Not a trick to make an old plane fly again. The trick is holding it together and landing it.
I would imagine the problem they have with the 70 year olds they’re trying to recruit is that there are old pilots and bold pilots but well, you know the rest.
More like Mission: Impossible. Replete with a mini-doco about how Tom Cruise literally for reals skydove out of the Blackbird without a chute and landed on the enemy rocket in one take.
The SR-71 is cool, but this article is not at all confidence inspiring on many fronts.
Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.
It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.
It’s almost certainly being done by clowns on the orders of one of the clowns in chief. Note that quote, “I would drop everything to work on that” said guy who did not in fact drop anything to work on that. Reading between the lines I can hear old Mr loaf belting out “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”
The unspoken part may be “if I was 10 years younger”, I knew one of the engineers who worked on the engines he’s still alive but almost a 100, I don’t think he’s up to the challenge of this particular boondoggle
Clown show is my guess too. There's no utility for it other than rattling windows and other airshow shenanigans for bragging press releases.
There are faster (X-43 is mach 9.6 but unmanned) and higher and stealthier ships. But unless you're going to dip into the classified catalog, a rusty SR-71 is faster than the next fastest two ships which are both MiGs.
Back when the SR-71 was active, this magazine was nicknamed "Aviation Leak and Space Mythology" - them doing an article after the other rumours and Isaacman quotes reduces the credibility of the story, at least among Old Folk :-)
There was something special about the 60s in the US. Your comment implies you might not appreciate how absurd the SR-71 was. The F-35 is our latest fighter jet. It has a top speed of 1200 mph, the SR-71 had a top speed of 2200 mph. The F-35 is capable of operating at around 50,000 ft, the SR-71 was capable of operating at 85,000 ft. The F-35 has a self fueled range of about 1350 miles, the SR-71 had a self fueled range of 2,900 miles.
Look up aviation records and you'll find the SR-71. It even still holds the #1 spot for the fastest airflight (by a plane) ever. Basically, the SR-71 is old, but old doesn't mean antiquated. The 60s was the era that we went from knowing basically nothing about space, to putting a man on the Moon in 7 years (Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech in 1962, first landing 1969), while we currently flail about trying to recreate it with a program lasting into the decades already. The SR-71 was another product of this era.
The US also had two superlative poles of engineering excellence, Kelly Johnson's Skunkworks and Hyman Rickover's nuclear submarines. They've been since replaced by bureaucrats without an ounce of talent.
Why not? Losing that level of capability, and the ability to iterate upon it, seems like terribly poor strategic planning in the past - much in the same way that ending human space after landing on the Moon was also quite poor strategic planning. Reviving the SR-71, in much the same way that human spaceflight is also being revived, seems quite logical - especially because in the case of the SR-71, in contrast to rocketry, there is nothing remotely comparable in the commercial domain.
Near the top of this thread, there's a lot of debate and discussion about what we must have 'secretly' concocted. Some think that the various sighted UFO/UAVs might be secret US tech. But I see no reason to think this is the case, in no small part because things like the decision to retire the SR-71. You don't get from A to E without going from B C and D.
There's also other practical reasons. If we did have anything meaningfully advanced then it'd be being used, however grossly inappropriate it might be, in places like Iran. No chance the current administration holds anything back for the sake of some strategic edge in a possible future conflict. I also think secrecy in modern times is not especially realistic. Everybody has eyes in the sky, to say nothing of probable increases in human level spying and the like. And so forth. Basically the idea of rebooting the SR-71 would be precisely with the aim of eventually fulfilling these sort of 'fantasies.'
« what we must have 'secretly' concocted » — Secrets are often dirty, which is why they're secret. Not for public consumption. Like, what is the secret behind Wikileaks Bradley Manning's “conversion” into “Chelsea” after whistleblowing secret dirty videos showing the world how dirty it really is in there? In that military? Did they castrate him in custody?
Rather than wondering about “secret tech”, boyish fantasies fueled by Pentagon sponsored Hollywood movies glorifying guns and violence and blasting enemies (they always need enemies), ask yourself whether all of the stuff publicly and conspicuously trumpeted about (not only in past decades) did and does actually work and exist. ;)
There were armed variants like the YF-12. So far as I understand, the main reason the game changed is because missiles improved. Not much point focusing on things like speed when some missiles are reaching mach 16, contrasted against the SR-71's mach 3.3. In that context you simply have to pray your counter-measures work, and if that fails, then hope your ejection seat works.
The guy interviewed is actually the gentleman that was in charge of destroying all the spare parts at the end of the SR-71 program So he knows what he is talking about and is well known. Old interview here:
https://youtu.be/mQse_XLxcWM?is=JASvQNI_bVn_bAr7
The remaining members of the quickly dwindling Blackbird community ( maintainers and flight crews) are very skeptical that it can be done but it does not mean that Isaacman is not trying.
What's so surprising is that this is supposedly using an SR-71 that was on outdoor display. The Museum of Flight in Seattle has one in much better condition.[1] It's on loan from the USAF, so the USAF could take it back if they needed it.
There's another one at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, and a third at the Smithsonian's annex in Chantilly, VA. All three of those have been stored indoors in good conditions, and were flown to their current location under their own power. Not abandoned outdoors on a pylon.
This sounds too much like a politically motivated decision.
If the US needed a hard to shoot down recon aircraft, converting a cruise missile to carry a recon package would probably be quicker. There's also the X-37B, the unmanned mini space shuttle the USAF has. The USAF launches one once in a while. It stays up for a year or so, and then comes back down and lands. There have been about eight flights. Seems to work fine. Once it was put into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere and went back out, to test if could do high-altitude recon if desired.
It looks a lot like the original Space Shuttle, but it's much smaller, about the size of a small aircraft.
I think this one was on its wheels. But presumably the key factor is that it was owned by NASA, which makes it I assume much easier for NASA to do...whatever with it.
The article says this one was on a pylon (with a spare engine on display on the ground below). Being owned by NASA is important, also being on a military base (the home of USAF test flight!) where it could be removed and easily wheeled into a large-enough hangar without anyone noticing for 5+ months.
Getting any of those planes outside of their museums would be logistically difficult, and of course it would immediately be noticed. And even if you can rent a hangar big enough, and secure it, then you're stuck at BFI/IAD/Wright-Patterson trying to do this impossible task.
Another comment in this thread pointed out that "return an SR-71 to operational flying" is /also/ the exact type of cover story that would be handed out for as cover for an actual project (likely some hyper-sonic aircraft) when trying to rehire retired engineers for this new secret project.
I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71 (likely unmanned) that has been flying around at night from facilities like Groom Lake for years. Look at how long the RQ180 was flying around in semi-public and known about before it became seen in daylight by plane spotters in Greece. And a long time before that there were public relations approved photos of the Lockheed Martin Polecat.
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
The official public reason for NASA having an SR-71 back when they were still flying one was for extreme high altitude atmospheric tests/experiments. No other plane (at least at the time) could fly at the altitudes the SR-71 could.
Whether that was a cover story for additional spying by the NASA SR-71 is unknown to those of us without the necessary security clearances.
The 'SR-72' timeline makes for interesting reading, LM was talking about it for a while when it was their private concept then suddenly scrubbed all mention of it from their website a few years ago, which some suggest that it became an official government funded black project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72
Not sure why they would need an old SR-71 unless maybe they plan to test out something like new generation engines at very high speed, maybe with plausible cover to hide the newer more secret aircraft as flying at Mach 3+ tends to cover a lot of distance so it would be difficult to keep within secret test areas.
