Hope I got the tag right.
I firmly believe that Lockheed wants us to firmly believe the SR-72 exists. They seem to drag it out and shake its chains whenever they're due for an earnings report. Especially when the Chinese do the same. I'm not willing to believe we went from "nine minutes of flight after being launched on an MX Missile" in 2011 to "we've totally got this hypersonic spy drone" in 2015.
Considering that the Skylon guys were having all kinds of trouble getting wind tunnel access, my first though was where are they testing the models at? Thing looks cool as all hell and i want to believe, but yea, maybe in 10 years. They may have a working engine that can, at least on paper, power the thing, but how many hypersonic test facilities are there in the world? Two? Three?
I'm unconvinced that a compelling use case exists for the SR-72. The turn radius at Mach 6 is non-negligible and anywhere you wanna get that thing you'll be in the airspace of somebody who doesn't want it there. Besides which, the SR-71 stopped flying because it was vulnerable to the R-33. The R-33 is still in service and the R-37 is faster. Russia could keep any potential SR-72 on the ground simply by threatening to sell R-37s/MiG-31s to anyone we might want to spy on. Or, simply leak the plans. Missiles are much easier, cheaper and faster to develop than aircraft.
With the real possibility of global tracking of anything bigger than a falcon, me either. This is why, IMO, we just "lost" a satellite. Then again with so damn many birds up there who knows what birds are spy satellites (all of them), what can image your troops in the field (all of them) and what birds can track your electronic signals (all of them). Launch a weather satellite with a special not advertised payload of say a 1M camera, or an elint package. Add on customers to the satellite bus, and if you are already a government agency it may already be happening with the LandSat family for all we know. The Air Force already has a fleet of weather satellites, why not add some extra gear if the power budget allows since the main cost is launch and ops, not building the sat itself. Then you start to get into Alex Jones, tin-foil hate territory of what is possible, what is probable and how you can fuck with people. I'm wondering if we are going to hit a point in the very near future where there are so many spy sats from so many players that the very concept of war itself is going to go through a radical transformation. Why fight and risk breaking the stuff you want and having to rebuild when you can write checks with lots and lots of zeros, and then hack what you cannot buy?I'm unconvinced that a compelling use case exists for the SR-72.
If you follow the real armchair defense guys they use commercially-available imagery. "Weather station." Last photo published from that thing is September.We may go back again with better optics. They help a bunch. However, it's mostly for the exercise as there's a ridge that hides the main runway anyway… and since 2011 there's a weather station on top of Tikaboo peak with a PTZ camera. It probably didn't follow us. It sure felt like it. All I know is that if I were a secret air force base, I'd figure out a way to put a microphone on that thing. If they can consider Ted Molczan a "hostile target" they can sure as hell just not fly when there's someone up on Tikaboo.