I'm really hoping it's NASA doing some really cool science shit, otherwise you'd expect a military organisation to be doing this.

There could be some legitimate uses (NASA operates U-2 spy planes over wildfires to this day) but it would not surprise me at all if it is for some dumb reason.

"Jeff, the Blackbird doesn't go to the moon."

Well, Mayday did just come out in September, and that features an SR-71 ish spyplane

Next up: A base in the bermuda triangle

They don't need all this to do that. All those numbers are breached already anyway.

I can think of a couple of reasons to use the SR-71 again.

• Concern that a crash in space could lead to a cascade of crashes, disabling all sattellites.
• (On demand) capacity. I could imagine that the SR-71 can cover an unplanned spot faster than sattellites. Also, with the wars in Ukraine and Iran they're maybe finding out that they don't have enough imaging capacity.
• The imaging angle, a plane can image almost horizontally, they can look under bridges, through windows etc.
• A ten times increased resolution could be useful for recognizing details, maybe it's even good enough to recognize people though it might be pushing the limits of facial recognition. It's also the kind of resolution where they can read some text, e.g. identifyers on shipping containers or military vehicles.

realistically, I don't know what you'd use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.

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.

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.

This timeline is fucked, may as well use our resources to create better ones

Ask an Iraqi if they think the timeline went bad in 2016.

Everything fell apart after Harambe. Save us NASA.

I agree with the skepticism, however this one is being reported by real aviation news sites, Aviation Weekly specifically.

The confirmed news is an SR71 that used to be parked outdoors has been moved.

Investigative journalism and some theorizing goes further, I found The Aviationist article saying "according to Trimble’s reporting, NASA also contacted former members of the SR-71 program to determine whether they would be interested to participate in a potential return-to-flight effort."