The SR-71 is mostly analogue. It has remarkable battlefield resilience including ability to operate when EMP and nuclear radiation are issues that would affect a lot of digital systems.
Worried about how to navigate if the GPS systems gets knocked out by an adversary? SR-71 has an analogue system, use that. Worried about how an adversary could use cyberwarfar against your avionics? SR-71 has you covered, use all of that.
And sure, you could take all the designs and hand them over to the SR-72 team at LM and say "yeah, all of that please", and they could figure it out, but you know what might be handy? A working SR-71 they could play with. And who knows, maybe the answer is to take an SR-71 in its entirety, and just upgrade a few parts to get the SR-72 performance (Mach 6) that you're after.
Side note: IIRC a lot of the star tracking tech still exists and is used by Trident D-5, B-52, B-1, and B-2 etc. IIRC. Most of it is analog, although I think only the B-52s version is a mechanical computer assuming its still in service. You never design your second strike capability to require a system that will be knocked out in the first round.
Crucially, the engine inlet spikes were computer controlled. And since it's an observation platform and not a bomber, is it going to be EMP hardened? That was probably classified at the time. /shrug
The SR-71 mission set included trans-attack reconnaissance for SAC, where it would overfly a radiating Europe and USSR perform nuclear bomb damage assessment for follow-on strikes. Aside from nuclear bursts and leftover detritus from the ICBMs etc., it was anticipated to operate in an environment where nuclear-tipped SA-5 and other Soviet SAMs would be bursting here and there. It's EMP-hardened.
I wonder if people are 1. proud, 2. in awe, 3. regretful, 4. spiteful of the people (engineers, technicians, administrators, executives, and back office people) who make secretive kinetic hardware like this under USG contract / prospective contract.
Very possible. Once you've gone to the massive engineering effort/budget to produce something like an RQ180, I'm sure someone will come up with an idea boiled down to essentially "hey what if we took the radar-resistant bay door design and internal munitions bay mounting from the F22 and shrunk it a bit, we could fit at least four 500 lb JDAMs in this bad boy"...
Things get re-used in weird ways with other stuff grafted onto them, I'm pretty sure the people who originally designed the F-A/18 never imagined it would be turned into the EA18 growler.
I'm not sure how an unmodified JDAM would handle highly supersonic slipstream. Best case is the guidance section just falls apart. Worst case - the bomb smashes into the aircraft on release, killing the crew.
Would not be the first for the related A-12 program - the D-21 drone program managed top get 3 people killed due to crashes on release.
“Yes we know, Mrs Lincoln, but how did you like the show?”
Classic HNer fixating to something technical because it’s safer than engaging on moralistic lines with broader topic at hand. And this is how unaccountable military technical monstrosities get built.
I would not be so sure, the environment that led to the development of the SR71 is not there any more.
For one thing space based observation is very good and has a much faster turn around now days.
Back then photography was film based, satellites would fly take pictures and release the film in a pod to reenter and be recovered mid flight[1].
And on the other hand altitude and speed does not buy as much survivability as it did back then.
Fighters flew at a maximum of 1.5 mach and missiles at 2-2.5 mach.
S-400s for example can launch interceptor variants that can intercept targets at almost a hundred thousand feet moving at 14 mach. I know that is for ballistic targets, but I doubt an aircraft flying at a similar altitude even at hypersonic speeds would have much luck.
I agree that any military on equal standing would blast the SR71++ to smithereens. But how many wars does the US fight against equals? And on the reconnaissance side, there are pros and cons to satellites. They're hard to replace and easy to track & destroy. Plus even the best space sensors lose quality due to distance.
Do I think an SR72 is a good idea? Hell no, but I don't think like the US military haha.
Like most things militarily Russian, the S-400 over-promises and under-delivers, but that doesn't mean it's not potent. It's probably incapable of hitting most ballistic missiles in real world conditions, but a plan flying in a straight line would be a lot easier, ignoring any stealth capabilities.
What we imagine as next-gen sr71 (ie, reconnaissance) is not going to be a plane. It's satellite based. You don't need a super fast plane and pilots going in and out of dangerous airspace if you are not even operating in airspace.
I talked to Lockheed engineers (at a party) thirty years ago about the supposed successor to the SR-71 which was all the rage back then: the Aurora. Obviously they didn't tell me anything but it was nice joking about it.
It struck me they were trained to respond to questions about classified stuff. When you asked them a question they responded with a question.
So yes, most probably something has been flying for decades that's at least as fast as the Blackbird. Prototypes which may or may not have been put into production.
As time goes on, Warhammer 40k will become a better and better guide to current events, apparently. Only one question: after recovering this lost standard template constructor pattern, how will the rites be learned to appease such a venerated machine spirit?
Rather than re-engineer the cart to use a different block? I mean, I guess when a part reaches end-of-life, your first move is to buy as many as you can, before you try to re-engineer things so it isn't needed, but... horsepower is horsepower. Torque is torque. It shouldn't be that hard to replace...
> The original design was conceived by two Lockheed Skunk Works engineers who had prior race car engine knowledge. In the mid-1970's, the engines of the start carts was changed to Chevrolet LS-7 454's. The Chevrolet big block engines developed 465 horsepower each. Even so, for many years they were still referred to as the Buick's.
And eventually the start carts themselves got replaced.
> In the '80's the AG-330 Start Carts were mothballed and in there place came a Pneumatic Air starting system for the SR-71's. It is true that the start carts were hard to maneuver around. Logistically, a recovery of a Blackbird at another base could be done easier with Pneumatic Air.
Yeah, big car engines is actually not that impressive, rather surprisingly primitive. Modern jets have external APUs for starting, usually via compressed air, that have compact yet powerful gas turbines inside.
Sure, less impressive than a contraption with a bunch of car engines but much more powerful.
It could have, sure. That would have been easy. But it would have added weight and complexity. That would have reduced speeds and/or altitude and/or range between in-flight refuelings.
We fixed it the other easy way: In the event that an SR-71 makes an unscheduled stop somewhere that wasn't prepared for it, then we send out a bunch of dudes with a cargo plane and some starter carts. That just takes money, which even easier.
It also takes time, but time was not a big deal: The plane was going to be there for awhile anyway. It could go over 15,000 miles between takeoff and landing; it wouldn't have landed where it did if it weren't broken somehow to begin with.
It'd need repaired by the crews who actually knew how to work on it -- who would also need flown in.
It would also need fuel before it could leave. That's problematic since the JP-7 it required was shared by ~nothing else in the sky, so: More deliveries.
Waiting for some Buick V8 starter carts to be delivered from the other side of the world wasn't really a roadblock at all.
There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.
For military planes, every bit of weight you can shed up front increases some operational capability of the plane. In this case, not carrying an extra 200-300kg of weight for starters meant 200-300kg more spy equipment /could/ be carried along on the mission.
Granted there are likely many obstacles to getting this airframe flying again, but the V8s probably isn't one of them. All those V8s did (and I've seen them in action) was turn a shaft. There's an infinite number of alternate options available to turn the same shaft.
You can credit card as many ready-to-run 9L+ V8 engines as you want[1], built to modern tolerances using high quality tooling, tested on a dyno and equipped with a warranty. Maybe different mounts and/or couplers are needed, but that's a very finite problem.
I suspect one actually difficult problem would be finding a refiner that can make the special fuel used in the unique engines of the SR-71. Then again, the US has a great many agile refiners at its disposal.
