Boeing and Lockheed Martin have announced that they will team up to compete on the US Air Force’s Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) programme, which is likely to involve some 80-100 ‘very stealthy’ long-range bombers for the Air Force, with an initial operational capability in 2024-26, and with a unit cost ceiling of $550 million.
Called the SR-72, the prototype/demonstrator aircraft is under construction at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in the USA and is envisioned as an unmanned aircraft. It will fly at speeds up to Mach 6. Dubbed ‘son of Blackbird’, it is being developed at the birthplace of the SR-71 Blackbird, which reached Mach 3 in 1976 with a crew of two, flying from New York to London in less than 2hr.
Brad Leland, Lockheed Martin Hypersonics programme manager, said: “Hypersonic aircraft — coupled with hypersonic missiles — could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour. Speed is the next advance in aviation to counter emerging threats in the next several decades. The technology would be a game-changer in much the same way that ‘stealth’ is today.”
For the past few years, Lockheed Martin has been working with Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop a method to integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a supersonic combustion ram-jet ‘air breathing’ jet engine to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6. Air Force officials say they expect the aircraft to be operational by the mid-2020s. Details of the programme are classified.