Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
Don’t you guys see it: If really crazy stuff happens and satellites are taken out of the sky, youre going to see to do some old-school reconnaissance.
It’s just trump living in the past we have drones now even if satellites were taken out
OK - so, Trump thinks they are cool and wants them back in action despite having better technology already in place. This tracks because of his dumb Trump-class battleship in development, which will be closed down soon after being commissioned because it’s a dumb idea.
It’s sad that that is the most likely explanation. No grand strategic vision, no plan, just being nostalgic for the eighties.
“If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen,” he told Aviation Week. “They went to the Moon, you know.”
That is SO funny.
NASA is researching quieter supersonic flight, and I can’t help but think of how the (also Lockheed Martin) X-59-
-has a extreme wing profile/nose, not unlike SR-71:
I think the most likely explanation is something like this, they want data they can’t otherwise get.
I guess we can put to rest the idea that the US government has successfully reverse engineered UFOs. Because if they had, there would be absolutely no need to do this if we could fly anywhere in the world in minutes or seconds and invisibly.
Maybe they have done that, they’re just really slow, and not actually any better than what we have?
Or maybe thats just what they want you to think 🧐
the ol’ reverse psychology
Who cares why - this plane is so fucking awesome it’s an end unto itself.
I agree.
Grandpa watched The Right Stuff last night, for the love of god someone disable his line to the Pentagon.
This is likely the majority of the reason anyway
Perhaps NASA is doing it to make a trophy that might impress the imbecile emperor in hopes of securing funding for space science.
Like in Rainbow Mars when the Time Travel Bureau has to go on safari to capture extinct pets for their imbecile emperor.
Is that an actual movie? Sounds like the sequel to Idiocracy. Or a sequel to current real world events. I’ve been having trouble telling apart these things.
Guy at NASA:
The reason they got rid of surveillance jets is that satellites can do it without any risk to a pilot and on a 24 hr basis.
During the Cold War, it had to overfly Russian airspace to be able to see far enough. They were within their rights to shoot at unauthorized aircraft in their airspace.
However, it could see a lot higher percentage of Iran without overflying, and Iran can’t legally shoot at something in international airspace
Blackbird didn’t overly the USSR. The U2 did, and they learned the hard way that Soviet missiles went a lot higher than anyone thought.
Any country involved in a shooting war is within their rights to shoot at any object they have reason to believe is a military target, regardless of where that object is.
Outside their airspace, in international waters, inside another country, on the fucking Moon - the limits are technological, not legal.
If the object isn’t a military target, then they aren’t within their rights to shoot at it no matter where it is. Not that that has stopped attacks on civilians in the past (e.g. Russian ballistic missile attacks on apartment blocks, US drone strikes of fishing boats), only that the laws of war forbid such things.
X-Men did it.
I was worried at first, why do they need that right now? But looking over the specs, this would be like taking a classic corvette to a bank robbery. So this is for sure for show and possibly to add more sensors to record data they couldn’t previously record. Me thinks they want to make another that could maybe go to space proper and deploy something.
This is pure speculation, I’m not an expert.
To speculate further, the stated reason for attacking Iran was nuclear weapon development. Perhaps there are sensors to track that, that can’t operate from satellite
If it were about Iranian nuclear weapon development, it wouldn’t be NASA doing the surveillance. Although weather phenomena is in NASA’s purview.
We already had high confidence intel before the war Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But since then, Trump has expressed that a nuke is the only thing he would respect.
They fired all the people who knew how to build shit and now they are desperately sending a bunch of newbies to “reverse engineer” the plane and try to figure out how it works. /s
Claude, reverse enginer plane, make no mistake.
Most of the people who knew how to build that plane are dead to be fair
They would be pretty retired but this probably isn’t that far off…
I like the idea that one becomes more and more retired each year after they stop working.
So Space Cowboys 2, except
- Everybody passes the physicals just fine, but all decide to quit instead of going through the onboarding process
- The young punk bad guys in the movie are secretly trying to get an LLM to redesign it, but can’t because the Blackbird was a skunkworks program and some key principal either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed
Given the US diet and healthcare system, I’d say many are definitely 6ft under
Vampire on an aircraft carrier.
It’s fun speculation to assume this is for military reasons but remember nasa s a civilian agency. Perhaps it’s connected to their research on supersonic and hypersonic flights
That’s my thought as well, they want data for something they’re building.
It’s probably some senile whim from Dear Leader. Remember when he told the navy what kind of catapult they should use?