The SR-71 is a rather awkward thing to operate. Fuel leaks out of the tanks until atmospheric friction heats the aircraft enough to make them seal. It's a big mess, and the cohort of people that were actually capable of making these things work is aged out of the workforce. Assuming any of this real, NASA must have something truly extraordinary in mind to consider this.
The best theory I've heard (Alex Hollings) is that NASA is doing an exterior refurb to get the plane ready for a big reveal of some other exotic aircraft: putting it on stage with the new thing for glamor shots.
NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.
Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.
Generations of aviation enthusiasts will look back on the legendary risk management of NASA and wonder how it was entrusted to a MiG-29 aerobatics pilot.
> The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.
There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.
it looks like it would be much easier to get a powerful regular fighter jet engine (even old Mig-25 engines were fine for 2.8M), stick it to pilotless frame and just launch. Work a bit on intake shape, modern materials, CFD, and probably you can push it well into 3+.
Building a machine that can travel at speeds exceeding Mach 3 for a brief period of time is probably well within aeronautical engineering's current capabilities, with today's engines, yes. The innovation with the SR-71 was that it could fly at those speeds for an hour and a half, thanks in part to that JP-7 fuel with its high flash point.
Either way it's unclear why NASA, with its decreasing budget, might feel like they need to be taking this on as a research project.
That seems reminiscent of the Fogbank material in the US nuclear weapons. The process of making it was lost, and when it was finally recreated modern processes where to good and it still didn't work. In the end they had to compensate for the improved processes and re-add impurities.
That doesn't explain why they took the SR-71A off display. What would they need the actual plane for? They must have enough engineering diagrams to build up computer models for whatever new plane they would design.
> or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
One of the reasons why the UK went vastly over budget and behind schedule when they built the first Astute class submarine, because almost everyone who had domestic UK based hands on experience building a nuclear sub had long since retired. There's certain technical things, both military or non military, where if you stop making them for a long period of time (at even a minimal rate of production), the institutional capacity to implement them dissolves away.
See also - mega rail projects that start from nothing (cough HS2).
Politicians think doing engineering projects is like buying something off the shelf. Every engineer will tell you the only way to do stuff is iteration - starting small, learning from your mistakes and growing things. If you start a megaproject without a team of people experienced in doing more or less the same thing recently, it will cost vast amounts. Particularly if you push too fast and commit large amounts of money before you've had a few iteration cycles.
This feels like the steam catapault kerfuffle from earlier this year. Maybe I'm missing some vital reason these retired technologies must be revived, but it's not inspiring when our military doctrine is "let's go back to what worked 60 years ago"
Don't forget the new 'Battleship'. You should have seen the looks on the faces of some of the DoD people when they trotted out the big CGI rendered posterboard of the thing. They know it's a boondoggle and they're kicking the can down the road.
Yes, like the graphic at the top shows multiple rockets launching simultaneously from the ship. Is this even something that came from what the navy needs or is it just an ego trip?
My speculation level is at full but the SR-71 program was the gold standard and I think it's good to tap those responsible for it. They were doing some incredible stuff 60 short years ago and dismissing it as "old" is folly.
The SR-71 wasn't randomly retired, though. The tactical need to go really fast at a high altitude disappeared because you can now get the same intel from satellites and stealth aircraft. The real question is why do you suddenly need that capability again?
Planning for the possibility that access to space may become denied, and wanting a backup option. If the enemy takes out your spy satellite, how else are you going to get photos of the warzone?
Even in that case, cheap and unmanned would be much more cost efficient.
The SR-71 was uncontested in the 70'ies, but it wouldn't be today. Today it would be vulnerable. Missiles reach higher and fly faster. There are missiles that are designed to intercept ICBM's, which come in faster than a Mach-3 SR-71.
Radar detection, tracking and firing has also become much more effective in the last 60 years.
Making a single SR-71A airworthy again is likely not the goal. The tactical need for it is no longer there and a single working aircraft doesn't add much.
Rebuilding the institutional knowledge for future supersonic / hypersonic projects, on the other hand, seems like a worthwhile target.
I’m with the old guy on this, too long since it last flew.
It makes no sense to me, it would be an expensive and pointless vanity project. Sounds like there is a chain of people too afraid to say no, perhaps they’re hoping to drag their heels until priorities change again.
I think it would be worth it for the sheer education and entertainment value.
Seeing the SR-71 still gives me the same buzz as when I read about it in books as a child 40 years ago. It reminds me how cool technology can be, when it increasingly isn't.
I also think it's pretty cool that arguably the most awesome aircraft in existence didn't have guns (I'm ignoring the YF-12).
It's been probably 40 years since I first became aware of the SR-71 myself. I'm definitely not a kid anymore; if I want to feel some sizzle in my SR-71 beans, then I can just get in the car, drive to Dayton, and see one in person.
If that's not nostalgic enough then maybe I can spend some real money on a new-old-stock copy of the first new Lego kit I was given -- set 497 -- and bask in the rose-tinted glory of the past while I put it together on the rug.
But sure: We can make tech cool again. Part of me thinks that tech should be amazing and cool to learn about.
Kids deserve their own new generations of amazing technological spectacles to marvel at, not a resurrection of ghosts from 60 years ago.
Remember how old and archaic it seemed when you were a kid, 40 years ago, and you saw something that was high-tech 60 years before that? We're talking 1926-level tech, here. I sure did love the local history museums that had areas that covered that timeframe, but I recognized them for what they were: Displays of really interesting very old stuff.
We can do better than that for today's kids, but we can only get there by moving forwards -- not backwards.
I've suggested this elsewhere in this thread, but the analogue nature of it might be useful to current design teams to get familiar with operationally.
Getting contemporary knowledge of the navigation, hydraulic, avionics and other systems is going to be pretty powerful if you need to build something that is as battlefield-ready in the modern era. Nobody is hacking into an SR-71, and it's going to be delivering its missions just fine if GPS is knocked out. Taking the operational (and not just academic) experience of doing that and putting it into the current generation of Skunk Works engineers is going to be useful.
I'm not sure their plan is to put it into active service, but they could - the SR-72 could just be an SR-71 with upgraded engines and other systems.
However, the process of getting it ready for active service even if just as a flying museum piece could sure help a lot of engineers learn a ton of lost knowledge.
I’m going to stick with my pointless designation, sure many things can yield knowledge and if money, time, and expertise were infinite then sure, why not. But they are finite and there a million better things for these people to be doing that would yield useful knowledge more efficiency.
Engineering exists within an ecosystem and that old ecosystem is gone. Everything would be a once off. The materials science could be interesting but that’ll also be one offs and probably wouldn’t generalize.
1) when people say "destroyed the jigs, tools and spares in 2007" What do they actually mean? Burying things isn't destroying. Putting them in a furnace is destroying. Is it possible that both parts, and tools actually are recoverable e.g. from the seabed? The dimensional stability might be off, but to help reconstruct tools, it's not nothing. Likewise digging up something buried in its packing crate is not rocket science.
2) "that would be ludicrously expensive" doesn't mean much any more. It's not unlike "we can't make a saturn 1 any more because the tools were destroyed and it would be ludicrously expensive to make an F1 engine" -well yes, but thats not impossible, it's just unlikely and expensive. So maybe this is unlikely, expensive but ... has a unicorn sugar daddy?
3) there are craft in all sorts of places. Not just on sticks outside NASA property. I am not a historian or a federal government employee, but I wouldn't think it impossible for people to ask other agencies to let you inside the shell and remove the bits you want, or even ask for it back. The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs..
