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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.'"
I was feeling naked with all this NSA spying and no air surveillance.
I'm glad things are back and track and I can be monitored in my backyard and abroad, for my safety.
Thanks for looking out for me, big brother!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
... can finally replace their old beater with something a little more hip and modern. Party at the mansion!
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http://marvel.wikia.com/X-Men_Blackbird
A defense contractor, a tea partier, and a teacher sit down to a plate of 10 cookies. The defense contractor takes 9, leans over to the tea partier, and says "psst, the teacher is trying to steal your cookie"
TFA won't load. But how "affordable" are we talking, here? Manhattan Project levels of affordable, or F-35 levels of "affordable"?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Which, ironically, is probably why they didn't bother upgrading the spy plane until now. Countries that could shoot it down could shoot it and any successors down, and those that couldn't couldn't.
The idea of a new plane to fill the gap, not from earlier planes, but from satellites being shot down, or just not being in the correct spot when you need extremely fresh data, is interesting.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It worked fine in practice for the entire second half of the 20th century.
Except for the inflation and economic stagnation of the 1970s, caused by excessive deficit spending on the Vietnam War. Or the recessions in 1961, 1979, 1991, 2008, etc.
Sorry that it doesn't work in theory.
Military spending can promote economic growth if there is insufficient aggregate demand (e.g. Germany in the 1930s). But economically, it is better to spend that money on something else, such as infrastructure (roads, bridges, ports), because in the end, you will still have the infrastructure. With military spending, you end up with either a war, or unused weapons.
What makes you think that they can't shoot an SR72 down?
Ballistic missiles and satellites are less maneuverable, but faster. And it doesn't take a lot of damage for a Mach-6 bird to disintegrate.
On the same topic, I'd really like to see a Mach-6 weapon deployment.
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)
I assume that a plane flying Mach 6 would turn a human pilot into chunky salsa with any kind of maneuvering. Generally, an aircraft can be a lot smaller and cheaper if you don't have to worry about keeping a person alive inside of it. Same thing with spacecraft.
Amazing plane, looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.
Will it be available in the traditional Hotblack Desiato livery?
Will it still leak oil straight off the showroom floor like a '57 Jaguar?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The fact that they announced this means 1 of 2 things.
1. The SR-72 has been in service for quite a while already.
-or-
2. Lockheed Martin proposed this to the military a while ago and they turned it down.
You really think *this* government would actually tell us about the latest and greatest?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
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 interceptor missile cannot use maneuverability for much. Ballistic missiles have little to no maneuverability at the time that the interceptor missile strikes them, so all the interceptor missile has to do is figure out where the ballistic missile is going and put itself there. An SR-72 would be able to see the interceptor missile coming and turn out of the way, and the interceptor missile cannot go Mach 6 to follow. The only way to hit an SR-72 would be to simply fire enough missiles and hope the SR-72 blunders into one.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The summarization of the summary of the summary comes into play again. The funny thing is, if you try to spend extra money on infrastructure like roads, power generation and distribution or healthcare, people will no longer vote for you. If you spend the money on war, you can play the "patriot" and "fear" cards, and they will love you.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
The SR-71 wasn't maneuver limited by the pilot, but by the airframe. The turning radius on the SR-71 was the size of some states!
That said, I wouldn't put too much stock in the artists rendition. That looks an awful lot like the cover of Popular Mechanics, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was made in a similar way (mostly with bullshit).
I read the internet for the articles.
The point is that this plane is going to be flying so high and so fast that an interceptor missile won't be able to get up to speed and altitude before the plane is gone. That's how the SR-71 operated, and it was never shot down by enemy action. The only reason it's feasible to shoot satellites down is that they fly on predictable paths and can't maneuver much. Even a limited maneuver on this aircraft is going to translate into a wildly different location in just a few seconds.
I read the internet for the articles.
1963 poverty rate: roughly 19%. 2013 rate: 15% Hooray. This is actually impressive given the tremendous increase in inequality between 1963 and today.
I read the internet for the articles.
Shooting down a Mach 6 aircraft is extremely difficult.
Lets say an SR-72 was going to go the full length of Iran, and Iran had recently deployed S-300 missiles from Russia. The S-300 is considered a world-class air defense weapon (despite having never been fired in combat). It has a 5 minute deployment time and a 24 mile range.
