USAF Developing New "SR-72" Supersonic Spy?

Kadin2048 writes "According to an Air Force Times article, the famed Lockheed Martin 'Skunk Works' may be hard at work on a new supersonic spy plane (with 'artist concept') for the U.S. military, to replace the SR-71 'Blackbird' retired a decade ago. Dubbed by some the SR-72, the jet would be unmanned and travel at about 4,000 MPH at as much as 100,000 feet, with 'transcontinental' range. Some have speculated that new high-speed spy planes could be a U.S. response to anti-satellite weapons deployed by China, in order to preserve reconnaissance capabilities in the event of a loss of satellite coverage. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin would comment on the program, or lack thereof."

better hope it's real stealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the size of the thing, and the speed and height it flies at, that's going to look a lot like a missile. Might not be the best thing for an already paranoid enemy to see.

A few comments...

[Valdez]

The new jet -- being referred to by some as the SR-72 -- is likely to be unmanned and, while intended for reconnaissance, could eventually trade its sensors for weapons.

I'd be interested to see what kind of weapon they're planning to pop out the bottom of this thing @ Mach 6. Doesn't seem like a terribly bright idea...

Second, friction at high speeds could reduce stealth.

At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.

I hate to state the obvious, but the article is pretty sensational... I can summarize:

Cower before our unmanned 6000mph stealthy black aircraft! If the Mach 6 shockwave doesn't get you, the nuclear handgrenades it carries will!

Did anyone really believe the Airforce's line?

[InsidiousDarkLord]

When they SR-71 was retired, they claimed it was no longer necessary as satellites could do the job. I assumed they had a replacement aircraft in place.

there's a good reason they dont use the SR71

[wizardforce]

The new aircraft would offer a combination of speed, altitude and stealth that could make it virtually impervious to ground-based missiles, sources said. Even the SR-71 is said to have evaded hundreds of missiles fired at it during its long career, although some aircraft sustained minor damage.

kind of like how they thought the U-2 was beyond missiles isn't it? The shear amount of heat coming off the plane should be easily noticeable to any system capable of detecting infared. That combined with potential laser defenses [at least in current development] there is no such thing as "out-running" a laser system.

Incorrect according to wiki

[Blahbooboo3]

Sorry, no dyslexia for LBJ :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird#Name_ and_designation [wikipedia.org]

USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaisance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the Blackbird was to be announced by President Johnson on 29 February 1964, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the plane's designation.

I think the AC's point was retaliation

[benhocking]

As in Mutually Assured Destruction, if the SR-72 were falsely interpreted as a nuclear missile. I doubt that would happen, but I believe that was the point of the "first post".

Re:there's a good reason they dont use the SR71

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody ever thought the U-2 was immune to missles, they knew that it flew outside the engagment envelope of _current_ Soviet SAM systems but the CIA estimated that by sometime around 1960 Soviet SAM technology would advance far enough to make them vulnerable. When Powers was shot down in 1960 his flight was supposed to have been one of the last to go into Soviet airspace. Simply put they took a chance that they could pull it off one more time and lost.

Second its not enough to just detect the plane to shoot it down, you have to have a weapon that can engage it. The Soviets had known that planes (probaby US) were penetrating their airspace for some time, they just didn't have a weapon that could engage them yet. The higher and faster the plane flies the smaller the envelope of engagment (both in space and time). Altitude and speed don't make a plane invulnerable but they make them harder to hit and possibly invulnerable to _current_ air defence systems. Of course if there is a next-generation plane that can evade current missles then people will start work on next-generation missles (or laser, HPM, ...) to shoot them down.

It's a never ending game of cat and mouse.

Re:better hope it's real stealthy

[moderatorrater]

Assuming such lasers exist, shooting down a satellite is much, much harder than hitting any airplane. The satellite has a known trajectory that doesn't change much over the course of weeks, making it very easy to plan exactly how to fire the laser. Also, a satellite will change a few degrees per second at most.

On the other hand you have an aircraft traveling at mach 6. This requires you to accurately plot the trajectory, get the laser in place and aimed and firing for however long it needs to be concentrated on the same spot, all in a matter of minutes. Assuming the laser needs to be concentrated on the same spot for 1 second, the aircraft will have traveled nearly a mile. Not an easy task.

Re:Pilot not required?

[Ironsides]

That does highlight the one area in which you'd want a pilot, though, and that's to make sure that no real technology falls into the enemy's hands.

That's what the C4/Thermite is for. Debris isn't worth much when all that's left won't even fill a teaspoon.

No joke.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Seriously.

The SR-71 is easily the baddest mofo of any item in either the Smithsonian's downtown Air & Space or Air & Space II in the big hangar out by the airport [which is where the SR-71 sits, right smack in the middle of the floor, dominating everything else around it].

Badder than the Wright Bros' biplane, badder than Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis, badder than Apollo 11, badder than the Space Shuttle.

Just one great big Samuel Jackson Pulp Fiction Bad Mofo of an airplane.

probably exists now

[192939495969798999]

the SR-71 is a famous example of something very advanced remaining classified for a long time. By the time the public saw them, they were practically retired. I'd guess that this vehicle exists now in classified form, and by 2020 we'll "officially" know they've built and flown them.