4) its a titanium alloy. It's temperature and corrosion resistant, noting some things (like chlorine according to the web) are bad for it. It's not made of pure chinesium or balsa wood. Interior surfaces would be in pretty good shape.
As far as number one goes, the tooling has almost certainly been recycled when they say "destroyed". By recycled I mean in to new steel in an electric arc furnace. It's pretty common even in every day mass production for tooling to either be sent for destructive testing or a destructive decomissioning/EOL use (cutting, defacing, used for practice for facility apprenticeship, etc). I imagine something on the level of Blackbird tooling would have gone through a very strict decomissioning process before it even hit the scrap bin.
As far as #2 and the rest goes, I agree that with enough money you could make anything happen. However, sometimes recreating something so complex could be a "not enough money in the world" type situation. Sure, drawings and specs exist, but even on today's 3-d modelled assembly you're not typically modelling every single part to full accuracy. You have things that are off the shelf that might be a black box drop in, you have things you contract out that are built to spec. You know what you get, but not necessarily exactly how it's done. Then in your own facility there is a certain level of institutional knowledge that is not necessarily documented in such a way you can just recreate it.
Finally, one of the biggest hurdles, there's are not things that you can just throw an LLM and some engineers at. The actual trades themselves have changed so much since the time of production your only option is to call in retirees. The machinery is different now and so are the workers.
I feel like with a large budget they could definitely get an SR-71 in the air for testing and exhibition purposes, Id love to see it happen. I guess it really depends on how much was removed and destroyed when the machine was decomissioned and how much damage lack of maintenance, environmental factors and age have taken their toll. The good news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time. The bad news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time.
Source: I am a toolroom machinist at a material science lab in the aerospace and defense sector.
Large production runs (think cars) the tooling is sold to a third party to make spare parts. However that third party will watch what sells and scrape the tooling when sales are not large enough to justify keeping it around. Things that never break have the tooling scrapped early. Things that collectors break the tooling stays around - if it wears out they make replacement tooling.
The SR-71 was not made in large enough numbers to get the above treatment. If the government wants spare parts they need to pay to keep that tooling around.
> I imagine something on the level of Blackbird tooling would have gone through a very strict decommissioning process before it even hit the scrap bin.
Being a military vehicle, the tooling would have been classified. It would need to be "demilled" (or de-militarized) before disposal. Depending on the materials involved, it could be melted or shredded before burial in a classified landfill.
> we can't make a saturn 1 any more because the tools were destroyed and it would be ludicrously expensive to make an F1 engine
The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
The Rocketdyne F1 was the pinnacle of hand-crafted engineering, with each engine being slightly different and the people having to account for those differences during assembly. It has a whole bunch of complicated welds which require a lot of tweaking, adjusting, and literally days of welding work? Neil's got to go to the moon, so you better get to it!
Those highly-skilled highly-specialized engineers don't exist any more, and for a good reason: with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost. It just requires the designers to make it automation-friendly from the start. Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
So no, we literally cannot build a new Rocketdyne F1. We can design and build a better F1-like engine, though!
> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost
As far as I know that is still not true. Manual welding provides less defects and higher quality welds. Provided one has experienced welders. The cost is much lower for robotic welding but the results are still not as good as manual welding.
> Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
The skills can be acquired by new people.
Regardless I believe the industry has moved to 3d printed parts for engines due to lower costs, higher throughput. And in either case rigorous inspections are the way to get reliable parts.
I do agree that they cannot build a new F1, but they can build a new better model. But I believe that has to do with engineering and the loss of the contextual knowledge and experience building these things, the loss of why the design settled at what it did, why the processes settled to the ones documented, the undocumented knowledge the people building these had.
This knowledge can be rediscovered, but it would be easier/cheaper to start with a new design and acquire that knowledge organically.
They can be. However it will be expensive to train them. (starting with figuring out what training is needed - probably a lot of trial an error because not all of this was written down) Also you will need to pay people to get this training - they won't pay for it themselves since it is unlikely to be a useful job anywhere else anymore so they have better investments in their time/money.
I remember a Wall Street Journal article about 25 years ago where business leaders were upset that there was a "terrible" shortage of Swiss-style machinists in the US (whose daily output of tiny stuff would fit into a shot glass). And that they had to import those machinists from Germany.
Buried in the lede was that to get the skill level needed requires an apprenticeship that took at least 10 years. Germany provided that with trade schools and subsidies for hiring apprentices. In the US, the Cold War provided the money and incentive for aerospace and defense companies to subsidize that apprenticeship. High schools used to supply much of that trade education. I remember the high school that I was going to attend in NJ had vocational programs (for boys) in vending machine repair, machine shop and auto repair. Vocational education moved from high schools to community colleges. Along the way, community colleges went from free (for students) to something students have to pay for.
So the question becomes "who is going to pay for this?" I don't believe that what would be needed can possibly be done in America.
US corporations are allergic to paying for training in any form.
Everytime it’s come up people always argue that if you train the employee they’ll just leave for more money once they’re skilled.
Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay, or even making a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years in exchange for the training costs is never an option.
They’d rather have the position stay empty or outsource outside the country even if that has associated issues with shipping costs or quality control.
> Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay
But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
> a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years
Literally shudders. Employer has no practical way to ensure adequate quality of work from their employee. Generally it is not a problem, because employer can get rid of those workers one way or another, but when you have spent money upfront... Shudders.
Thank you for reinforcing my point that no US corporation wants to pay for training.
> But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
No, they spent their time without even having a partially trained employee and just having empty positions. If they are still outcompeting you, access to labor wasn’t your problem.
You can structure a contract so that the company has the right to fire for performance still. It’s how moving bonuses are normally done with a “you’ll work here for X year/s or return the bonus”
> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost.
This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
The same applies to quality control, fitting and assembly.
I don’t think they’re planning to start mass producing of SR-71s.
> because the job had become obsolete
You are greatly underestimating the number of parts, welds and inspections carried out on critical equipment that are done by hand or in small batches by highly skilled workers. The fact that they use a CNC machine does not make their job obsolete. In fact, quite the opposite is true, its require more skills.
Apart from the turbine section, virtually nothing on a helicopter is produced with a high level of automation or in large batch.
Still, I don't think anyone is ever going to hand assemble thousands of tubes for nozzle cooling & prepare them for brazing.
Not when you can get the same for a fraction of the cost by CNC milling the channels & then shrinking a jacket over it. Or in some cases even 3D printing the thing.
The assembly of the tube bundle in a nuclear steam generator is still carried out mainly by hand, using hundreds of shims, anti-vibration bars and supports.
At the other end of the spectrum are stamped-plate heat exchangers, which are mass-produced using a press line.
Each has its own specific application, and they are neither comparable nor interchangeable. The comparison makes no sense.
>> with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost.
> This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
This isn't right.
CNC machines aren't magic and they do require skilled people to design for them and operate them.
BUT: they are an enormous advance on capability compared to 30 years ago and are absolutely not limited to mass production. 3D CNC milling is how most prototyping of metal parts is done and can be done to extraordinary precision, repeatably. It was always a low volume technology - it was Apple that started applying it in volume as part of mass manufacture.
While not metalwork, some are surprised to learn how old CNC machined guitars are. I have a Peavey T-60 and they were among the first CNC-machined production guitars in the late 1970s. It's going strong to this day as well, they're very well-built instruments.
