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50 Years Ago Today: First Flight of the SR-71 Blackbird
The SR-71's first flight, December 22, 1964, is a milestone in aviation and national security circles. Outside of those circles, I'm surprised how few people have heard of the SR-71 or know more than that it was "a spy plane"--which is like saying the Taj Mahal is "a big building." Unofficially known (but still not well-known) as the Blackbird, the SR-71 flew at record altitude--90,000 feet--and speed--2,193.2 miles per hour. And it could sustain such speed: In… (www.huffingtonpost.com) 更多...
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Coincidentally, just a few hours ago, a friend who's a lead engineer on a major airline project told me that he'd been handed a report by a junior engineer and when asked how he worked out the results, all he could say was he'd used a particular computer programme. He couldn't explain in even the most general terms how to work it out manually.
How quickly the A12 made it to production must be a design/procurement record. Maybe there was truth to the AREA51 UFO crash and the only technology that could be deciphered went into the BB. That would make the the timeline to production more plausible.
Surely you jest.
Pretty good up to the last para:
50 years before the Blackbird, the Model B--made by the Wright Brothers for the US Army--averaged 44 mph. If aviation technology has continued at its Wrights-to-Blackbird pace, there's something up there now doing 100,000 mph.
Minor issue with physics there...
From Wikipedia on escape velocity:
Because of the atmosphere it is not useful and hardly possible to give an object near the surface of the Earth a speed of 11.2 km/s (40,320 km/h), as these speeds are too far in the hypersonic regime for most practical propulsion systems and would cause most objects to burn up due to aerodynamic heating or be torn apart by atmospheric drag.
Many thanks for the unpublished accomplishments of the Habu
50 years before the Blackbird, the Model B--made by the Wright Brothers for the US Army--averaged 44 mph. If aviation technology has continued at its Wrights-to-Blackbird pace, there's something up there now doing 100,000 mph.
Minor issue with physics there...
From Wikipedia on escape velocity:
Because of the atmosphere it is not useful and hardly possible to give an object near the surface of the Earth a speed of 11.2 km/s (40,320 km/h), as these speeds are too far in the hypersonic regime for most practical propulsion systems and would cause most objects to burn up due to aerodynamic heating or be torn apart by atmospheric drag.
Many thanks for the unpublished accomplishments of the Habu
It was just an analogy to give the uninitiated, average reader some idea what the speed increase had been in such a short time. I'm quite sure that if the article had been written for an audience of pedantic aerospace engineers, he would have explained it differently.
And he probably wouldn't have used Wikipedia to make his point.
And he probably wouldn't have used Wikipedia to make his point.
Several spacecrafts are over 150,000mph and forecast to be 450,000 in a few years. They're up there.
I am not suggesting we turn off the work stations and pass out the slide rules, but we do need to nurture that class of engineer for aerospace again.