SR-72 Confirmed: Mach 6 Project Blackswift

a reply to: Blackfinger

Nothing too difficult about getting to Mach 4.5 or so. Then it gets trickier, bit not impossible.
The hard part is getting something that can do that, have a useful range, and a useful payload, and is affordable/reliable enough to build and then use more than once or twice a year.

Even the SR-71, which avoided most of the problems of hypersonic flight was ridiculously expensive. It cost about 20 times the cost of an F-4. The operations costs were even worse. If a SR-72 were 20 times the cost of an F-35, it'd be around $1,700,000,000.00. Or around 3 times the projected cost for a Raider.

Unless it does something very special, I'd rather have the Raiders and F-35's.

a reply to: Barnalby

“I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.”
― M.B. Dallocchio

originally posted by: RadioRobert
a reply to: Blackfinger

Nothing too difficult about getting to Mach 4.5 or so. Then it gets trickier, bit not impossible.
The hard part is getting something that can do that, have a useful range, and a useful payload, and is affordable/reliable enough to build and then use more than once or twice a year.

Even the SR-71, which avoided most of the problems of hypersonic flight was ridiculously expensive. It cost about 20 times the cost of an F-4. The operations costs were even worse. If a SR-72 were 20 times the cost of an F-35, it'd be around $1,700,000,000.00. Or around 3 times the projected cost for a Raider.

Unless it does something very special, I'd rather have the Raiders and F-35's.

Yeah Mach 4 or so is my honest guess at the speed record for any manned air-breather we might have cooked up in Palmdale or Groom between 1965 and today. Rocket-powered ones might have been a decent but faster, though, but far less useful as anything beyond a testbed.

There is realy no proof of new hypersonic airbreather. All new programs on hypersonic are oriented on Missile.

originally posted by: darksidiusThere is realy no proof of new hypersonic airbreather. All new programs on hypersonic are oriented on Missile.

Falcon / FaCET / HTV-3 / MoTr / AFRE / SR-72 / Valkyrie II would like to have a word.

a reply to: mightmight
Yes I know but since a lot (since 2006 htv-3x so now 14 years) nobody see one of those in the sky or on the ramp, I think more that all of this programs are more study than concrete flying demonstrators or operationals plane. I love hypersonic technology but I have the feeling that USAF take the way of simply missile than aircraft. There is no budget line for futur hypersonic ISR or strike aircraft, the new directions are more Skyborg and may be NGAD but it seem that USAF have little interest to budget hypersonic plane, saddly. There was a Rumor about a flying may be SR-72 may we don't see news since.

a reply to: darksidius

The future of USAF global strike is pretty clearly going to be more along the lines of hypersonic stand-off missiles launched from a loitering, unmanned B-21 circling at 60,000 feet at Mach 0.8 than it's going to be about hypersonic strike aircraft dropping PGMs over targets at 90,000 feet and Mach 8.

a reply to: Barnalby

And prompt in demand global ISR is more likely to be spaceplane platforms like the X-37B that can alter their orbital properties like secaf just said

a reply to: darksidius

A sighting of "the SR-72" / a TBCC prototype into Palmdale was widely reported in the media. Multiple people have confirmed it's existence on this board through at least second-hand knowledge. Not everything is posted though.

As for line items - the classified AF R&D budget sat at a record 17 billion in FY20. That's up from some 11 billion in FY09, back when they stopped listing the classified line items independently. Never mind the gazillion 'anything hypersonic' line items they've set up at this point.

a reply to: hawkguy

Yeah, it's all about maintenance costs and the costs of maintaining a constant ability. With launch costs plummeting thanks to SpaceX, (and with costs to orbit primed to further drop by an order of magnitude or so once Starship starts operation), it's far, far cheaper to launch a handful of X-37 type vehicles that can stay up for years and alter their orbital inclinations when needed than it is to design some hyper-exotic top secret air-breathing fastmover, build a dozen of them, and then manage that horrifically expensive operational footprint from somewhere inherently expensive like Groom Lake.

As someone who loves cool aircraft, I kind of hate that things are headed in this direction, but at the same time it's so much easier and more cost-effective to do it this way than it is to try and manage the costs of building and operating something as expensive as the space shuttle in near-total secrecy.

a reply to: mightmight

Hopefully when it gets cancelled the DOD will at least have the common decency to give it to Wright-Pat or the Smithsonian so it can be put on display where it belongs. The grim reality for fastmovers is that space access is accelerating far, far faster than hypersonics tech is. All you need to do is watch a Starlink launch to see this, and that trend is primed to start accelerating even harder this decade once New Glenn and Starship come online in the next couple years.

Who needs to spend billions on a single airframe when that same investment will now allow you to blanket the planet in Starlink-style constellations of miniaturized imaging satellites that can return commercial-grade imagery instantaneously from anywhere at any time. Or if you want to go "big", the future is using New Glenn or Starship to lob a KH-11 successor with the image-collecting capabilities of the Hale or Keck telescopes for only a fraction of the cost-per-pound that it took to put a KH-11 into orbit on an Atlas V or Delta IV Heavy. "Disruptive" doesn't even begin to describe what's about to happen.