> The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste and YouTube or AI has all the answers. Children in schools even now in 2026 right up to high school and even college can't read. Many who can read can't comprehend what they are reading.
In addition to that I recall a UK study that said smartphones have caused a lack of hand dexterity. Not social media or content but the phone itself a two dimensional surface means hand dexterity is not developed. People do not have hobbies like wood working, sewing, anything that involves fine manipulation and strength. The biggest hit is to the medical field and lack of surgeons because people in medical school now do not have fine motor skills needed for the job.
> You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste
I think a lot of this has been driven by businesses completely dropping their part of the deal in a pursuit of ever increasing profits. Formerly there was the long term promise that staying with one company would be rewarded and instead now for 99% of companies you're deeply punished if you don't hop jobs every couple years for a pay bump. Then they've also lobbied to completely gut funding for education to lower taxes or shift into subsidies. And a lot believe college is a waste because there's been a huge reduction in the value of just holding a college degree while the costs have ballooned.
The whole system that created it has been dismantled for profit long before the culture of it started to fall apart.
I’d suggest questioning the sources you are reading. Wood working and sewing are hugely popular hobbies across younger generations. There used to be a site, Ravelery.com maybe, that was on here all the time because of their engineering blog and all the work involved in sharing sewing patterns.
Just to clarify one thing, Edwards AFB still has a lot of those highly-skilled engineers. Edwards has a huge machine shop with all the fancy tools and the engineers in there job is mostly making one-off replacement parts for planes. NASA and the Air Force are still flying all sorts of test planes out there and they often need some part they can no longer get from the manufacturer. They drop the spec for the part and it gets made, sometimes it takes a long time, but I promise there are skilled people on that base who can make it.
IMHO the SR-71 is going to be problematic due to sourcing the materials and fluids more than finding skilled CNC techs.
No doubt there are highly skilled engineers there, but saying "those" might be a stretch. It is possible someone there has worked on an SR-71A, but it last flew 27 years ago. It was originally introduced 60 years ago. A lot of the knowledge about this plane has most likely unfortunately passed on. That isn't to say people can't learn, but it is a tougher starting point. Honestly, almost like starting over I would guess.
USAF has a lot of TOs (technical orders) that include things like schematics for the aircraft and its components. I'd be surprised if that data has disappeared or was incomplete for the SR-71. IME, TOs have been getting worse and systems from the time of the SR-71's period of service were generally better documented, though not perfectly.
So titanium alloys are not completely resistant to all forms of corrosion. They are particularly prone to galvanic corrosion, which means that specific tools must be used, all forms of ferritic contamination must be avoided, special tools must be used, and they must be stored separately, etc.
This is very labour-intensive, which is why it is generally carried out in dedicated workshops, with specialised equipment, and so on, by staff who have been specifically trained and do nothing else.
If you add jigs, production-specific tools, and so on, all of that has been lost and needs to be recreated: staff need to be trained, QA defined and workshops need to be reorganised. This can take decades to return to the expected standard. You can throw as much money at this sort of problem as you like without actually being able to speed things up.
Finding the drawings and dimensions is the easy part of reverse engineering a mechanical device. The real challenges lie in identifying the manufacturing processes and quality control procedures, and achieving the expected performance with an acceptable scrap rate.
If I place a monocrystalline turbine blade on your desk, you’d be able to draw up the plans for it. But that would tell you absolutely nothing about the processes required to produce a monocrystalline ingot of a nickel superalloy.
Risk tolerance perhaps? But also our increased capabilities make it harder to keep things simple. Should it be radar-opaque? Of course! Capable of autonomous flight? Duh! Carrier landings? Well sure, that might be needed. Refuel midair? Obviously. Sigint to the gills? Seems useful…
Not a mechanical engineer here, but I reckon close to a decade would be pretty realistic for full operational restoration. Even a small amount of lost critical maintenance knowledge could cost the whole airframe.
I'd compare it to a really old codebase. Sure, our modern tech is much better. But if you need to make an old, top-secret COBOL program work as-is, you're in a pickle. Sure, we could rewrite it in Rust and make it way better, but management sees it as more cost-effective to just "turn the old one back on, it worked great!". And unlike software, it's pretty hard to comprehensively test a plane in a non-destructive way. Bolt falls off turbine while in flight, etc etc.
What, it's a good analogy for this audience. I know enough to have an opinion though. You'll never see me using a thread to locate a part. And I know taste isn't the only difference between red and blue loctite!
If you think my reply was off-base, give me a bit more than this mate.
The A-12 was not developed from scratch, whether in terms of its design, production facilities or in-house expertise.
Design is a very different matter when you have a workshop full of skilled workers and machinery right on your doorstep, who can critique your work and explain what they can and cannot produce. A lot of engineers discovered this the hard way when companies started outsourcing to the other side of the world and lost control of production process.
Designing parts that look nice but are impossible to machine or assemble is simple.
Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer.
Just look at the struggles faced by all the organisations that stopped producing anything for a long time and then wanted to restart production. Whether it’s ships, aeroplanes or nuclear power stations, each time it takes something close to ten years to restart.
Complexity and knowledge grow over time. It's likely that the last SR-71 and the processes and materials behind it were much more complex than the first. You have to recreate not only the first unit, but decades of added knowledge, skill, and complexity.
The A-12 was built in an era when the aerospace industry was flush with knowledge and active R&D into mach 3+ flight - everyone was convinced that it was the future. Today's industry is heavily optimized for subsonic airliners and fighter jets that have top speeds of "only" mach 1.5-2. No one in the west has built a mach 3 aircraft since the 60s and not in Russia since the early 80s. The knowledge isn't _lost_ (well, we hope) but there is a lot that will need to be relearned, and we all know how even the best documentation is usually missing a lot of details.
What are your thoughts on creating processes and systems to maintain continuity of this institutional knowledge across programs and talent generations? How do you keep this muscle memory strong over decades besides keeping folks building and working? Or would you say that is the only way?
> They are particularly prone to galvanic corrosion, which means that specific tools must be used, all forms of ferritic contamination must be avoided, special tools must be used, and they must be stored separately, etc.
The C4 Corvette had a titanium component back in the early 1980s (I worked for GM back then). The piece was flat and mechanics tended to use it to hold tools. Leaving the tool on that piece when closing the hood resulted in a dented (fiberglass) hood. Most tools (at least back then) have a cadmium coating (to keep them shiny). Cadmium causes corrosion to titanium. There were lots of service bulletins about this.
Sure you "can" have a new F1. But you could also make a brand new design using current capacity manufacturing that will also do the job for a lot less. So why would you do the former?.
Yes! Best book ever on how a high technology startup operates. If you are wondering how to create an "internal startup" - that's your guide. It's a people system - so you need to find the people!
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[ 0.44 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIt’s a true marvel of engineering.
I would imagine the problem they have with the 70 year olds they’re trying to recruit is that there are old pilots and bold pilots but well, you know the rest.
Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.
It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.
There are faster (X-43 is mach 9.6 but unmanned) and higher and stealthier ships. But unless you're going to dip into the classified catalog, a rusty SR-71 is faster than the next fastest two ships which are both MiGs.
Look up aviation records and you'll find the SR-71. It even still holds the #1 spot for the fastest airflight (by a plane) ever. Basically, the SR-71 is old, but old doesn't mean antiquated. The 60s was the era that we went from knowing basically nothing about space, to putting a man on the Moon in 7 years (Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech in 1962, first landing 1969), while we currently flail about trying to recreate it with a program lasting into the decades already. The SR-71 was another product of this era.
