NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here. Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes. But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.

> “Every time I threw one of these things out there, he says, ‘Oh, engineering will take care of that [and] engineering will take care of that,’” Relja recalls. That sounds all to familiar to people that actually has to accomplish stuff, heard from management. Engineering will not take care of that because engineering is the one that is raising the concerns!

There is an SR-71 on display in Seattle's Boeing Museum of Flight. One of my most favorite memories of it was taking my late Belarussian grandfather to that museum and having one of the docents there, a retired airforce person about my grandfather's age, tour us around, with me translating. I already knew a bunch of BlackBird's lore, but the docent/tour guide was pulling out all the stops to impress my grandpa and was talking about various overflights of USSR, and I my grandfather's smile crinkled up and he said "oh I remember we finally shot that guy [Powell] down, and all the papers were trumpeting about it" and he and the tour guide started laughing and slapping each other on backs! I miss my grandfather. He was a good one!

A couple of questions/observations: 1) when people say "destroyed the jigs, tools and spares in 2007" What do they actually mean? Burying things isn't destroying. Putting them in a furnace is destroying. Is it possible that both parts, and tools actually are recoverable e.g. from the seabed? The dimensional stability might be off, but to help reconstruct tools, it's not nothing. Likewise digging up something buried in its packing crate is not rocket science. 2) "that would be ludicrously expensive" doesn't mean much any more. It's not unlike "we can't make a saturn 1 any more because the tools were destroyed and it would be ludicrously expensive to make an F1 engine" -well yes, but thats not impossible, it's just unlikely and expensive. So maybe this is unlikely, expensive but ... has a unicorn sugar daddy? 3) there are craft in all sorts of places. Not just on sticks outside NASA property. I am not a historian or a federal government employee, but I wouldn't think it impossible for people to ask other agencies to let you inside the shell and remove the bits you want, or even ask for it back. The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs.. 4) its a titanium alloy. It's temperature and corrosion resistant, noting some things (like chlorine according to the web) are bad for it. It's not made of pure chinesium or balsa wood. Interior surfaces would be in pretty good shape.

The Blackbird is a deeply awesome machine, and hn understandably loves it. But this initiative is almost certainly about agency funding and access to budget, not engineering. The Orange Entity sets the direction and his congress provides the money. My guess would be that NASA has been told that the direction that leads to there being money is to forget the space telescopes and other science, and instead to focus on national prestige projects (Moon, Mars) and things that will feed through to military applications (hypersonic flight).