Replacement for the SR71

Northrop Grumman has built a super-secret low-observable unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to fulfill the penetrating ISR niche left vacant by the retirement of the SR-71 in the 1990s. Informally dubbed “RQ-180” even though that is probably not its true designation, it first flew in 2010 and has been operational with the US Air Force since the late 2010s. The design of the “RQ-180” is derived from a 205-foot span conventional flying wing which was one of Northrop Grumman’s design studies for the SensorCraft program sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Satellites, as always, were never going to replace the U-2 or SR-71 because the laws of orbital mechanics mean that they only can provide episodic coverage of hostile territory. As tacitly stated by retired SR-71 RSO Richard Sheffield:

‘Satellites could never replace the SR-71. They don’t orbit east to west. Satellites can’t collect 100,000 miles of data per hour and it is easy to predict the path of a satellite. There was new money for projects in the Air Force if they went with satellites so they did. The Air Force Chief put Lockheed out of the SR-71 business. The Chief said that Lockheed trying to keep the SR-71 alive was going to hurt their chances of winning the F-22 contract [at the time the YF-22 was competing against the YF-23 in the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program]! Contractors like Lockheed only have one customer the Department of Defense.

The SR-71 undoubtedly was expensive to maintain and operate, partly with respect to the fact that it took time for images of enemy territory to be processed from the film cameras carried by the Blackbird, even though it was cheaper to operate than a single spy satellite launch in the 1980s. In a testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 15, 1993, Defense Department official Keith R. Hall said that the SR-71 was retired in March 1990 because a canceled CIA/NRO project for an unmanned long-endurance strategic reconnaissance flying wing, codenamed Quartz by the CIA, had a real-time satellite data link to provide images to field commanders, something the SR-71 lacked when it was retired in March 1990. 

While there’s no doubt that rumors about the USAF operating a hypersonic spyplane in the early 1990s were debunked or totally dismissed as being unconvincing because of the immaturity of hypersonic air-breathing technology but also the reactivation of the SR-71 in 1995, Lockheed did undertake design studies for a hypersonic follow-on to the SR-71 in the late 1970s and 1980s, including the methane-fueled Mach 5 Penetrator. It is worth noting that General Dynamics Convair Fort Worth and McDonnell worked on design studies for a hypersonic successor to the U-2 and Archangel-12 in the 1960s under the auspices of the CIA program Isinglass (which also included Rheinberry), including the McDonnell Model 192 boost-glide air-launched spyplane that could fly at close to Mach 20. However, the Isinglass program was shelved on grounds of cost before any of the Isinglass/Rheinberry proposals could be built. 

As for the following statement:

A final note: AURORA is a name that has nothing to do with black aircraft. At least anymore. It was a code word used for a Lockheed ATB study, Northrop eventually winning the contract and making the B-2. People still use the word to reference a secret black aircraft, but if the “SR-72” is officially acknowledged, don’t expect it to be called “Aurora”.

When the codename Aurora appeared in a February 1985 Pentagon budget request, the press speculated at first that Aurora might have to do with the B-2 (still officially called ATB when the budget request was released) or the yet-to-be-declassified F-117. By the late 1980s, there were growing suggestions that Aurora might refer to an SR-71 replacement because the codename was mentioned next to a budget line-item for the U-2. The losing Lockheed ATB design was actually codenamed Senior Peg, and not only was the 1985 budget request mentioning Aurora released a few years after Northrop’s Senior Ice/Senior Cejay won the ATB competition in 1981, Ben Rich confirmed initial press speculation regarding the Aurora codename by mentioning in a 1994 memoir about his time as head of the Lockheed Skunk Works that Colonel Adelbert “Buz” Carpenter told him Aurora was related to the B-2, being applied to requested funds for B-2 program support/logistical, including test support infrastructure. Similarly, the codename Stingray was applied by Pentagon budget document drafters to funds for a USAF campaign to prepare Edwards Air Force Base for flight testing of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber in the future. Lockheed Martin unveiled the SR-72 hypersonic P-ISR aircraft concept for in 2013, but this proposal was not going to have a chance of receiving USAF funding given the need for bench tests of the air-breathing technology for the SR-72, itself an evolutionary derivative of the company’s Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle and Blackswift designs. 

Links:

https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/usaf-unit-moves-reveal-clues-rq-…

https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/secret-new-uas-shows-stealth-eff…

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA526045

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1985/02/09/23-billion-sought-for-aurora-pr…

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-02-09-fi-4198-story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/12/us/defense-department-seeks-more-mon…

https://news.usni.org/2013/11/05/lockheed-martin-sr-72-plane-paper