Mach 6 is roughly 4,567 Miles/hour or 1.26 miles every second.
It will cover the 48 mile engagement envelope of an S-300 (24 miles each way), in 38 seconds. What this means is a missile site can't detect and engage the target. Someone has to detect and transmit targeting information to air defense sights in the path of the plane, so they can be ready to lauch, when it gets within range.
Just some moderate maneuvering and route planning, keeps the SR-72 out of range most of the time.
There was rumor that the SR-71 was detectable with long range radars, but stealthy to weapons guidance radars. Add in stealth characteristics and the task becomes even more difficult.
From looking at a map, the absolute longest flight path over Iran appears to be about 2000 miles. Meaning the SR-72, worst case, would only be over Iranian airspace for less than 30 minutes. If a plane came in over the Caspian Sea, crossed over Tehran, then turned for the nearest border, they could be in and out of Iran in less than 5 minutes.
All in all, a very challenging exercise.
What does "100 miles in size mean"? There are no states that are anything close to 100 square miles, no. But there are certainly states whose dimensions don't (or barely) exceed that in the northeast. Connecticut, for example, is approximately 110 miles by 70 miles. The smallest state, Rhode Island, is 40 miles by 30 miles.
I kind of doubt that the SR-71 could not be intercepted. The Russian ABM system or some variants of the S-300 PMU would probably fit the bill. You have to remember they made entire systems to defend against XB-70 Valkyrie bombing attacks including the AA-9 missile system used in the Mig-31. The XB-70 Valkyrie had similar specs in terms of speed and performance compared to the SR-71 IIRC.
I'm cautiously optimistic that hypersonic flight will eventually make it to passenger airlines. It would be really nice to travel to Japan or Australia in 3 hours instead of 15. There are enough oceans over which to fly without worrying about the sonic boom. Reaction Engines is working on an interesting hypersonic engine prototype. That one looks even better than this military scramjet: higher thrust-to-weight ratio and ability to function as a rocket engine. This engine would enable travel by ballistic trajectory .. even faster and way cooler. People would pay crazy money just to ride it for the thrill of it. Maybe these are just dreams.
I'll add something since I've been following this stuff from 1986 when I first saw a scramjet test.
It wasn't the DoD spending money all over the world with whoever was interested in scramjets since the 1980s - that was NASA. Trickle down had nothing to do with this. It was about direct funding and then the DoD getting interested some time in the last five or ten years - more than thirty years after successful scramjet model tests in shock tunnels.
It's very sad really. All that outrage could have been used to form a useful third party instead of just a bunch of cheerleaders for the batshit insane wing of the Republican party.
I disagree - one thing I found intensely scary was the people who liked to dress up in period costume that walked around shouting stuff that would have made George Washington want to shoot them as Royalists - that sort of thing showed a profound lack of understanding and indicates some failings due to cutbacks in the US education system.
1963 poverty rate: roughly 19%. 2013 rate: 15% Hooray. This is actually impressive given the tremendous increase in inequality between 1963 and today.
It was 15% in 1966, 1982, 1993, 2013. From 1966 to today it has been fluctuating between 12% and 15%. Nearly 50 years of massive government spending with no change.
BTW, Johnson introduced the "War on Poverty" legislation in 64 not 63. The programs that implemented this agenda took years more. Poverty had been on a very sharp decline many years before this. This decline essentially stopped as this legislation was implemented.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG
Shame on you, confusing a poor teabagger with facts!
What facts are those? The government stats show that poverty has been essentially flat for nearly 50 years, 1966 through 2013. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG
It seems you are the confused party in this discussion.
And yet the U-2 is still flying. The reality is the SR-71 was retired because it was too expensive to operate.
True. But I've never understood the U.S. Liberal tendency to fawn over royalty either. The way the liberal press treats a Kennedy or a Clinton, you'd think they were secretly wishing to restore the Monarchy.
Sadly, the batshit-crazy wings are in control of both parties at the moment.
http://www.aviationweek.com/Blogs.aspx?plckBlogId=Blog:27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog:27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post:6dc7cb4a-39d7-4413-ac07-f145261f0e73
Just another day in Paradise