WASHINGTON – For years, Lockheed Martin has been developing a successor toone of the fastest aircraft the world has ever seen, the SR-71 Blackbird,the Cold War reconnaissance craft that the U.S. Air Force retired almostthree decades ago. Lockheed officials have said the hypersonic SR-72-dubbedthe “Son of Blackbird” by one trade journal-could fly by 2030.
But a rather curious talk last week at an aerospace conference by aLockheed Skunk Works executive implied that the SR-72 might already exist.Referring to detailed specifics of company design and manufacturing, JackO’Banion, a Lockheed vice president, said a “digital transformation”arising from recent computing capabilities and design tools had madehypersonic development possible. Then-assuming O’Banion chose his wordtense purposely-came the surprise.
“Without the digital transformation the aircraft you see there could nothave been made,” O’Banion said, standing by an artist’s rendering of thehypersonic aircraft. “In fact, five years ago, it could not have been made.”
Hypersonic applies to speeds above Mach 5, or five times the speed ofsound. The SR-71 cruised at Mach 3.2, more than 2,000 mph, around 85,000feet.
Computer processing power and new tools allow for three-dimensional designof a scramjet engine, O’Banion said at the American Institute ofAeronautics and Astronautics’ annual SciTech Forum near Orlando. (Scramjetrefers to engine combustion occurring at supersonic speeds, which adds tothe engineering complexity.) Adding a little Hollywood to an engineeringpresentation, O’Banion likened the digital advances in 3D-design to thebuild process Tony Stark employs in the film “Iron Man.”
“We couldn’t have made the engine itself-it would have melted down intoslag if we had tried to produce it five years ago,” O’Banion said. “But nowwe can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated coolingsystem integral into the material of the engine itself, and have thatengine survive for multiple firings for routine operation.” The aircraft isalso agile at hypersonic speeds, with reliable engine starts, he said. Ahalf-decade before, he added, developers “could not have even built it evenif we conceived of it.”
Of course, none of the Skunk Works executive’s talk confirmed that LockheedMartin is preparing to turn over to the Pentagon a top-secret hypersonicaircraft, nor does it reveal how far the project may have progressed. It’salso unclear if such an aircraft would carry pilots or operate as a drone.(Skunk Works is the name of Lockheed’s 75-year-old advanced developmentprograms division, based in California.)
Lockheed declined to address O’Banion’s comments. The defense contractor”continues to advance and test technologies which will benefit hypersonicflight,” spokeswoman Melissa Dalton said in an email. “A ReusableHypersonic System (RHS) is a far term solution that will be made possibleby the path-finding work we are doing today.”
An Air Force spokesman, meanwhile, said only that that the military has noinformation on the project “at this time.”
Talk about Lockheed’s hypersonic program isn’t new. In fact, executivesdiscussed the program’s status to such an extent last June that defensereporter Tyler Rogoway called it “highly peculiar.” (His article washeadlined “What’s the Deal with Lockheed’s Gabbing About the SecretiveHypersonic SR-72?”)
“There’s probably a big distance between prototype development and actualoperational capability,” said Richard Aboulafia, a defense analyst withTeal Group. And the military has a history of publicly revealing newadvanced aircraft many years after their prototypes were delivered.
Nevertheless, the SR-72 work could be an entirely digital exercise to date,funded by ample “black budget” appropriations stretching into the billionsof dollars over time, Aboulafia said. It’s also possible that anyhypersonic capability may well be incorporated into a new type oflong-range missile before an actual aircraft.
The basic physics of hypersonic flight have been understood for decades,with the Air Force and NASA flying the rocket-powered X-15 in the 1960sabove Mach 6 and the X-43A hitting Mach 9.6 in 2004. More recently, BoeingCo. flew an experimental craft, the X-51 WaveRider, to Mach 5.1 in May 2013.
Still, there are myriad design challenges involved with hypersonicprojects, Aboulafia said, likening scramjet engineering hurdles to “theproverbial lighting of a match in the hurricane.” This is one reason nohypersonic aircraft are in military service today-although U.S. officialshave expressed concern about Chinese and Russian ambitions employing thetechnology.
For the Pentagon, such speeds would represent a new form of strategicdeterrence in the sense that a hypersonic bomber could penetrate an enemy’sairspace, fire and depart before that nation had time to react. Aboulafianoted, however, that such a capability could also be considered adestabilizing development if a U.S. adversary decided to react preemptivelyto such an aircraft’s existence.
The specific need is also unclear, given advances in satellite surveillancecapabilities and the planned B-21 Raider, a precision bomber from NorthropGrumman Corp. expected to replace the Air Force’s aged fleet of B-1 Lancersadn B-52s. The B-21 could cost as much as $97 billion for production andmaintenance of at least 100 planes, with the first expected in themid-2020s. – Bloomberg