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NASA mysteriously trying to pull world’s fastest plane, SR-71 Blackbird, out of retirement — and won’t say why (nypost.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I'd love to know what NASA has planned for it.

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[–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Nor would an SR-71 play anywhere near the same role as an F-35 lol. They’re apples to oranges.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    they are both hypersonic aircraft.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    They are not. The F-35 has a top speed of Mach 1.6. It's a supersonic aircraft.

    The SR-71 has a top speed of Mach 3.2 lol. Literally twice as fast as the F-35 but still well short of the Mach 5 required for hypersonic flight.

    The F-35 also has a flight ceiling of 50,000 feet, while the SR-71 has an 85,000 foot ceiling.

    The SR-71 served exactly one role: High supersonic aerial reconnaissance. No weapons, nothing. Just fly higher and faster than anything else on the planet.

    The F-35 is a strike fighter and air superiority fighter.

    They're really not comparable.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Technically, they're both supersonic, not hypersonic, but yeah, that's just semantics. The actual important detail is that the SR-71 is twice as fast (or more) as the F-35. There's a lot of testing you can do with the former that's just not possible with the latter.

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