The SR-71 was retired in 1998-1999 yet the US must have had alternatives both at the ready and in development.
What other means might be available to fill in for the SR-71?
What US or foreign advancements have made the SR-71 less attractive and alternative means more attractive?
Orbital platforms like the KH-11 Kennan cost several billion dollars each. What kind of capabilities might they have?
Some satellites have low-observability features. How might this be achieved? Given that satellites have little room for maneuvers, I’d expect them to be easy enough to detect after many passes, especially if many countries (or one laᴙge countᴙy) cooperate to form a multistatic radar network.
4) Are sub-orbital Corona-like payloads still worthwhile? They seem to offer high enough speed and altitude to be difficult to engage (like satellites) while being easy to upgrade and flexible to deploy (like planes).
I realize that the answers to this line of questions must, per the nature of the topic, be educated guesses at most. I’m putting this in GQ because I’d like the answers to be of the more reasonable type of speculation and guesses rather than the fantastical sci-fi kind. In other words, if you know how the term “X band” is relevant to this topic, it’s fine to speculate freely and offer WAGs. If your first thought was that it must refer to early 90s grunge music, keep it factual or ask questions to better understand the topic.
In a moderately advanced country that has not lost air superiority (ie. before major hostilities), they would have the ability to track and shoot down an SR71. The USA confidently lied about Gary Powers and the U2 because they thought that (at the time) the USSR did not have the capability to shoot down a U2 and if they got a lucky hit, it would have destroyed any evidence. Modern missiles have more than enough accuracy and speed to catch an SR71.
If the other country has lost air superiority you can fly a boxcar over their territory with impunity.
So the only mission I would see for an SR71 nowadays slower stealth aircraft or high-strength satellites could do better.
A manned reconnaissance plane has one large advantage over satellites - the target doesn’t know when it is coming. If you know you are under satellite surveillance, you can either hide the important stuff when the bird is overhead, or alternately, put out fake stuff you want the spy to see (or you can not do anything, and let your enemies wonder what if anything they see is factual).
But that supposes an enemy who has the sophistication to know where the satellites are all the time. For low tech targets like ISIS, satellites would be fine. If you can get the same resolution as a plane can give, that is.
As much as it would be cool, I seriously doubt the “Aurora” exists. They couldn’t even keep the SR-71 a secret in a time when it was easier to keep secrets. There’s also no reason TO keep it a secret.
Why is this the case with satellites? I get that once you know about them and their orbits, it’s simple to predict when they’re overhead. But how would I know that in the first place? I imagine things like the number of them and their orbits are classified. And I imagine that spotting them and distinguishing them from other types of satellites is challenging.
Satellites are not so easy to avoid. A low earth orbit sat comes around every 90 minutes. In principle the orbit could be set up so that it passed over you each time. Any modern system is going to be multi-spectral. The specification of the sensors is going to be a very well guarded secret - but it becomes quite difficult to spoof them - as they more akin to imaging spectrophotometers than cameras.
Knowledge of the location of satellites is pretty trivial to find. I have an app on my phone which does it, and there are many web sites. There are too many enthusiasts out there who track satellites to keep their orbital parameters secret. One problem is that moving a satellite to a new orbit is quickly observed, and can give clues to the strategic intent of the owner. Then again, it would hardly be a surprise to anyone that some orbits favour the middle-east.
There are still plenty of alternatives to SR-71. Currently, it looks like the most popular are Cold War Kids, AWOLNATION, Walk the Moon, Atlas Genius, but even Beck and Foo Fighters are still around.
Aurora is some type of classified government program. It showed up as a line item on a budget proposal that was sent to Congress. It was part of a list of military projects that were all supposed to be in the secretive “black budget” (all the classified military stuff that Congress just gets to vote yes or no on or maybe argue about the total number, they don’t get details on what each project is). When the mistake was realized, Aurora went back into the black budget and was never heard from publicly again.
All we know about Aurora is that it’s a secret project, and the government was planning on spending a lot of money on it that year. That’s it.
We don’t even know what Aurora is (or was). It could be a plane. It could be a ship. It could be a biological weapon. It could be trained dolphins with laser beams on their heads. These are the same folks who spent a bunch of money researching the pigeon guided nuclear missile (google Project Pigeon if you don’t believe me), so just about anything is possible.
There were a lot of fans of the SR-71 who couldn’t believe that it would be retired unless there was something better, and that something better couldn’t be satellites and other intelligence gathering devices, it had to be a plane. They saw the Aurora project and thought Aurora is expensive, fancy spy planes like the SR-71 are expensive, aha! Aurora must be the SR-71 replacement! The next thing you know, all kinds of people are drawing pictures of what the Aurora spy plane must look like and are spouting off numbers about how fast it will be and all kinds of information about it. All of this information was of course rectally generated (they pulled it out of the backside) since really the only thing known about Aurora was its price tag for one year.
