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  • Hacker News
  • Nasa reported they're not restarting the actual plane, it would cost too much money, they're making a new one based on the SR-71
    by anorphirith
  • people behave like engineers grow on trees.

    or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.

    by dzonga
  • 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?
    by whatshisface
  • > 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's not my money!"

    by justin66
  • It'd be incredible to have an SR-71 flying again, just simply __because__!
    by arlattimore
  • 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"
    by Centigonal
  • 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.

    https://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/SR71-crews/da...

    by buildsjets
  • 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.

    edit: for those who haven't seen the RQ180: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+gre...

    edit 2 (apologies for the X link): https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193

    by walrus01

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