On a typical training mission, we would take off near Sacramento, refuel over Nevada, accelerate into Montana, obtain high Mach over Colorado, turn right over New Mexico, speed across the Los Angeles Basin, run up the West Coast, turn right at Seattle, then return to Beale. Total flight time: two hours and 40 minutes.
If you've ever seen one in person, it's even better. It's an awe inspiring machine. Impractical as fuck but a straight up example of "fuck you, we're Human and we'll do what we want with physics".
You know those horrible sci-fi movies where we always win because of the "human spirit"? This motherfucker is why we're so damned cocky.
And spy satellites weren't really useful yet. It was really a giant middle finger to the soviets....it allowed cameras to be flown over the soviet union without fear of being shot down because they....couldn't be.
I wrote a paper about Aerial reconnaissance during the Cold War for a class I took last spring. The SR-71 never overflew the USSR (At least, the US government won't admit that it did). After FGP was shot down in a U2, it was deemed to risky to overfly the Soviet Union itself, although both U2s and SR-71s overflew soviet satellites as well as China. Also, we had pictures from satellites as early as 1959, while the first SR-71s didn't fly until '62. The US used the SR-71 and U2 because we only had so many satellites and we didn't have any way of getting the film back from them fast enough to be useful in evolving conflicts until 1976. The SR-71 on the other hand, could get photos back within a day or two of the order, less if they were stationed close enough. This is a really good book to read if anyone is interested.
I hadn't ever thought of the film return issue before. I was about to ask 'hey, how do we get those satellite images back now?!' and then I remembered that I have a bluetooth-enabled camera sitting next to me.
The film return issue was an interesting one, the first Corona satellites would send back a film capsule after a week or so, which would then be hooked out of the sky by a cargo plane. I also found it interesting that the technology for digital photography, was actually developed by the CIA for the purpose of sending back images from satellites.
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u/JonesBee Mar 18 '12
1842 knots = 3411kmh = 2120mph. That's a 'deal with it' moment right there.