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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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I like its lines, but realistically, I don't know what you'd use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.
We know, from Trump's probably-ill-advised tweet back in 2019, that we can do 10-centimeter resolution from reconaissance satellites like USA-224, near the physical limitations of light resolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
The SR-71 operates at a tenth to a thirtieth USA-224's altitude, so assuming comparable imaging systems (which I could believe) and that there aren't stability or thermal issues (which I'd be less-certain of) it can get ten to thirty times the resolution of a KH11 satellite from the lower altitude. I'm not sure how much utility there is in reconnaissance to getting 1 cm or ⅓ cm resolution images instead of 10 cm.
I can think of a couple of reasons to use the SR-71 again.
the sr-71 is definitely not a scramble-able plane:
when they were doing surveys of iraq during desert storm they had to field a fleet of eight tanker planes over the indian ocean just so the damn thing would make it from japan to the gulf.
Edit: oh and those are specially designed tanker planes because of course it uses JP-7 so they needed separate tanks for that and their own fuel. they also needed to be able to refuel at like 850km/h or the blackbird would just drop out of the sky.
love that plane.
Iirc it starts nearly empty and is only fueled up in the air, so basically no way around tanker planes.
that's apparently not true, it would take off with half fuel because the landing gear could buckle under the full weight.
even with a full tank it could only go for about 90 minutes though so anything nontrivial did indeed require a tanker.
I'm sure a skilled politician could sell this as being basically the same ;)
still faster than launching a new satellite
we have over 15 thousand of the things up there now, surely someone must have seen something
Can't they do all that with drones?
You need to deliver the drones to the location of interest though. And regularly bring fresh ones I guess. A stealthy and fast as fuck delivery platform would make sense.
I don't think the SR-71 has much cargo space if that's what you're suggesting.
Imagining an SR-71 crewmember now opening a little hatch and awkwardly shoving little drones out, to see them instantly torn apart in the winds at the slowest speed it can go, 850 km/h.
Well, what does NASA do?
I think it's a pretty safe bet that NASA wants it to test something about aerodynamics at extremely high speeds. Perhaps they want it to deploy some experiment at mach 3. Sometimes you just don't know if your simulation models are correct, and you need to try something in the real world.
I suppose it's also possible they want it to get some close up footage of a rocket during launch or reentry.
But I think the most likely answer is still that they just need something that goes very fast.
The thing is sounding rockets do exactly that and are still in service (vs somehow unfucking an ancient plane that hasn't been serviced in decades with tooling that no longer exists) and there are multiple companies out there operating supersonic drones for high speed tests of whatever you wanna do.
I dont see the value in bringing the blackbird back into service. I think its more likely that they want to freshen up the paint and park it at some press conference / event.
Well, you can control your airspeed and attitude in an airplane, solid rockets just make a ballistic arch and they only accelerate, they can't maintain a speed.
So if you want to test how air behaves in a particular regime, you can't actually maintain that regime with a sounding rocket, so the best you can get is a snapshot.
Honestly, if what they're working on is dialing-in their computer models, the more precise data they can get, the better. It makes sense to maintain a speed for a minute, so you can get a really good running average on your measurements of air pressure, heating, drag, etc. They may want to conduct the same tests at different altitudes and airspeeds, and probably all in level flight. To control all those factors, that's near impossible to do with a rocket.
Again, I don't know what they're doing, what their actual plans are. I'm just saying there are absolutely plausible reasons to use this aircraft.
Satellites are too predictable, plus too infrequent. If there are two spy satellites that cover Iran, for example, Iran can easily know when and what direction, then presumably take some effort to cover whatever they want to hide.
A reconnaissance plane can show up without warning, any time, loiter for at least minutes, take pictures from different angles, in addition to sharper imaging. We can speculate they may also have sharper non-optical imaging, such as thermal or radar
Ok, but what if there are several satellites that cover iran at all times? What if they would need to hide from most directions all of the time? Because I think that's basically the situation right now. The whole world is being monitored from multiple angles all of the time by several different governments. At that point, reconnaissance aircraft in general seem a little redundant.
I think the only real utility they offer is the ability to swap out sensors between flights and upgrade old cameras to the new cutting edge options whenever they're available.
My money's on hegseth wants the sonic booms when he's giving a speech about how manly the army is. Considering they have that unmanned x-37B for spy satellite stuff, and it would be a massive amount of money to bring back the blackbird, while NASA is having its budget cut, it is 100% going to be for some self serving promotion.
I would just like to point out that while not confirmed, it has been speculated since the mid-2000s that the actual imaging resolution of the satellites is closer to 2mm. Or as the joke goes, we'll figure out what brand of cigarettes you smoke by reading the filter.
I would say that that's purely speculation. Physics won't allow it. The diffraction limit basically limits the best resolution to about 10 cm (assuming an altitude of 200 km, blue light and a humongously large lens with a diameter of 1 m). It's likely that they're quite close to the diffraction limit and maybe they have even more extreme hardware than I would guess, but a two orders of magnitude better resolution isn't happening anytime soon I think.
This is not my area of expertise at all. With that said, multi spectrum multilens sub visible light sensor array.
NASA flies U-2 spy planes over wildfires. They might be able to do the same thing with the SR-71. I really don't know, that's my best guess for a realistic use case.