Why the SR-71 was retired over the U-2 which is still in service today:
> For a mission over a target in the Middle East with the planes based in England, [the SR-71] needed to have multiple airliner size aircraft in the air to support it.
> It was not capable of taking off with a full load of fuel (or rather, not advisable for many reasons), so in order to take off, there had to be a tanker waiting in the air to top it off once it got airborne.
> It would then make a high speed run to the target zone where it would meet up with another tanker before doing its Mach 3 run over the target. It would then need to tank up again once the recon run was done for the trip home, and then there would still be a tanker in the air on standby in case it needed gas before landing or in case it needed to divert for weather or something.
> So that’s a minimum of 4 airliner sized support aircraft, including all of their parts, fuel use, and crew, flying out of a minimum of 2 different bases just to make a single SR-71 operational mission happen.
> And that’s on top of all the crew, fuel, parts and mechanics just to operate the SR-71.
This sounds like dev hell, and yet a viable dependable product.
I wonder how many big corps operate the same behind the scenes.
There's a term "hangar queen" for aircraft that fly a little and need a lot of maintenance.
Sometimes you want extreme performance at any cost. But a lot of the time you want a good enough performance at low cost.
The amount of supporting resources and length of maintenance breaks etc affect cost, or the amount of aircraft you need to get in order to be able to do the mission.
If you have 20 aircraft but 15 are being maintained, you only have 5 flyable ones, you still had to pay for acquisition of all the 20, and have to pay for the ongoing maintenance for the 15.
If you have 10 but only 5 are maintained at any given time, you have the same flying capacity of five aircraft but your total costs are likely going to be much less as you only had to acquire ten aircraft and only have to have maintenance people enough for 5 at a time.
This is really hard to explain to a lot of people in the software industry by the way. They say a feature is complete, my job is done. But if it's extremely hard to configure, deploy, monitor, maintain etc then it might turn out to be a net negative.
> So that’s a minimum of 4 airliner sized support aircraft, including all of their parts, fuel use, and crew, flying out of a minimum of 2 different bases just to make a single SR-71 operational mission happen.
Why can't it be 2 support aircraft? Is the SR-71 mission too long for the tanker to stay in the air? The tankers can also service other aircraft so they aren't necessarily put in the air exclusively for the SR-71.
The SR-71 won't be anywhere near the first tanker when it needs fuel again. The fuel itself isn't common to most aircraft, which means the tanker has to carry fuel specifically for it so it.
Correct. The SR-71 uses JP-7 fuel, and is the only aircraft in the fleet known to do so. So, the USAF has to have custom KC-135Q tankers just for SR-71s. They can't be used for any other fuel.
The thing that made it obvious to me that there was a replacement for the SR-71 was that when they retired the aircraft, they didn't retire any of the tankers. That meant there was now some other unknown aircraft flying that also used JP-7, and it must therefore be the replacement for the SR-71.
Note that JP-7 is so hard to light on fire that if you throw a match into a bucket filled with JP-7, the match will get snuffed out. You've got to be a lot hotter than a match to light that stuff.
But if you did the same experiment with 87-93 octane gasoline, you would set the fumes on fire as the match went into the bucket. And those fumes would continue to burn.
When they were still flying, I worked on them at Beale AFB. You always knew when an SR was going to take off. About an hour prior, 2 KC-135Q's would take off like a bat out of hell. They would always use water injection and you could see their black smoke trails.
An hour later, you would hear a giant rumbling coming from the flight line. It would get louder and louder until it was all you could hear. As the SR shot off into the distance, you could slowly make out the din of all the car alarms on base.
They would sometimes need 4 tankers and they would shoot off in pairs. I was told they always had two tankers per fill up. They would grab some from one and then some more from the other.
Back in the 90's it was estimated that each SR flight had a cost of at least a million dollars with fuel costs, wages, etc.
