In 2013, a feature article appeared on the website of legendary aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin that quickly had aviation buffs talking. The piece, titled “Speed is the New Stealth,” claimed that a new hypersonic aircraft was under development at the company’s famous Skunk Works facility, which would soon set a new standard for speed and stealth in American aerospace technologies.
“That’s because today,” the article explained, “engineers are developing a hypersonic aircraft that will go twice the speed of the SR-71.”
“It’s called the SR-72.”
It was a remarkable revelation since 2013 marked nearly 23 years since the fabled SR-71—once the pride of the American stealth reconnaissance arsenal—had been officially retired. The conclusion of the SR-71’s tenure in service resulted from several factors, including maintenance costs amid a shrinking military budget and new vulnerabilities presented by developments in Soviet surface-to-air missile capabilities.
Perhaps the most apparent issue the SR-71 faced was the implementation of newer, less costly, and more effective reconnaissance technologies. Chief among these were satellites that had already proven their resilience in collecting detailed information from the heart of Soviet territory by the final years of the 20th century. Then, in the early 2000s, the CIA began to deploy the first armed Predator drones for missions in Afghanistan, an early showcase for the power and capability of unmanned aerial vehicles as an American military asset in the new millennium.
Amidst such 21st-century realities, by 2013, Lockheed Martin seemed confident that its vision of a new unmanned hypersonic aircraft capable of flight at six times the speed of sound would soon become a reality. Citing cost-saving production methods and recent advancements made with Aerojet Rocketdyne to “integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a supersonic combustion ramjet air-breathing jet engine to power the aircraft,” the 2013 article seemed to indicate that the forthcoming wonder machine that Aviation Week had already nicknamed the “son of Blackbird” would soon take flight.
The arrival of America’s next formidable stealth plane, in other words, was right around the corner. Yet despite all the buzz the SR-72 announcement generated at the time, the story eventually receded again into the shadows of the highly classified world of black projects.
Hellbound and Down 