SR-72 Darkstar, the fictional secret hypersonic jet from the hotly anticipated new Top Gun: Maverick film, might just be a whole lot more realistic than we previously thought. The chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, James Taiclet, has confirmed that the company's legendary Skunk Works advanced projects division worked with the producers of the movie and helped create the fictional design. Taiclet said that members of the Skunk Works team had “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen” before referencing “critical work in hypersonic flight.”
That admission follows a previous Tweet by a Lockheed Martin executive, John Neilson, the Director of Communications, in which he pointed to rumors that the fictional jet could provide a “sneaky peak at what might be the Lockheed Martin SR-72.” The SR-72 concept proposes an unmanned reusable hypersonic military aircraft that would be capable of carrying out intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as strike missions. The SR-72 has already been widely speculated to be the inspiration for Darkstar. Like conceptual artworks of the SR-72. One difference compared to the SR-72 concepts is the Darkstar’s two inward-canted tail fins.
In addition, the cockpit configuration of the fictional aircraft notably features zero forward visibility, something that we've also seen on the real X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology aircraft, or QueSST, which Skunk Works is building for NASA. Once again, the SR-72 would be unmanned, but a demonstrator of its high-speed technologies would be manned.
The name is also a tell. Darkstar is already part of the Skunk Works legacy. The name was assigned to the short-lived RQ-3 Darkstar low-observable reconnaissance drone. That program was canceled in the late 1990s with its technologies migrating 'into the black' and influencing a number of programs. More sensationally, Hollings also writes that Bruckheimer claims the U.S. Navy told him “China reoriented a spy satellite to get pics of [SR-72 Darkstar], thinking it was a real experimental aircraft.” The claim that a Darkstar mock-up alerted Chinese intelligence agencies, prompting them to task their spy satellites to get a better look at it, seems a bit more fanciful, although it's possible? We don't really know what kind of mockup was used, although most of the imagery we have seen of Darkstar appears to be largely CGI rendered.
Looking back in history, the cockpit mock-up of the B-52 strategic bomber used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy movie. Regardless, having Lockheed Martin involved in creating a fictional hypersonic aircraft concept shouldn’t be entirely surprising, if only from a public relations point of view. After all, despite the cloak of secrecy surrounding Skunk Works designs, the SR-72 concept has, in the past, been the subject of unusually public pitching by Lockheed and has fueled much speculation. The big question that we have is if there is something else going on here? The Skunk Works was very hard to pin down regarding its involvement in Darkstar and there are rumors floating around that this aircraft maybe a little less fictional than we are made to believe, at least at this very moment. We will stay on the story, but for now, enjoy a long-awaited quenching of your "need for speed."
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