If you're at all interested in the history and development of these kinds of aircraft and the process that went into them, I cannot recommend enough the book "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed", by Ben Rich who was the second director. It covers the era of the U-2, SR-71, and the F-117 Nighthawk including the initial earliest development of stealth. Fascinating inside baseball about the politics of such things in the Cold War too, the various issues with different services. They did amazing work, and they did it on time and on budget, even as bureaucracy slowly got pushed in more.
The F-117 was a true black project, no oversight, no official budget and hence close to no bureaucracy other than needed to develop and certify a combat aircraft for the USAF. It borrowed components from the F-15 and F-16 programs for example.
The B-2 on the other hand, well, that was secret but official. And had a ton of bureacracy because of it.
Avionic came from the F-16, F-15 and F/A-18 programs (unsourced claim, but very likely, those parts were purchased as spares for those aircraft).
Engines are modified are modified F404s drom GE.
That leaves the airframe, landing gear and some other bits and pieces like evironmental controls, but the avionics and engines account for the vast majority of aircraft costs.
We finished the first big hangar and my said how cool it was and that we’d seen it and ut was time to go.
Then I told her about the other 2 (3?) hangars.
We got our 10k steps in before lunch, but it was amazing, and I’d go back any day.
Putting the kids in the flight sim was cool. I told them it wasn’t that bad then my daughter promptly flew it fully upside down and we heard the screams from inside. Mostly fun screams. They begged to ride it again. We did it a bunch. My daughter got competitive so we had to fly together to get the days high score.
looking back, it's interesting that the US casually flew planes over the USSR
I can't think of any other situation where the US has violated airspace regularly like that while not being in a state of war. Seems incredibly dangerous/provocative. For instance the US doesn't fly over North Korea or Iran even though I'm sure it could.
We had a couple Chinese balloons over the US and it was a major diplomatic incident that ruined relations for about a year
I find it hard to believe the US can go back to flying planes over Russia/China/etc. without stirring up some major issues
Can you imagine if at their whim Chinese supersonic jets flew over LA or NYC? It'd be basically a declaration of war
> I can't think of any other situation where the US has violated airspace regularly like that while not being in a state of war.
US flew its planes over pretty much all of Middle East, while not being in a state of war with any of the countries. And probably many, many other countries that did not have technology to even know they are being overflown.
Very strange though, why does it need to be reusable? It clearly is a sensible platform as it looks like the Chinese have built a similar thing, but I just don't understand what it's really doing and why it has to be done that way. V.interesting!
> Very strange though, why does it need to be reusable?
Some people speculate that it is designed to take foreign satellites offline. Perhaps part of that mission is bringing them back to Earth to be analyzed.
Pure speculation, of course. Removing their solar panels so that they fit in the bay and then actually getting them inside seems complicated.
No they don't, satellite flyovers are predictable, planes can unexpectedly roll up on you and catch you with your pants down whenever they feel like it.
Yes, a part of that was the USSR actually did have a plan for intercepting it, it just required a whole lot of MiG-25s doing zoom climbs on stopwatch precision along the SR71's flight path to get a radar lock.
Wasn't there an open airspace agreement for recon flights so that each couls make sure disarmament agreements where adhered to? Hence all the wing clipping of bombers and whatnot in the Mojave?
>looking back, it's interesting that the US casually flew planes over the USSR
Only the U-2, and only while it was a secret program. The Soviets could have protested the overflights at any time before shooting down Gary Powers, but didn't because not being able to get aircraft or missiles near it embarrassed them.
It's set in the 60s with the pilot flying a new supersonic spy plane and dodging Soviet interceptors, eventually crashing guess where.
He goes into a lot of detail about the plane, and specifically the different modes the engines have as the speed increases, which although fictional sounds very much like what they've actually done here. I think he acknowledged help from an aerospace expert in the plane design.
I have trouble seeing use-cases for newly developed manned combat aircraft.
