NASA mysteriously trying to pull world’s fastest plane, SR-71 Blackbird, out of retirement — and won’t say why

Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.

nypost.com/2026/09/29/us-news/us-quietly-sr-71-blackbird-out-of-retirement-and-wont-say-why/

Something something moon landing something area 51.

NASA, the famously underfunded organization that has to deal with that crap even today is pulling out military stealth fighters.

It’s not a fighter, the SR71 is totally unarmed. The SR stands for Stealth Reconnaissance.

It was actually originally designed to have two different versions, one for each role. But the fighter version was scrapped, and only the recon version went into actual production.

Kind of a shame, really. It would make a really badass fighter. More of an ‘interceptor’ maybe? – because it’s definitely not going to be doing any dogfighting. Then again, maybe ‘interceptor’ isn’t the right word either, because it takes a long time to get one off the ground and you’d never be scrambling them in an emergency to intercept enemy planes. But once in the air and at speed, it would be able to outrun and catch any enemy plane, and it could be practically untouchable because it could simply outrun any missiles or even bullets fired at it.

It’s probably terrible at dogfights though.