Meanwhile, Skunk Works Lockheed Martin subsidiary responsible for pushing the boundaries of aviation is said to be working on a hypersonic successor to the legendary SR-71 Blackbird. According to reports in Aviation Week, a technology demonstrator over an unarmed subscale aircraft was spotted by eyewitnesses last month at the U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.
It is a strike and reconnaissance aircraft designed to cruise up to Mach 6. Lockheed Martin has been working on this since the early 2000s. “The Skunk Works team in Palmdale, California, is doubling down on our commitment to speed,” said Orlando Carvalho, executive vice president of aeronautics at Lockheed Martin, during the SAE International Aerotech Congress and Exhibition. He underlined that the United States is standing on the threshold of a hypersonic revolution.
It includes hypersonic technologies that have matured, such as a combined cycle propulsion system that merges a rocket engine with a supersonic jet engine. Now, the SR-72 project can forge ahead. “This technology is now maturing, and we’re making efforts to bring this capability to the warfighter as soon as possible,” said Rob Weiss, executive vice president and general manager, of Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs.
To this date, the SR-71 Blackbird remains the world’s fastest and highest-flying operational manned aircraft. It established an absolute altitude record of 85,069 feet and an absolute speed record of 2,193.2 mph on July 28, 1976. It allowed the Blackbird to outrun surface-to-air missiles simply by acceleration, thus making it a formidable flying reconnaissance platform through most of its years of operational service, from 1964 to 1999.
The SR-72 is looking to start where that plane left off, taking the legacy with hypersonic capability. According to Lockheed Martin, it will be approximately the size of an F-22 and powered by a full-scale, combined-cycle engine. The SR-72 would travel at speeds up to Mach 6; adversaries would have little time to react or hide. “Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour,” said Brad Leland, Lockheed Martin program manager for Hypersonics.
Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne have been working together since 2006 to couple an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the SR-72. Weiss emphasized that the air-breathing propulsion system has matured and is prepared for fielding.
It won’t be very long before hypersonic passenger planes are being designed. Boeing’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Muilenburg, even commented that these could be a reality within a couple of decades, reducing travel times by a huge margin. A commercial flight from New York to Shanghai, for example, could be performed in just two hours if it were taken up to hypersonic speed, whereas it would take more than 15 hours currently.
Meanwhile, NASA, too, is in the race, seeking proposals for the development of its supersonic X-plane-quiet supersonic transport low-boom flight demonstrator, designed to produce much less ‘boom’ compared to other supersonic aircraft. First flight tests are scheduled to begin in 2021.
As competition for hypersonic technology heats up, Lockheed Martin SR-72 leads from the front, with a promise to change the face of military and civilian aviation.