Originally Posted by
chopper2004
Think up to a point when L-M said 72 not in development lest exist, everyone thought it did exist via press releases plus reported sightings of scaled unmanned demonstrator landing at Plant 42 in the dark with a pair of T-38 Talons.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...t-skunk-works/
cheers
Chopper, if you do a little thinking, you might revise some of your assumptions.
A proposed hypersonic reconnaissance and strike aircraft, the SR-72 would serve as a replacement for the famed SR-71 Blackbird, which was retired by the Air Force back in 1998
Tell me, chopper, what has the USAF been doing for the past 20 years without the SR-71 in order to meet their mission requirements that the SR-71 met?
Nothing?
Perhaps they replaced that capability with something else already, and Popular Mechanics might not be as credible a source (in terms of conclusions) as some think.
What is very true, however, is that USAF (and IIRC DARPA) have been spending money over the years on figuring out hypersonic flight. The presumption that this is to build a replacement for SR-71, whose mission area has been fulfilled by something else for about 20 years, strikes me as an unfounded assumption. What mission and role a hypersonic aircraft, manned or unmanned, would fulfill would seem at this time to be something less than 'written in stone' for the simple reason that you have to get it to work as something larger than a scale model.
Given the advances in a variety of tech, I am not convinced that this hoped for hypersonic aircraft would be a manned air vehicle. Think of the weight you can save by not having to account for all of that stuff needed to keep the human up and running for the length of a mission.