A feat of engineering for the history books. The fact that they were able to design and build it without modern computers makes it even more inspiring.
Like the moon landing.
Designed with slide rules
Drawn on vellum with pencil
Fabricated by high school graduates with manually controlled machine tools
The J-58 engines are mind bending. To think they were designed in the 50’s.....
Read recently they were being studied for newer applications.
Operated like a ramjet it high Mach and needed to be throttled back to avoid airframe over heating.
There certainly was some badass draftsman back in the day. I even did some compound trig on the drafting board a few times. A Smoley Parallel Tables of Logs and Squares and an Engineering handbook were our bibles.
My first drawing (grating for a platform) ever was a Mona Lisa, but my lettering looked like some retarded kid did it left handed. I did get much better at it though, lol.
They built the U2 in 18 months and with a slide rule.