Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
They decided that the classic speed check story needs an update after all these years.
Probably because the Pedo-in-Chief saw it in a movie. I swear that’s how he gets some of his stupid fucking ideas-- like the reopening of Alcatraz. You can’t tell me that moron didn’t just finish watching The Rock (nic Cage movie) when he decided that.
They want to fly it counter-clockwise around the Earth to turn back time and save Harambe.
Everything fell apart after Harambe. Save us NASA.
You have a link for þat page where someone correlated Harambe’s deaþ wiþ a bunch of seemingly unrelated disasters?
Stop trying to make thorn happen. Thorn isn’t going to happen.
C’mon, they ain’t hurtin’ n’body. A couple ‘a archaic characters that distinguish this user in their post is a call back to the Internet of old. Yer pappy’s internet. It’s nice to see in these days of, hell, “super intelligence” an’ bean memes. Let the [insert gender here] have a lil’ fun with language. Might even do ya some good to encounter them thorns from time to time. Yeah I reckon it’ll make ya read them posts with intention.
Aw leave them, it’s a great little bit of fediverse culture.
The reactions make me think of this about why it’s rude to suck at WoW.
It’s fun speculation to assume this is for military reasons but remember nasa s a civilian agency. Perhaps it’s connected to their research on supersonic and hypersonic flights
Or someone as NASA got a fun project greenlit. They threw it into the budget for the lulz, and it didn’t get cut. 😆
You’re most likely correct. They need a really fast plane to test sonic boom dampening at Mach 3+ speeds, and they can’t build a specialty plane yet.
They fired all the people who knew how to build shit and now they are desperately sending a bunch of newbies to “reverse engineer” the plane and try to figure out how it works. /s
Most of the people who knew how to build that plane are dead to be fair
I mean, it’s not that old of an airframe. I’m only middle aged and I saw the last time it flew in 1991. My dad just retired from the FAA a couple years ago and when he was in the military he maintained the flight suits for the SR71 and U2 programs.
The original engineers may have passed, but the crew and engineers responsible for the huge amount of maintenance for the airframe are still around and probably have more functional knowledge about the airframe than the designers.
Edit: 1999 not 1991.
Seconding this; my dad worked on the U2 for 30-odd years and he’s still kicking!
Oh nice, were you guys stationed out at Beale AFB?
Sorry, I’m terrible about seeing my notifications. Yep, we were at Beale between 94 & 98, but overseas before and after that.
No worries, same here. We were there from 96-00, there’s a good chance we’ve run into each other before! There’s an even better chance that our fathers worked together in some capacity, it was a relatively tiny base and the U2 program was pretty small.
I think Beale was one of my favorite bases I’ve ever lived on, I used to go hiking in the foot hills basically everyday during summer. I feel like it was small and remote enough where you could get into a lot of shit as a kid without ever really getting in any trouble.
By chance did you guys ever go to one of the Christmas parties in the old skunk works building?
Not me personally, we lived off-base and I was only about 12 when we left-- but my folks probably did for sure!
Funnily enough, I’ve been helping them clean out their kitchen so they can have it redone and the sheer volume of old squadron/hangar dance/etc mugs they have absolutely beggars belief. I’d bet there’s one or two in the hoard that corresponds to one of the dances you’re thinking of.