That's not to say that there isn't a very important place for hypersonics going forward, but the future of hypersonics is expendable missiles launched from relatively inexpensive subsonic stealth platforms, rather than relatively simple PGMs getting dumped out the back of some ludicrously expensive hypersonic airframe. This allows you to build the complicated fast stuff relatively cheaply since it's expendable, while launching it from something that's relatively cheap to procure and operate (even the B-21 is going to have a per-airframe cost on par with a widebody airliner), which makes far, far, far more operational sense than launching something cheap from something that's as expensive to procure and operate as the Space Shuttle.

You know it was really interesting, a while back on another forum there was a link to a website created by an individual who had created a pen & paper fantasy world complete with its own wikipedia page. Inside of it, there were "classified" aircraft that had rather intricate details about their performance, capabilities, operational testing anecdotes, & background on the defense contractors and how the aircraft came to fruition. Then at some point, most of that specific material was taken down and removed from internet archives (e.g. Wayback Machine).

Not really sure how much truth there was to any of it or how one individual may have as much knowledge about a handful of compartmentalized programs but it was a really great read.

a reply to: Barnalby

No argument there, I don't think hypersonic aircraft will be necessary going forward. Unfortunately, necessity is not a driving factor in military procurement.

I also don't think they cancel the TBCC effort. They'll keep throwing money at it to make it work and tbf, they're nearly there anyway. The USAF just won't procure a squadron of operational birds on the design.
Whether or not some other entity with money to burn will end up utilizing the existing hardware for its very own pet projects is a different question entirely. One which will never be answered, unfortunately.

a reply to: mightmight

i think there will always be a space in the hangers for at least a handful of high speed ISR platforms


cube sats as they are at this moment are not replacements for real multi billion dollar spy sats, thats just how it is now.

maybe if they were in some form of distributed aperture radar situation, dont get me wrong cube sats are going to be a big part of the future.

with aircraft or even maned 'spacecraft' you can change time over targets, orbits, payloads be it cameras/sensors or weapons.

PGS systems as far as i know still carry the risk of it being misinterpreted as something else even with the flatter trajectories a PGS weapon would take. If you rely on space assets alone to target and observe you limit yourself on highly mobile targets.

be it manned or unmanned i would be willing to bet my bottom dollar that for the next 20 or so years we will be using highspeed aircraft and special space assets

Don't you think it will be possible to use hypersonic glider like the ARRW scaled up size of a x-37 b and becoming reusable ? With a stuff like this you could have a stealth space Platform abble to re enter shoot a target on a glide pass, and land somewhere. You could put it on orbit like the x-37B with warhead staying a long time and for a strike activate it. You could have a stealth prompt global strike Platform.

a reply to: penroc3

You can reconfigure orbits of satellites, too. Even small ones. So it's not completely predictable.

And again, I can get 24/7 coverage of every single place on earth with only four satellites. Here's how predictable that is: "Is there a satellite watching me right now? Yes."

And if I want to be on low earth orbit, i need about 8 to provide coverage to a specific area with redundancy. Less if I have short gaps in my coverage. And I can launch small ones several, even dozens, at a time. And if I need to move them to a new orbit, I can move them. And if they run out of fuel, I can launch another several dozen. For cheap.


That's persistent surveillance. If I spend billions on a fleet of hypersonic recon aircraft, I get an extremely short snapshot of information every 12-36 hours...

Where should I spend my money?

a reply to: darksidius

What advantage does that have over hypersonic expendables or various other PGS schemes? Certain not cost...

a reply to: RadioRobert

Satellites fly above the ionosphere. Hypersonic aircraft don't.

a reply to: RadioRobert


We had sats in orbit when SR-71 was flying missions so clearly there is a need

if your going to take a picture of something would you rather take it from 100,000 feet or a few 1000 miles? i know optics have changed and are great but your going to get better resolution from an aircraft or something JUST outside the atmosphere

launching anything to space is expensive and the all interested parties will be watching and following said satellites, in the 80'i believe Russia was shooting lasers at the space shuttle and other satellites.

The USS Lake Erie shot a fail US weather satellite out of the sky with a SM-3 in the middle of the ocean, and then there is Cosmic Eagle, and China made a very public test of their ASAT weapons.

hard to shoot something down that you dont know is there.

and as far as what you spend your money on, both. whats afew trillion between friends

Great, so they shoot down one of my cheap satellite. Now I only have dozens more. And again, I can launch more on demand just as easily as I can generate a hypersonic sortie. Maybe more easily as commercial space opens up. Yoy cannot feasibly destroy a distributed sensor array of dozens of small sats.

If you can make hypersonic flight affordable, then go for it. If the SR-71 was still considered survivable and affordable, it would have stuck around like the Buffs.