Starlink(-like) communication has a low enough latency (25 and 60 ms) and is nearly unjammable. There are too many satellites to destroy, unless the enemy resorts to outright Kesslerization. In the rare cases where the communication is dropped, some fallback programming / AI can at least return it home.
Having a person in the plane does make shooting it down (or not shooting it down) much more meaningful, which can be important. For example in the South China sea, flying a manned aircraft around is a much stronger statement than flying a drone around.
And to me it still seems possible that someone could come up with some jamming technology that prevents drones from communicating with satellites or base stations - and if someone does, you don't want your entire air force to be disabled.
1 - Is China capable of taking down 5000 satellites, and can they do it quickly enough to matter?
2 - Can China take out the satellites faster than they can be replaced?
3 - If a "major" conflict erupts that calls for the destruction of Starlink (et al.), some of the first "strikes" by the other side will be to reduce China's ability to take out satellites. Do they have the redundant capability to take out Satellites continually?
The U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon, has poured so much money into Starlink that they likely already have contingency plans to deal with this exact scenario.
Satellites have essentially fixed and predictable orbits, are hard limited in how close they can get to targets, and soft limited by realistic payload limitations of satellite constellations.
You can have an extremely high end satellite in LEO but it may only pass over the desired target once per day. You can put it in GEO and have it see the whole area but it's going to be so far away it's going to be limited in what it can see. You can build more satellites so that one of them passes over areas of interest more frequently but you can't make a Starlink sized reconnaissance satellite constellation if you're putting super high end hardware in each one. Those sensors cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each.
Reconnaissance aircraft are a dramatically more economical way of finding mobile targets than massive LEO constellations of super high end sensors. Instead you just put the high end sensor in an aircraft and have it overfly the area you're trying to surveil. This is why many countries are dramatically increasing investment in them. Actually knowing where things are is critical to destroying them.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is about use case. A SR-71 successor would not be snapping pictures of static known sites where nothing is changing. That can happen at a leisurely pace which means that satellites do that fine. Satellites and reconnaissance aircraft do different things. There are many cases where you need to go look at a specific area RIGHT NOW, not in 7 hours. You can't wait for your high end LEO satellite's orbit to pass over the correct spot of the earth. Reconnaissance aircraft can actually maneuver and fly over specific places making them dramatically more flexible when you need to find something that may be in a completely different place 1 hour from now.
>What sensors are you talking about that cost hundreds of millions and requires multiple?
Nearly all sensors worth putting on a satellite in a military context are going to cost at least $10 million and those would be pretty low quality and of limited usefulness. The NRO regularly launches individual satellites with sensors which cost >$1 billion dollars. Their yearly budget is >$6 billion despite having almost no personnel. High end sensors are very very expensive. You need multiple because, as previously stated, if you only have 1 you might be waiting an entire day for it to orbit over the correct place on the earth. You can build 1,000 of those and get near real time tracking but it's going to be absurdly expensive. Much cheaper to just fly a single aircraft over the correct part of the earth you're interested in. The sensor payloads that RQ-4s carry still cost >$100 million but you can just fly them exclusively over areas of interest meaning you don't need nearly so many of them. They're also a lot closer to the ground meaning that an equivalent quality sensor can see a lot more than it would be able to from LEO.
Challenging to control a drone at hypersonic speeds & low altitudes (sub orbital) I think, the behavior of the air as a plasma around the craft will mean that it will probably have to be fully autonomous, which if armed could be quite a challenge ethically.
You have a point there, but only marginally, as current rocket tech is making rapid deployment of satellites a breeze. I'm not talking about Musks or the Chinese reusable rockets - the military doesn't care as much about economics and had the ability to rapidly launch satellites from planes for a long time.
Satellites don't collect electronic radio waves, among other things, the same way a plane can. And despite all the advances in tech, lower flying aircraft will always have better resolution, which can matter. There's a reason a lot of online maps (google, etc) still use planes to capture the "satellite view".
