The SR-71 Spy Plane Was So Fast, It Outran Every Missile Fired at It
Is there any single piece of technology that's more retro-futuristic than the SR-71? It is undefinably iconic especially if you understand what happened behind the scenes. Lockheed's Skunk Works managed to not only look into the future, but they managed to make it manifest in the past.<p>The first one took flight over fifty years ago and we still talk about it as if they represent the promise of the future. As a culture and community, we rarely view Project Apollo in the same way. To me, in contrast to the Blackbird, our first step outside our cradle looks dated. The Saturn V is an ode to the sheer force of will required to send human beings to another heavenly body. It certainly looks the part. The Blackbirds, on the other hand, were precise, surgical instruments designed to cut borders and they look the part. Every element of the plane ends in that sharp-looking edge. There are no blunt surfaces on it. It’s one complex curve wrapped around itself and stretched into that timeless shape.<p>And that's before you pull back on the curtain. I don't have online sources for this, but I have read books about the project that explained how every single part within the Blackbirds - from the engines to the paint - was brought into being for this project. They set out to do something so daring and so pioneering that they had to invent new alloys to do it. And then they had to build the machines to work that alloy: new machines - tape-based robots - to precisely carve it into shape, new procedures to put it together, and new philosophies to let it fly. These planes were designed to fly so fast that ordinary Titanium-based alloys would melt or weaken over time leading to rapid, unplanned disassembly. They didn’t have more advanced ceramics which could do the job, so Kelly Johnson’s team came up with a new alloy that was annealed - or re-tempered - in flight, so that it became stronger and stronger over time. Theoretically above some classified altitude the Blackbird can go much faster than Mach 3 and keep on going until the airframe melts away at some crazy high, theoretical speed no one has bothered to check.<p>They did all of that in a past where the most sophisticated engineering tool in common use was a slide rule and the first scientific pocket calculator was nearly a decade into the future.<p>Do you ever wonder when we'll build something so daring that it will finally eclipse this project? I do. Paraphrasing Thiel, "what happened to the future? We were promised Blackbirds and got the F-35 instead."