Re:Ok, so...

[drgould]

(And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)

I think you're confusing the hovering McDonnell Douglas DC-X [wikipedia.org] (which was a successful test vehicle until NASA got ahold of it) and the Shuttle replacement Lockheed Martin X-33 [wikipedia.org] (which was a diaster).

Re:better hope it's real stealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

We (or at least, I) forgive you. To err is human...

Re:better hope it's real stealthy

[rsmoody]

Um, actually, the SR-71, for its time, was quite stealthy. The chines were constructed to reduce radar signature and it was coated with an early RAM material. About the only time you could see it well on radar was during a turn as the underside was poorly designed with regards to radar signature and would reflect a massive radar signature. Several of its accidentally stealthy characteristics are what brought on the interest in the creation of Have Blue, the predecessor to the F-117. They correctly deduced that these radar absorbing and scattering characteristics could be amplified with a correctly shaped object, thus was created the "Hopeless Diamond" which was a computer modeled object that when placed on a radar range, directly reflected almost no radar signature. In fact, during the test, they thought that the model had come off the stand and were prepared to go down the range to fix the issue, about this time, a small bird landed on the model creating a radar signature. This was their eureka moment. Regardless, radar lock was certainly possible to acquire on the SR-71, however, do defend itself, the pilot simply needed to add power for a few seconds and it would accelerate out of the missile's range very quickly.

Re:I think the AC's point was retaliation

[gujo-odori]

That was the point (although China Vs. the US or Russia in a nuclear shootout would not result in MAD, it would results in the US or Russia being mauled and China being utterly destroyed), but the AC was a complete tool, and so were those who modded him Insightful. The only kind of missile with a similar flight trajectory would be operating at a much lower altitude - say, 50 - 100 feet - and at subsonic speeds.

An ICBM, unlike a cruise missile or an SR-71, has a very steep angle of ascent, and comes down pretty steeply, too, doesn't have much of a heat signature on the way down, and since most (or all?) of those held by the US and Russia have MIRV warheads, the things coming down will also be far, far smaller than an aircraft. A spy plane looks nothing like a missile on radar.

Re:The unanswered question

[LabRat]

IMHO, recon assets are probably the best bang-for-buck that the taxpayer gets from the defense budget. You don't always have a satellite where it needs to be to see something *when* you want...that's where these come in. Good recon can prevent wars...or at least help keep wars small (dependent on the cowboy factor in the whitehouse, of course). Far different from the nuclear stockpile...recon assets have immediate benefit and impact on national security while being used in an active role. As others have surmised...I'd be surprised if this thing wasn't already operational. I never bought the story that the air force was going to rely 100% on satellites for strategic recon...especially since the Soviets demonstrated ASAT weapons decades ago. The recent tests by the Chinese in that arena have only refocused the public on a long-existing threat to our global surveillance capabilities via our satellite systems.

Re:I think the AC's point was retaliation

[gujo-odori]

Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.

Fortunately, the major nuclear powers have reached a point where they are all pretty against having war with each other. Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.

While that is unlikely to trigger a confrontation between the major nuclear powers, it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and
whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis. I think there is no doubt that the Israel response would be successful and devastating. Sometime between now and when Iran can actually build nuclear weapons, that building needs to be prevented. By peaceful means if possible, but by any means necessary if peaceful means don't work.

Re:A few comments...

[TFloore]

At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.

The thing about high speed is that you don't turn very quickly. So when a radar site sees you, they notify the SAM battery 400 miles downrange of your track, and the missiles are on the way up to meet you when you get there.

And the missiles are fast enough now to catch you, too.

This is why the SR-71 was retired from reconnaissance missions. When the Soviets developed and fielded hypersonic SAMs (hypersonic == 5 times the speed of sound), they suddenly had missiles fast enough to catch up to an SR-71 from behind. Before that, the SR-71 pilots would barely even notice that they'd been fired upon, because the missiles couldn't catch them. And when they did notice, they laughed, because they knew the missiles were ineffective.

The US had enough of a problem when the U-2 was shot down... they didn't want an SR-71 shot down also.

Stealth matters.

Other than that... correct, the article is pretty sensational.

Anyone remember the Aurora aircraft that was talked about when the SR-71 was retired? I remember comments then that "The Air Force would never retire an aircraft unless they had a replacement already available" and other statements like that. Haven't heard anything about that in the last 5 years. Maybe we will in another 25 years, assuming it exists at all, when it gets declassified.

Re:I think the AC's point was retaliation

[Shakrai]

Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.

Kudos for that argument. I made it for the EU awhile back when some EU tool stated that they could "atomic-bitchslap" the US and Russia and nobody wanted to listen to it. Russia and the United States are the only two nations that can play offensive nuclear war with any chance of success (albeit, "success" in nuclear war probably implies millions of deaths on your side and total genocide for whomever you were going after).

Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.

That guy scares me more then Kim Jong ever will. At least Kim's motives are obvious and somewhat understandable (survival of his regime). Ahmahdinejad's goals remain a mystery.

it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis

The Israelis have a couple hundred missiles that can be nuclear tipped and reach any point of Iran. They can completely destroy Iran if they choose to do so. One can only hope that it doesn't come to that....