US needs supersonic cruise missile/glider platform. China and Russia worked on this stuff for a few decades, US is behind. Dressing it up as a SR-71 replacement is supercool, working on new nuclear missile would not be very sexy!
Not much, really. Reconnaissance airplanes don’t experience high g-forces. The loading you build the airframe for is well within what a human can handle. It’s more like an airliner than a fighter. You do have the benefit of not needing a cockpit, ejection seats, etc.
Space exploration makes more sense because it's largely seen as a precursor to eventually establishing a colony in space, on the moon or on Mars. Whether that's actually viable is another discussion, but if NASA were to announce this is all just for the sake of curiosity and nobody's ever going to live in space then their funding will be gone in a week.
The problem is that without embedded human smarts such exploration is very limited, novel / unexpected situations are hard to predict or react to, and the latency between earth-bound command posts and non-orbital remotes makes that unusable for anything beyond batch orders.
While hardly trivial, remote control within earth atmosphere has much more reasonable latency, and thus applicability.
Or make it completely disposable. If you don't worry about recovering anything, the amount of fuel needed is less than 1/2. Heck, send 2 and get it in stereo.
While neat tech, it seems hypersonic icbms like the Sarmat make more economic sense these days vs expensive and overly complicated delivery or spy vehicles.
Or at least, upgrading the current icbm and detection systems seems like it should be a priority in conjunction with these cool birds. Especially after their recent failures.
Edit: Launching an ICBM is going to cause a huge alarm - how do the other side know that rocket is being used for reconnaissance rather than an attack?
There was some discussion of modifying the US SLBMs to perform traditional weapons delivery, like a high explosive warhead. Other than the extreme cost the main problem you'd have is other countries would have to adopt a "just trust us" attitude towards SLBM launches
In case you're wondering why you're downvoted: This is a spy plane, not a delivery vehicle. The closest competitor would be satellites, but as the article mentions, there's limitations to those.
ICBM makes no sense to use. There are no targets suitable for ICBM.
Same for hypersonic reconnaissance airplane - expensive and no much sense to use. Either satellite or small slow low altitude reconnaissance dron, which could fly for hours to provide realtime image of the battlefield.
For hypersonics it's more about not melting the airframe, regardless of whether there are any people inside or not. That's why I'm skeptical for such vehicles - unless they're disposable, of which there already are plenty (like the penetration aids installed in MIRVs). China seems (seems!) to be leading the pack here with their anti-aircraft-carrier programs.
I'm sceptical as well. Expensive and with small amounts of missions applicable.
Instead of one such vehicle you afraid to loose it is much better to have tens or hundreds of long endurance drones for realtime reconnaissance. And satellites of course.
Sounds nice, but from talking with jet pilots it is quite easy for humans to push the machines past their limits. All of the cool stuff in Top Gun Maverick would have required the planes to get airframe service after every flight. Where you gain benefit from removing humans is the reduction in weight from life support and HMI systems and in the prospect of reducing reaction times.
Why the SR-71 was retired over the U-2 which is still in service today:
> For a mission over a target in the Middle East with the planes based in England, [the SR-71] needed to have multiple airliner size aircraft in the air to support it. > It was not capable of taking off with a full load of fuel (or rather, not advisable for many reasons), so in order to take off, there had to be a tanker waiting in the air to top it off once it got airborne.
> It would then make a high speed run to the target zone where it would meet up with another tanker before doing its Mach 3 run over the target. It would then need to tank up again once the recon run was done for the trip home, and then there would still be a tanker in the air on standby in case it needed gas before landing or in case it needed to divert for weather or something.
> So that’s a minimum of 4 airliner sized support aircraft, including all of their parts, fuel use, and crew, flying out of a minimum of 2 different bases just to make a single SR-71 operational mission happen.
> And that’s on top of all the crew, fuel, parts and mechanics just to operate the SR-71.
This sounds like dev hell, and yet a viable dependable product. I wonder how many big corps operate the same behind the scenes.