Posted on 02/05/2005 3:15:15 PM PST by Indy Pendance
Edited on 02/05/2005 3:17:49 PM PST by Lead Moderator. [history]
The coolest spy plane ever built, SR-71. I was watching Modern Marvels on the History channel last night. This aircraft broke all kinds of international speed and altitude records which still have not been beaten today. It was nothing for them to fly at 80,000 feet and it was a piece of cake to fly at about mach 3, or about 2100 mph. For those of you old enough, remember the sonic boom days? About 750 miles would create a sonic boom, or a doppler effect.
Here's the question, this plane was so fast, it was faster than the earth's rotation. What would happen with time over a long sustainable period of flying time? If it goes faster than the earth's rotation long enough, will it be ahead of time when it lands, or likewise in the opposite direction, will it go back in time. Do you think Einstein has an answer? Saturday night ponderings.
I'd give my right arm to fly in one of those.
Maybe.
There is no SR-71 in the Museum of Flight, Seattle. The aircraft is an M-21. The M-21 is a variant of the A-12.
yessssssssssssss
Freiden calculators - I assume those were the mechanical calculators to get more than 3 significant digits. Those things were a little before my time. 1971 was when I was taking high school chemistry, and started using a slide rule. Around 1972 was the HP-35 calculator (electronic)
The altitude record is held by the Russians. The aircraft is the Mikoyan E-266. For 'E-266' think MiG-25 FOXBAT.
I did not know that. Let me be the first to say the airframes are similarly shaped...:-)
The mechanical calculators didn't know they couldn't divide by zero, and would give a sustained effort if sent down that path. It used to be funny. :-)
Ye gods, Hollywood can't grasp Newton! But just to give you a sense of the thing, at 1/2 the speed of light time slows, length shrinks and mass increases only by about 15%. At 1/10 the speed of light (fast enough to get you to the moon and back in thirty seconds WITH a change of planes at Atlanta), the changes are about 1/2 of one percent.
In my opinion the SR-71's predecessor, the U2, probably saved us from direct war with Russia. It was able to determine that the USSR's nuclear capability was far behind ours (at the time) and thus we were able to restrain ourselves in Berlin, Cuba, etc.
"Did your dad work at the Skunk works? "
he did indeed , we lived in Burbank ,
and he was gone alot....
More rank than you I suppose. I hope you are not going to make the sign on date an issue, that's really dumb to do. In the real freeper world, that troll stuff is so idiotic. We respect people, not the date they joined, because I became a freeper in 1998, joined in 2000. Plus, I'm years ahead of you in that respect anyway. Don't go there, it's not revelant to what you know.
The CIA and Lockheed Martin were just go-getters in those days. I wonder if our government could accomplish something like that today. The U2 went from green light to test flights in less than a year, if I recall correctly.
Really. Didn't know that.
In Dick Helms autobiography, he describes standing on the runway at a "secret airbase" (Area 51 at Groom Lake I guess) when they lit off both engines to take off. He said it made him jump about 6 feet.
Excellent, where did you get those stats from? I'm just curious. Thanks
Here's the question, this plane was so fast, it was faster than the earth's rotation. What would happen with time over a long sustainable period of flying time? If it goes faster than the earth's rotation long enough, will it be ahead of time when it lands, or likewise in the opposite direction, will it go back in time. Do you think Einstein has an answer?
And later added:
I'm a degreed engineer with an MBA.
Um, dude, either you are pulling our collective legs (like that 'Gosh, how do humans survive outside NYC?' post by LauraLeeBirdbrain about a week ago), or you really ought go back to your engineering school and demand a refund.
One of the things I did notice early on about the HP-35 (with the "Reverse Polish Notation") was that the stack math used was an early introduction to microprocessor operation.
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