Near the top of this thread, there's a lot of debate and discussion about what we must have 'secretly' concocted. Some think that the various sighted UFO/UAVs might be secret US tech. But I see no reason to think this is the case, in no small part because things like the decision to retire the SR-71. You don't get from A to E without going from B C and D.
There's also other practical reasons. If we did have anything meaningfully advanced then it'd be being used, however grossly inappropriate it might be, in places like Iran. No chance the current administration holds anything back for the sake of some strategic edge in a possible future conflict. I also think secrecy in modern times is not especially realistic. Everybody has eyes in the sky, to say nothing of probable increases in human level spying and the like. And so forth. Basically the idea of rebooting the SR-71 would be precisely with the aim of eventually fulfilling these sort of 'fantasies.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2
« what we must have 'secretly' concocted » — Secrets are often dirty, which is why they're secret. Not for public consumption. Like, what is the secret behind Wikileaks Bradley Manning's “conversion” into “Chelsea” after whistleblowing secret dirty videos showing the world how dirty it really is in there? In that military? Did they castrate him in custody?
Rather than wondering about “secret tech”, boyish fantasies fueled by Pentagon sponsored Hollywood movies glorifying guns and violence and blasting enemies (they always need enemies), ask yourself whether all of the stuff publicly and conspicuously trumpeted about (not only in past decades) did and does actually work and exist. ;)
who described that a motion happens in relation to its inertial system.
Fact is, the claim that the SR-71 would fly into its own fired bullets is absolutely ludicrous.
The remaining members of the quickly dwindling Blackbird community ( maintainers and flight crews) are very skeptical that it can be done but it does not mean that Isaacman is not trying.
This sounds too much like a politically motivated decision.
If the US needed a hard to shoot down recon aircraft, converting a cruise missile to carry a recon package would probably be quicker. There's also the X-37B, the unmanned mini space shuttle the USAF has. The USAF launches one once in a while. It stays up for a year or so, and then comes back down and lands. There have been about eight flights. Seems to work fine. Once it was put into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere and went back out, to test if could do high-altitude recon if desired. It looks a lot like the original Space Shuttle, but it's much smaller, about the size of a small aircraft.
[1] https://www.museumofflight.org/Exhibits-and-Events/Exhibits/...
Getting any of those planes outside of their museums would be logistically difficult, and of course it would immediately be noticed. And even if you can rent a hangar big enough, and secure it, then you're stuck at BFI/IAD/Wright-Patterson trying to do this impossible task.
There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.
Whether that was a cover story for additional spying by the NASA SR-71 is unknown to those of us without the necessary security clearances.
Trying to find reason behind so much of this shit is a fools errand. Vibes based presidency.
Not sure why they would need an old SR-71 unless maybe they plan to test out something like new generation engines at very high speed, maybe with plausible cover to hide the newer more secret aircraft as flying at Mach 3+ tends to cover a lot of distance so it would be difficult to keep within secret test areas.
Worried about how to navigate if the GPS systems gets knocked out by an adversary? SR-71 has an analogue system, use that. Worried about how an adversary could use cyberwarfar against your avionics? SR-71 has you covered, use all of that.
And sure, you could take all the designs and hand them over to the SR-72 team at LM and say "yeah, all of that please", and they could figure it out, but you know what might be handy? A working SR-71 they could play with. And who knows, maybe the answer is to take an SR-71 in its entirety, and just upgrade a few parts to get the SR-72 performance (Mach 6) that you're after.
Crucially, the engine inlet spikes were computer controlled. And since it's an observation platform and not a bomber, is it going to be EMP hardened? That was probably classified at the time. /shrug
https://saemobilus.sae.org/papers/sr-71-digital-automatic-fl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px9YLM6R6MM
Anyway, don't you think the modern platforms are prepared for a little ECM action?
https://www.twz.com/17207/sr-71s-r2-d2-could-be-the-key-to-w...
But an easy illustrative reference is the Predator drone loosing Hellfire missiles during the War on Terror.
Things get re-used in weird ways with other stuff grafted onto them, I'm pretty sure the people who originally designed the F-A/18 never imagined it would be turned into the EA18 growler.
Would not be the first for the related A-12 program - the D-21 drone program managed top get 3 people killed due to crashes on release.
Classic HNer fixating to something technical because it’s safer than engaging on moralistic lines with broader topic at hand. And this is how unaccountable military technical monstrosities get built.
For one thing space based observation is very good and has a much faster turn around now days.
Back then photography was film based, satellites would fly take pictures and release the film in a pod to reenter and be recovered mid flight[1].
And on the other hand altitude and speed does not buy as much survivability as it did back then.
Fighters flew at a maximum of 1.5 mach and missiles at 2-2.5 mach.
S-400s for example can launch interceptor variants that can intercept targets at almost a hundred thousand feet moving at 14 mach. I know that is for ballistic targets, but I doubt an aircraft flying at a similar altitude even at hypersonic speeds would have much luck.
Do I think an SR72 is a good idea? Hell no, but I don't think like the US military haha.
It's idiotic. Unless the goal is to waste money and opportunities, then it's brilliant.
Between spy sats and drones we don't need a spy plane, not even a mach 6 spy drone.
It struck me they were trained to respond to questions about classified stuff. When you asked them a question they responded with a question.
So yes, most probably something has been flying for decades that's at least as fast as the Blackbird. Prototypes which may or may not have been put into production.
> The original design was conceived by two Lockheed Skunk Works engineers who had prior race car engine knowledge. In the mid-1970's, the engines of the start carts was changed to Chevrolet LS-7 454's. The Chevrolet big block engines developed 465 horsepower each. Even so, for many years they were still referred to as the Buick's.
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Engines/starting-t...
And eventually the start carts themselves got replaced.
> In the '80's the AG-330 Start Carts were mothballed and in there place came a Pneumatic Air starting system for the SR-71's. It is true that the start carts were hard to maneuver around. Logistically, a recovery of a Blackbird at another base could be done easier with Pneumatic Air.
Sure, less impressive than a contraption with a bunch of car engines but much more powerful.
We fixed it the other easy way: In the event that an SR-71 makes an unscheduled stop somewhere that wasn't prepared for it, then we send out a bunch of dudes with a cargo plane and some starter carts. That just takes money, which even easier.
It also takes time, but time was not a big deal: The plane was going to be there for awhile anyway. It could go over 15,000 miles between takeoff and landing; it wouldn't have landed where it did if it weren't broken somehow to begin with.
It'd need repaired by the crews who actually knew how to work on it -- who would also need flown in.
It would also need fuel before it could leave. That's problematic since the JP-7 it required was shared by ~nothing else in the sky, so: More deliveries.
Waiting for some Buick V8 starter carts to be delivered from the other side of the world wasn't really a roadblock at all.
You can credit card as many ready-to-run 9L+ V8 engines as you want[1], built to modern tolerances using high quality tooling, tested on a dyno and equipped with a warranty. Maybe different mounts and/or couplers are needed, but that's a very finite problem.
I suspect one actually difficult problem would be finding a refiner that can make the special fuel used in the unique engines of the SR-71. Then again, the US has a great many agile refiners at its disposal.
The SR-71 is a rather awkward thing to operate. Fuel leaks out of the tanks until atmospheric friction heats the aircraft enough to make them seal. It's a big mess, and the cohort of people that were actually capable of making these things work is aged out of the workforce. Assuming any of this real, NASA must have something truly extraordinary in mind to consider this.
