Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. I don't know the details of stealth with the Blackbird. I imagine a big part of that was the height, the altitude, and the speed of it. It's not that, I don't think. It's more around the shape because radar will just go unimpeded out into space. There are famous stories about detecting where people's radar transmitters are by bouncing them off the moon, and figuring out the patterns of bouncing off the moon. It's more, I think, that the SR-71's bottom was one of the first airplanes with a flat bottom rather than a rounded fuselage. Imagine I'm shooting a set of waves at a round sphere in front of me. Some of those waves are going to bounce back because some of that sphere is exactly perpendicular to me broadcasting it. There's one particular point that's exactly perpendicular, and I can tell the radius of the thing by how I'm detecting waves that are bouncing back at me. If it's all flat, there's only one very specific angle for which I can shoot waves at it, where I'm perfectly perpendicular, and every other angle that I shoot radar at it, it's going to bounce off and not come back to me as a transmitter. You'd need transmitters coding all over the earth to figure out where all those waves are bouncing. By making the bottom flat, they made it so that if it was truly flat, then there's only one exact moment in time that a given radar transmitter is useful. They also did a whole bunch of work around making the rivets exactly flush with the skin. It basically didn't have a whole bunch of rounded parts that could risk bouncing radar waves back at the transmitter or receiver. Super cool. Keep in mind for a minute from now that idea of flat surfaces, planes and radar. Planes not airplanes.Planes like a flat plane, and surfaces. To close out on this amazing airplane, amazing and sad in a lot of ways, it's hugely expensive to build these things. $33 million per plane, which was a lot back then. Planes now cost more, but a lot. As I said, $300 million a year just to keep them operational and run the program. You couldn't use it as a fighter or a bomber, it was only reconnaissance. It's not super popular with the military and the Air Force. They don't like it as an operational plane.…

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