Bet Tom Cruise will be offering to allow him to use it for an upcoming movie thrilla

It's for a new Pepsi promotion

Reading the article, this does seem ill-advised.

Why would they do this?

> And Lockheed’s operational manuals for the SR-71A still exist—and are superb...

I appreciate this level of documentation.

The SR-71 is cool, but this article is not at all confidence inspiring on many fronts.

Guy being interviewed by a reporter about a secret project. A secret project that is trying to resurrect an antique plane that has been subject to weather and on display as a museum piece for many years.

It sounds like a clown-show staged around a cool looking plane that's older than 90+% of HN readers.

I'd be more astonished if there isn't something superior to the SR71 (likely unmanned) that has been flying around at night from facilities like Groom Lake for years. Look at how long the RQ180 was flying around in semi-public and known about before it became seen in daylight by plane spotters in Greece. And a long time before that there were public relations approved photos of the Lockheed Martin Polecat.

There were a series of extremely public quotations from senior DoD officially recently about how they plan to aggressively retire the Global Hawk program (which is a mostly non stealth aircraft), reading between the lines it's because they have something much better.

edit: for those who haven't seen the RQ180: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RQ180+gre...

edit 2 (apologies for the X link): https://x.com/MechDesignxyz/status/2041281689838584193

A-12 (Oxcart) pilots say that the SR-71 was the station wagon version :)

As time goes on, Warhammer 40k will become a better and better guide to current events, apparently. Only one question: after recovering this lost standard template constructor pattern, how will the rites be learned to appease such a venerated machine spirit?

To give you an idea how ridiculous this is: to start each engine, they made a cart out of two Buick V8 engines tied together - so four V8 engines to start the plane. Those V8 engines were long since out of production, so at one point they went around the country, to every junkyard, buying up every one of those V8s they could find, so they would have spares to start planes up in different places. If an SR71 had an issue and landed at an unusual airport, they had to fly the start cart and other equipment to that airport to start the plane again. Everything about this plane is expensive and one-of-a-kind. It's a hot rod that goes to space.

NASA (Specifically, hotshot NASA administrator Jared Isaacman) is fixing to kill themselves some pilots.

Trivia, SR71 backseater Colonel Robert J. Roetcisender, RIP, on the right in the image below, was the designated pilot examiner who did my private pilot checkride many many years ago. It was pretty intimidating. All he asked is that I make the flight as boring as possible.

https://www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/SR71-crews/da...

The new planes (F-35) were supposed to supersede interceptors like the SR-71 (that's their multirole goal). If it can't, this is an embarrassment.

[delayed]

Nasa reported they're not restarting the actual plane, it would cost too much money, they're making a new one based on the SR-71

people behave like engineers grow on trees.

or processes can be restarted if they were not preserved and actively practiced.