1. https://blueprintengines.com/
Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.
https://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/SR71-crews/da...
There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.
"It's not my money!"
Either way it's unclear why NASA, with its decreasing budget, might feel like they need to be taking this on as a research project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tqlf31YTc
Why call up the old engineers?
or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.
One of the reasons why the UK went vastly over budget and behind schedule when they built the first Astute class submarine, because almost everyone who had domestic UK based hands on experience building a nuclear sub had long since retired. There's certain technical things, both military or non military, where if you stop making them for a long period of time (at even a minimal rate of production), the institutional capacity to implement them dissolves away.
Politicians think doing engineering projects is like buying something off the shelf. Every engineer will tell you the only way to do stuff is iteration - starting small, learning from your mistakes and growing things. If you start a megaproject without a team of people experienced in doing more or less the same thing recently, it will cost vast amounts. Particularly if you push too fast and commit large amounts of money before you've had a few iteration cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship
I mean, Obamacare was just the nick name for the Affordable care act, but Don actively just has to have it put up there.
The SR-71 was uncontested in the 70'ies, but it wouldn't be today. Today it would be vulnerable. Missiles reach higher and fly faster. There are missiles that are designed to intercept ICBM's, which come in faster than a Mach-3 SR-71.
Radar detection, tracking and firing has also become much more effective in the last 60 years.
Rebuilding the institutional knowledge for future supersonic / hypersonic projects, on the other hand, seems like a worthwhile target.
Like Four Seasons Total Landscaping or Tools For Humanity and Bruno Mars.
It makes no sense to me, it would be an expensive and pointless vanity project. Sounds like there is a chain of people too afraid to say no, perhaps they’re hoping to drag their heels until priorities change again.
Seeing the SR-71 still gives me the same buzz as when I read about it in books as a child 40 years ago. It reminds me how cool technology can be, when it increasingly isn't.
I also think it's pretty cool that arguably the most awesome aircraft in existence didn't have guns (I'm ignoring the YF-12).
Make Technology Cool Again.
It's been probably 40 years since I first became aware of the SR-71 myself. I'm definitely not a kid anymore; if I want to feel some sizzle in my SR-71 beans, then I can just get in the car, drive to Dayton, and see one in person.
If that's not nostalgic enough then maybe I can spend some real money on a new-old-stock copy of the first new Lego kit I was given -- set 497 -- and bask in the rose-tinted glory of the past while I put it together on the rug.
But sure: We can make tech cool again. Part of me thinks that tech should be amazing and cool to learn about.
Kids deserve their own new generations of amazing technological spectacles to marvel at, not a resurrection of ghosts from 60 years ago.
Remember how old and archaic it seemed when you were a kid, 40 years ago, and you saw something that was high-tech 60 years before that? We're talking 1926-level tech, here. I sure did love the local history museums that had areas that covered that timeframe, but I recognized them for what they were: Displays of really interesting very old stuff.
We can do better than that for today's kids, but we can only get there by moving forwards -- not backwards.
Getting contemporary knowledge of the navigation, hydraulic, avionics and other systems is going to be pretty powerful if you need to build something that is as battlefield-ready in the modern era. Nobody is hacking into an SR-71, and it's going to be delivering its missions just fine if GPS is knocked out. Taking the operational (and not just academic) experience of doing that and putting it into the current generation of Skunk Works engineers is going to be useful.
I'm not sure their plan is to put it into active service, but they could - the SR-72 could just be an SR-71 with upgraded engines and other systems.
However, the process of getting it ready for active service even if just as a flying museum piece could sure help a lot of engineers learn a ton of lost knowledge.
Engineering exists within an ecosystem and that old ecosystem is gone. Everything would be a once off. The materials science could be interesting but that’ll also be one offs and probably wouldn’t generalize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP-7
Come out of retirement for one last job!
1) when people say "destroyed the jigs, tools and spares in 2007" What do they actually mean? Burying things isn't destroying. Putting them in a furnace is destroying. Is it possible that both parts, and tools actually are recoverable e.g. from the seabed? The dimensional stability might be off, but to help reconstruct tools, it's not nothing. Likewise digging up something buried in its packing crate is not rocket science.
2) "that would be ludicrously expensive" doesn't mean much any more. It's not unlike "we can't make a saturn 1 any more because the tools were destroyed and it would be ludicrously expensive to make an F1 engine" -well yes, but thats not impossible, it's just unlikely and expensive. So maybe this is unlikely, expensive but ... has a unicorn sugar daddy?
3) there are craft in all sorts of places. Not just on sticks outside NASA property. I am not a historian or a federal government employee, but I wouldn't think it impossible for people to ask other agencies to let you inside the shell and remove the bits you want, or even ask for it back. The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs..
4) its a titanium alloy. It's temperature and corrosion resistant, noting some things (like chlorine according to the web) are bad for it. It's not made of pure chinesium or balsa wood. Interior surfaces would be in pretty good shape.
As far as #2 and the rest goes, I agree that with enough money you could make anything happen. However, sometimes recreating something so complex could be a "not enough money in the world" type situation. Sure, drawings and specs exist, but even on today's 3-d modelled assembly you're not typically modelling every single part to full accuracy. You have things that are off the shelf that might be a black box drop in, you have things you contract out that are built to spec. You know what you get, but not necessarily exactly how it's done. Then in your own facility there is a certain level of institutional knowledge that is not necessarily documented in such a way you can just recreate it.
Finally, one of the biggest hurdles, there's are not things that you can just throw an LLM and some engineers at. The actual trades themselves have changed so much since the time of production your only option is to call in retirees. The machinery is different now and so are the workers.
I feel like with a large budget they could definitely get an SR-71 in the air for testing and exhibition purposes, Id love to see it happen. I guess it really depends on how much was removed and destroyed when the machine was decomissioned and how much damage lack of maintenance, environmental factors and age have taken their toll. The good news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time. The bad news is it hasn't been operated in a long long time.
Source: I am a toolroom machinist at a material science lab in the aerospace and defense sector.
The SR-71 was not made in large enough numbers to get the above treatment. If the government wants spare parts they need to pay to keep that tooling around.
Being a military vehicle, the tooling would have been classified. It would need to be "demilled" (or de-militarized) before disposal. Depending on the materials involved, it could be melted or shredded before burial in a classified landfill.
That's an A-12, not an SR-71
The bigger problem there is that we don't have the people any more.
The Rocketdyne F1 was the pinnacle of hand-crafted engineering, with each engine being slightly different and the people having to account for those differences during assembly. It has a whole bunch of complicated welds which require a lot of tweaking, adjusting, and literally days of welding work? Neil's got to go to the moon, so you better get to it!
Those highly-skilled highly-specialized engineers don't exist any more, and for a good reason: with CNC and robots we can achieve far superior results for a fraction of the cost. It just requires the designers to make it automation-friendly from the start. Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
So no, we literally cannot build a new Rocketdyne F1. We can design and build a better F1-like engine, though!
As far as I know that is still not true. Manual welding provides less defects and higher quality welds. Provided one has experienced welders. The cost is much lower for robotic welding but the results are still not as good as manual welding.
> Those skilled people retired (and by now died) without a replacement, because the job had become obsolete.
The skills can be acquired by new people.
Regardless I believe the industry has moved to 3d printed parts for engines due to lower costs, higher throughput. And in either case rigorous inspections are the way to get reliable parts.