Personally, I think the days of spy planes like the U2 and the SR-71 were numbered. They originally flew too fast and too high to be shot down. Once technology improved to the point where the enemy could shoot down a plane even if it flew so high that it started to run out of atmosphere, then the SR-71 no longer served a purpose. There were still some reconnaissance missions that they could do, but the U2 could do them as well as the SR-71 in most cases, and cost a heck of a lot less to operate.
Someday Aurora will be declassified, and we’ll finally find out of it was some sort of high technology space plane or if it was a large scale attempt to create psychic monkeys that could remote view foreign military installations, or something else entirely.
There was a SR-71 mailing list, (invite only) made up of aficionados and many who were actively involved with the program, from building it, to maintaining and flying it. Several years ago the question was posed why the program was cancelled. Two reasons were given:
[ul]
[li]No active officer was able to further their career overseeing the program. It was a mature program. Satellites were the glamour fast-track for career advancement. Also, Congress is into glamour and ego, especially those Congress critters with DoD money being spent in their districts on the newest technologies.[/li][li]Satellites have plausible deniability. As great as they are, clouds and other weather phenomena sometimes prevent adequate intelligence-gathering. It’s much easier to deny the existence of the gathered intelligence if the weather allegedly messes up the process. In its entire history the SR-71 was never impeded by weather. Congress doesn’t want to get caught covering up what it already knows so satellite reconnaissance with its faults provides the excuse. It was impossible to deny the SR-71 reconnaissance because every Blackbird mission was a success, regardless of weather. [/li][/ul]
In other words, the SR-71 platform was too good at intelligence gathering for it to survive politically. The SR-71 was never replaced by satellites, but it was replaced nevertheless.
It is predictable enough that Lockheed could build the F-117 in Burbank Ca and every month or two the Air Force would land a C-5 at Burbank airport for about an hour or so in the middle of the nighter erect barriers around the plane load the plane with a plane and depart before the next satellite pass.
There used to be viewing parties in the middle of the night to watch a C-5 land and take off.
This article makes an off hand reference to the practice. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/22/business/fi-stealth22
I don’t think that’s true. A satellite will complete an orbit and return, roughly, to the same spot every 90 minutes, but the earth will have rotated 22.5° during those 90 minutes. On an image like this, the second pass is going to be somewhat west of the first one.
Of course, we have more than one satellite up there, and I’m sure their orbits were calculated to give maximum coverage.
:eek: Holy Shit! That’s a HUGE plane to be landing at that tiny airport. Which is literally 5 minutes from my house. I’m sure I’d have complained about the noise too if I was here back then.
For a pure polar orbit (zero inclination) that is true. You can have satellites have other orbits by changing their inclination, which makes use of the slight oblateness of the Earth to cause their orbital plane to precess. Sun synchronous orbits do this. Which is a very common thing for observation sats (they always see the same sun angle, making images consistent from pass to pass). I am assuming reconnaissance sats pull a similar trick and can set up precessing orbits that allow for much better return intervals. I suspect a return each orbit is asking a bit much, but you should be able to do a lot better than a simple polar orbit.
C-5s are very quiet, practically stealth. I lived under Dobbins AFB flight path, northwest of Atlanta, where Lockheed refurbished and modified the airframe. Never lost a moment of sleep for 5+ years. The latest version, C-5M, has improved turbofan engines even quieter than the originals on the C-5A.
I recognize you’re just passing this along, not vouching for it. But the bolded part strikes me as pure fanboy BS.
The whole point of the SR-71 was that it flew high. As in above 100% of the weather. IOW, it would have had to look down through the exact same weather a satellite overhead the same area at the same time would have.
I can see that SR-71 mission planning would have *tried *to avoid overflight of an area that was going to be socked in for sure. But the same thing would have been true for satellite mission planning. Those things don’t just take continuous pics of everything they pass over. Or at least they didn’t back in the SR-71’s day. Every shot is carefully planned to get the max benefit from the very finite supply of film in the earlier models and of maneuvering & pointing fuel in the later models.
I have zero insider knowledge. But my belief has always been that it became obsolete versus the threat and the quality of the pix was overtaken by satellites. And they were falling apart from old age vs. their bleeding edge-ness. Once it was relegated to flying only outside the target country of interest, it couldn’t do anything a U2 of KH-whatever couldn’t do much more cheaply.
BTW I agree with engineer_comp_geek about “Aurora”. I remember reading the original analysis in the trade press. From a tiny kernel of fact an enormous snowball of BS grew in the popular press and now internet.
I would concur - the reasons given for a politically driven closing down seem to be grasping at straws, and hold little to no water.
The success of SR71 missions will be biased simply because they wouldn’t even take off if the weather was looking poor at the target. So comparing to a satellite one would want to compare the number of desired missions, not the number of missions flown.
When arguments come down to things like “no-one could further their career” and favouritism about the amount of pork being available, you really get to feel they have nothing. Diffuse blaming of politicians is a very low grade argument.
The SR-71 and A-12 program got its big setback very early on when congress ordered the tooling destroyed.
Everyone loves the beasts, and it was very sad to see them cease flying. But there comes a time for everything.
