any paperwork that might be left. I suspect there's an element of anthropomorphic thinking too, fragging equipment is sparing it the indignity of being captured.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
From the tone, UID and nick, I assume you're about 16 years old, so not necessarily trollish, just misinformed. Here's a free geopolitics lesson, kiddo: if the US embargoes China, Walmart goes titsup. Last I checked, that's the largest employer in the country. Dig?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
A lot of people in comments are claiming conspiracy about the Air Force and Lockheed Martin denying comment on the plane's existence or lack thereof. When someone says information is classified, it is not a confirmation or a denial of its existence... It simply means that any information someone might have about the possible existence of a theoretical super-plane is on a need-to-know basis. If the general public has a need to know (wouldn't happen unless it was something like Armageddon) then the general public will be informed.
There's no need to immediately jump to "It's classified so it must exist." If that was the case, then ask any Air Force officer privy to classified information for info on that information. If you asked "Are there aliens at Area 51?" I guarantee you they'd respond with "That's classified." Same thing with "Is the Air Force testing prototype beam weapons?" Classified. I know that in this case, they simply denied comment, but the same principle applies. Saying nothing on the issue is not a confirmation of a person's suspicions.