Were there Soviet contemporaries to the U-2, X-15 and SR71?

[Magiver]

@md2000

I think it was the MIG25 that was clocked on radar (in the Middle East?) doing close to Mach3. Apparently that scared the heck out of the USA military establishment. Then, IIRC it was the memoirs of the guy who stole a Foxbat, mentioned that the one they had clocked at that speed landed and had to have it’s engines replaced. It was not meant to go quite that fast.

However, I guess the price of a new engine was worth it for scaring the hell out of the CIA and the USAF.

It all came full circle. The MIG 25 was built in response to fear of the XB-70.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Duckster

If you frequent some old Habu mailing lists, Blackbird was retired because it was too good. Satellite intelligence (at the time) was often obscured by weather conditions and regular orbits. Blackbird suffered no such ills. There was no plausible deniabilility with Blackbird intel.

This doesn’t make a bit of sense. The SR-71, and its predecessor, the A-12 ‘Oxcart’, were built for a specific purpose; to overfly the Soviet Union at speeds and altitudes exceeding any credible intercept capability. (It was originally intended to fly so fast that it would be ‘stealthy’ to early “blip-scan” radar, although with better analog and later digital filtering capability this anti-radar capability was negated.)

The SR-71 was retired because it was incredibly expensive to operate for the capabilities it offered, and for which the kind of high-and-slow reconnaissance missions required today can be performed by the U-2R and U-2S or by unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles. In the future, stealthy reconnaissance UAVs capable of both high speed transit and low speed dwell at a variety of altitudes will provide those capabilities.

The X-15 was always an experimental rocket powered vehicle designed to research aspects of high altitude and high speed flight. It was never used for any operational purpose.

As noted, the Soviet Union didn’t have direct contemporaries to these vehicles, but they did have some interesting vehicles and prototypes of their own for both high speed transit and high altitude/space research, including the interesting MiG-105 ‘Spiral 50/50’ vehicle filling somewhat the same niche as the proposed X-20 ‘Dyna-Soar’, albeit with a different flight mode (two stage aircraft-lofted orbital lifting body versus the Dyna-Soar’s rocket ascent profile on a Titan-3M), and the Tupalev Tu-123 reconnaissance drone.

Stranger

[wevets]

@Declan

That spotted doing mach 3 in the ME, was it that overflight that the Israelis got into hot water over in 82, for using a hawk missile to shoot it down.
Declan

Same aircraft type (MiG-25) but two different incidents… In the early 1970s (1971 or 1972) radar operators clocked a MiG-25 (probably a Soviet reconnaissance version) over the Sinai peninsula at Mach 3.2.

Ten years later, in 1982, the Israelis shot down a Syrian MiG-25 over Lebanon using a Hawk SAM and an F-15 - since it was in a third nation’s airspace, this would normally have caused a major international incident but this was during the phase of Lebanon’s civil war when the Israelis were shooting down Syrian aircraft frequently over Lebanon, so it didn’t have that large an effect.

(Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 - Wikipedia)