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Skunk Works Reveals Proposed SR-71 Successor: the Hypersonic SR-72
cold fjord writes "Aviation Week reports, 'Ever since Lockheed's unsurpassed SR-71 Blackbird was retired ... almost two decades ago, the perennial question has been: Will it ever be succeeded by a new-generation, higher-speed aircraft and, if so, when? That is, until now. After years of silence on the subject, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works has revealed exclusively to AW&ST details of long-running plans for what it describes as an affordable hypersonic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike platform that could enter development in demonstrator form as soon as 2018. Dubbed the SR-72, the twin-engine aircraft is designed for a Mach 6 cruise, around twice the speed of its forebear, and will have the optional capability to strike targets. Guided by the U.S. Air Force's long-term hypersonic road map, the SR-72 is designed to fill what are perceived by defense planners as growing gaps in coverage of fast-reaction intelligence by the plethora of satellites, subsonic manned and unmanned platforms meant to replace the SR-71.'"
An arms race is not a viable long-term strategy for keeping the economy going, especially when there's no one to run against.
This country can't build a web site. How the fuck are we going to build an SR-72?
They retired the SR-71 like fifteen years ago. It cost too much to operate and used a special fuel, JP-7, that no other plane used.
It still has the speed record for manned air-breathing aircraft. (And, from the looks of the SR-72, will continue to hold it -- I don't see a cockpit in the SR-72 in the picture in Aviation Week)
Terrible comment:
a) Mach 6 is an extremely useful engineering feat. If nothing else, having a vehicle that's going Mach 6 advances the state of the art in engineering for flight. You will probably eventually see some of that technology filtering into the general aviation fleet.
b) Have you ever even read the Wikipedia articles on the U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes? The U-2 was shot down once. The SR-71 was *never* shot down. No regime in existence today probably cares enough about an SR-72 to build weapons to counter it. Additionally, planes that fly at Mach 6 fly at very high altitudes, so even if you can see it on IR (and the precursors to today's stealth technology to HIDE IR were on the original SR-71), you probably wouldn't hear much if anything at all: there's that whole pesky energy dropoff as a function of R^2 and actually having to have more than a handful of molecules for atmosphere to actually conduct sound.
This is not necessarily a bad project. Not nearly as bad as, say, the B-2 or the F-35.
Nobody's using a ballistic missile to shoot anything down. Ballistic missiles are used to deliver (sometimes nuclear) warheads to a land-based target, and are the things that interceptor missiles are designed to try to shoot down. GP's point is that if an interceptor missile can shoot down a ballistic missile and/or a satellite, then it can shoot down an SR-72. Whether the SR-72 is more maneuverable than an interceptor missile is unknown, but doubtful.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The war on poverty began over 50 years ago and we've spent trillions of dollars, your dollars. The poverty rate is higher today than it was when the federal government started spending money on it 50 years ago.
So the answer is "no". The government should leave your money with you. You'll spend it, and the stores where you spend it will hire people. More jobs = less poverty.
You see the Tea Party as rational actors. Many of us see them as deluded fools - or "usefull idiots" - stirred up by puppet masters who have NO intention of actually bringing about TeaHadi Paradise.