In 1976, U.S. Air Force SR-71 Blackbird crews flew from Ny to London in below two hours, reaching speeds exceeding Mach 3 and setting world records which have held up for almost four decades.
But those world records won’t stay unbroken for long.
That’s because today, on the birthplace of the Blackbird – Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works – engineers are developing a hypersonic aircraft go twice the rate of the SR-71. It’s called the SR-72.
Son of the Blackbird
The SR-71 was developed using 20th century technology. It was envisioned with slide rules and paper. It wasn’t managed by millions of lines of software code. And it wasn’t powered by computer chips. All that changes with the SR-72.
Envisioned as an unmanned aircraft, the SR-72 would fly at quickens to Mach 6, or six times the velocity of sound. At this speed, the aircraft will be so fast, an adversary would don’t have any time to react or hide.
“Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in lower than an hour,” said Brad Leland, Lockheed Martin program manager, Hypersonics. “Speed is a higher aviation advancement to counter emerging threats within the next several decades. The technology will be a game-changer in theater, reminiscent of how stealth is changing the battlespace today.”
A hypersonic plane would not should be an opulent, distant possibility. If truth be told, an SR-72 may be operational by 2030. For the past several years, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works was working with Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop a mode to integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a supersonic combustion ramjet air breathing jet engine to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6. The result’s the SR-72 that Aviation Week has dubbed “son of Blackbird,” and integrated engine and airframe it truly is optimized on the system level for prime performance and affordability.
Hypersonic Research and Development
SR-72 isn’t the first hypersonic Skunk Works aircraft. In partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, engineers developed the rocket-launched Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2). The HTV-2 research and development project was designed to gather data on three technical challenges of hypersonic flight: aerodynamics; aerothermal effects; and guidance, navigation and control.
The SR-72’s design incorporates lessons learned from the HTV-2, which flew to a top speed of Mach 20, or 13,000 mph, with a surface temperature of 3500°F.
A hypersonic aircraft should be a game changer.
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