I do agree that they cannot build a new F1, but they can build a new better model. But I believe that has to do with engineering and the loss of the contextual knowledge and experience building these things, the loss of why the design settled at what it did, why the processes settled to the ones documented, the undocumented knowledge the people building these had.
This knowledge can be rediscovered, but it would be easier/cheaper to start with a new design and acquire that knowledge organically.
They can be. However it will be expensive to train them. (starting with figuring out what training is needed - probably a lot of trial an error because not all of this was written down) Also you will need to pay people to get this training - they won't pay for it themselves since it is unlikely to be a useful job anywhere else anymore so they have better investments in their time/money.
I remember a Wall Street Journal article about 25 years ago where business leaders were upset that there was a "terrible" shortage of Swiss-style machinists in the US (whose daily output of tiny stuff would fit into a shot glass). And that they had to import those machinists from Germany.
Buried in the lede was that to get the skill level needed requires an apprenticeship that took at least 10 years. Germany provided that with trade schools and subsidies for hiring apprentices. In the US, the Cold War provided the money and incentive for aerospace and defense companies to subsidize that apprenticeship. High schools used to supply much of that trade education. I remember the high school that I was going to attend in NJ had vocational programs (for boys) in vending machine repair, machine shop and auto repair. Vocational education moved from high schools to community colleges. Along the way, community colleges went from free (for students) to something students have to pay for.
So the question becomes "who is going to pay for this?" I don't believe that what would be needed can possibly be done in America.
Everytime it’s come up people always argue that if you train the employee they’ll just leave for more money once they’re skilled.
Somehow just paying them the market rate so they stay, or even making a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years in exchange for the training costs is never an option.
They’d rather have the position stay empty or outsource outside the country even if that has associated issues with shipping costs or quality control.
But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
> a (shudders) contract with the employee to stay for X number of years
Literally shudders. Employer has no practical way to ensure adequate quality of work from their employee. Generally it is not a problem, because employer can get rid of those workers one way or another, but when you have spent money upfront... Shudders.
> But your competitors can pay them more anyway, because they have not spend their money on training.
No, they spent their time without even having a partially trained employee and just having empty positions. If they are still outcompeting you, access to labor wasn’t your problem.
You can structure a contract so that the company has the right to fire for performance still. It’s how moving bonuses are normally done with a “you’ll work here for X year/s or return the bonus”
This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
The same applies to quality control, fitting and assembly.
I don’t think they’re planning to start mass producing of SR-71s.
> because the job had become obsolete
You are greatly underestimating the number of parts, welds and inspections carried out on critical equipment that are done by hand or in small batches by highly skilled workers. The fact that they use a CNC machine does not make their job obsolete. In fact, quite the opposite is true, its require more skills.
Apart from the turbine section, virtually nothing on a helicopter is produced with a high level of automation or in large batch.
Not when you can get the same for a fraction of the cost by CNC milling the channels & then shrinking a jacket over it. Or in some cases even 3D printing the thing.
At the other end of the spectrum are stamped-plate heat exchangers, which are mass-produced using a press line.
Each has its own specific application, and they are neither comparable nor interchangeable. The comparison makes no sense.
> This is only true for mass production, where the set-up costs are spread across thousands of units. For small batches, the cost of automation often exceeds the cost of the batch itself. CNC machines are not magic; they require qualified and competent staff.
This isn't right.
CNC machines aren't magic and they do require skilled people to design for them and operate them.
BUT: they are an enormous advance on capability compared to 30 years ago and are absolutely not limited to mass production. 3D CNC milling is how most prototyping of metal parts is done and can be done to extraordinary precision, repeatably. It was always a low volume technology - it was Apple that started applying it in volume as part of mass manufacture.
You don't have the education system and work ethic, stable family, curiosity. Many young people feel college is a waste and YouTube or AI has all the answers. Children in schools even now in 2026 right up to high school and even college can't read. Many who can read can't comprehend what they are reading.
In addition to that I recall a UK study that said smartphones have caused a lack of hand dexterity. Not social media or content but the phone itself a two dimensional surface means hand dexterity is not developed. People do not have hobbies like wood working, sewing, anything that involves fine manipulation and strength. The biggest hit is to the medical field and lack of surgeons because people in medical school now do not have fine motor skills needed for the job.
I think a lot of this has been driven by businesses completely dropping their part of the deal in a pursuit of ever increasing profits. Formerly there was the long term promise that staying with one company would be rewarded and instead now for 99% of companies you're deeply punished if you don't hop jobs every couple years for a pay bump. Then they've also lobbied to completely gut funding for education to lower taxes or shift into subsidies. And a lot believe college is a waste because there's been a huge reduction in the value of just holding a college degree while the costs have ballooned.
The whole system that created it has been dismantled for profit long before the culture of it started to fall apart.
This maybe what I read.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429
IMHO the SR-71 is going to be problematic due to sourcing the materials and fluids more than finding skilled CNC techs.
source: worked on Edwards for several years
This is very labour-intensive, which is why it is generally carried out in dedicated workshops, with specialised equipment, and so on, by staff who have been specifically trained and do nothing else.
If you add jigs, production-specific tools, and so on, all of that has been lost and needs to be recreated: staff need to be trained, QA defined and workshops need to be reorganised. This can take decades to return to the expected standard. You can throw as much money at this sort of problem as you like without actually being able to speed things up.
Finding the drawings and dimensions is the easy part of reverse engineering a mechanical device. The real challenges lie in identifying the manufacturing processes and quality control procedures, and achieving the expected performance with an acceptable scrap rate.
If I place a monocrystalline turbine blade on your desk, you’d be able to draw up the plans for it. But that would tell you absolutely nothing about the processes required to produce a monocrystalline ingot of a nickel superalloy.
The original A-12 took 4 years (or less) to design and build from scratch with slide rules and manual machine tools.
Surely we can match that with our 70 years of advanced knowledge and equipment?
Maybe our risk tolerance is low now, and we don't have Kelly Johnson.
I'd compare it to a really old codebase. Sure, our modern tech is much better. But if you need to make an old, top-secret COBOL program work as-is, you're in a pickle. Sure, we could rewrite it in Rust and make it way better, but management sees it as more cost-effective to just "turn the old one back on, it worked great!". And unlike software, it's pretty hard to comprehensively test a plane in a non-destructive way. Bolt falls off turbine while in flight, etc etc.
Yes, you are not a mechanical engineer.
If you think my reply was off-base, give me a bit more than this mate.
Design is a very different matter when you have a workshop full of skilled workers and machinery right on your doorstep, who can critique your work and explain what they can and cannot produce. A lot of engineers discovered this the hard way when companies started outsourcing to the other side of the world and lost control of production process.
Designing parts that look nice but are impossible to machine or assemble is simple.
Designing the plane may only have taken four years, but training the staff, organising the workshops and mastering the production tools took much longer.
Just look at the struggles faced by all the organisations that stopped producing anything for a long time and then wanted to restart production. Whether it’s ships, aeroplanes or nuclear power stations, each time it takes something close to ten years to restart.
When they manage to do so.
or the engineers from that time who had an intuitive knowledge of how this should all be designed. You can't teach a computer intuition.
The C4 Corvette had a titanium component back in the early 1980s (I worked for GM back then). The piece was flat and mechanics tended to use it to hold tools. Leaving the tool on that piece when closing the hood resulted in a dented (fiberglass) hood. Most tools (at least back then) have a cadmium coating (to keep them shiny). Cadmium causes corrosion to titanium. There were lots of service bulletins about this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251084