When they were decommissioned, the ultimate sacrilege was committed: they cut the wings and backbone on all but the three (?) left in NASA's care so that they could never be flown again. I practically cried when I heard that. I hate to see beautiful things destroyed, whether for good reason or not.
When I was at NASA/JPL, I worked in the Radar Science and Technology group. One day, in the basement lab where a lot of the equipment I occasionally had to deal with was located, a funny big lump of thing was delivered. It was a Synthetic Aperture Radar unit from the nose of an SR-71 ... declassified and now useless, they sent it to us to play with. It was an optical processing SAR, doing the essence of the required 2DFFT transformations required to take the returned backscatter from the radar chirps back into the spatial/intensity domain via a set of custom made, very complex lenses. To do this job, you need to know the vertical altitude, the speed of the aircraft, and the frequency of the radar transmit/receive cycling. The returning signal went through the lenses and wrote an image onto long reels of 70mm film, speed matched to the aircraft ground speed. The lenses had built into them the assumptions of altitude for image scanning data takes. Three sets of lenses were packaged with the unit. Calculations showed one set was for FL 70, one for FL 80 and one for FL 90. So I know for a fact that the SR-71 was capable of hitting at least 90,000 foot elevations for data acquisition... And I'm sure there was at least a 15-20% additional, emergency altitude buffer to get out of the way, fast!, when a surface-to-air or air-to-air missile was aimed at one. Of course at such altitudes it would likely be more akin to a ballistic missile than aeronautical flight! My friend, Dr. Al Bowers of NASA/Dryden, was for a short time the manager of NASA's SR-71 planes. You've probably seen him on a couple of Discovery or Science Channel shows from time to time. He's a big Ducati and Alfa Romeo enthusiast, a cool guy, and is also into Hasselblads and Rolleis... I've often cajoled him that he should have someone take me up for a joyride... ;-) The SR-71 was a unique and amazing aircraft. Whether its like will ever be seen again remains to be seen ... or it's flying now under the black shroud of security and we'll hear about it in another decade and some... Godfrey On Oct 20, 2007, at 1:07 PM, Bob Blakely wrote: > Actually, it's obsolete for reasons other than speed or altitude > supremacy. > And no, current the crop of stealth aircraft can't do everything it > could. > It's still a Mach 3.2+, sustained flight aircraft with an 80,000+ ft > cruising altitude, 85,000+ ft ceiling. I know of no other existing > aircraft > or drone capable of sustaining this type of heat, though there are > rumors of > "Aurora". One day the government will remove the "pluses" and we'll > have the > actual figures. The SR-71 is simply not cost effective any more. It > uses > JP-7 fuel,which is somewhat ago a problem. Further, turnaround time of > intelligence is not adequate for tactical commanders. As to overhead > resources, keep in mind that satellites exist in predictable > orbits. Hide > yourself and/or your activities when the SV's pass. The satellites > can be > maneuvered, but this takes serious propellant and is expensive as > it reduces > the life of the very costly satellites drastically. Further, though > the > overheads have amazing capabilities, the photos are NOT as good as > those > from reconnaissance aircraft. It's about altitude, that is > distance. All > lenses are ultimately limited in angular resolution by diffraction as > expressed by the Airy disk phenomenon. This means that for a given > aperture, > the ground resolution decreases with the altitude of the sensor. > > the molds for the skin and other special jigs used in construction > of the > craft were destroyed because the US isn't going to make any more and > Lockheed was charging a pretty penny for large volume classified > storage at > the time. > >> >> Bob Blakely wrote: >>> The top speed and altitude of the craft is still classified for some >>> reason. >>> Only NASA flies the few that are left. Under orders from the >>> government, >>> all the molds for the skin and other special jigs used in >>> construction of the >>> craft were destroyed. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
