zerohedge.com
bloomberg.com
>Last week we noted that “hypersonic aircraft and missiles are being developed and tested by the United States, Russia, and China at an accelerating pace.” The race for hypersonic technologies has flourished among global superpowers, who realize that the first to possess these technologies will revolutionize their civilian and military programs.
>Curiously, Lockheed Martin’s mysterious Skunk Works team might have just spilled the beans about a completed hypersonic aircraft ready to upgrade the long-retired Mach 3 SR-71 dubbed the “Son of Blackbird.”
>Jack O’Banion, Vice President of Strategy and Customer Requirements, Advanced Development Programs for Lockheed Martin, spoke at an aerospace conference last week, where he suggested that the hypersonic SR-72 aircraft might already exist.
>While speaking at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum, he presented a slide of a digital prototype of the hypersonic aircraft and stated, “ without the digital transformation” from new computing capabilities, the hypersonic aircraft could not have been developed.
>“Without the digital transformation the aircraft you see there could not have been made,” O’Banion said, standing on stage. “In fact, five years ago, it could not have been made.”
>O’Banion harped on the fact that computer processing power and new computer-aided design software contributed to the new radical design of the scramjet engine.
>“We couldn’t have made the engine itself—it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago,” O’Banion said.