🚀 NASA is asking former employees to help it restore the Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird who last flew in 1999.

Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago.

Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight.

“I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”

It appears NASA is going to try.

At some point early this year—certainly before May 17 and perhaps even before April, according to commercial satellite imagery acquired by Aviation Week—agency employees removed the SR-71A with Tail No. 844 from a display pole near the corners of Lilly and Walker Avenues at the Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB, California.

That SR-71A had stood there since about Oct. 9, 1999, the day that marked the final flight of No. 844—and of any Blackbird. NASA employees rolled the SR-71A into the hangar that once housed the Space Shuttle at Edwards, Relja says. An inspection of the aircraft followed. By the time Ash extended the job offer to Relja in August, NASA had crews working on the SR-71A inside the hangar.

“I do know they’ve got people working on it,” Relja says. “But again, without equipment, it’s beyond me what they’re doing.”

The first public hint that a return to flight for the SR-71A was brewing came at the exclusive All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Sept. 12-14. On stage as a panelist, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman teased an image of a new X-plane, revealing the famous outline of the SR-71A’s inward-canted vertical tails, bulbous midwing engine nacelles and flush and blended cockpit. The image prompted speculation that NASA is planning to create a modern X-plane based at least loosely on the Blackbird’s distinctive profile.

Retired NASA employees tell a different story. Aviation Week confirmed that the agency approached Relja, Tim Conners, another former NASA SR-71A test engineer and others over the summer with job offers to work on the return-to-flight project for Tail No. 844.

In meetings with the prospective rehires, Ash brushed aside all questions about why NASA wanted to go to the effort and expense of putting the Mach 3-capable SR-71A back in flight.

During his remarks at the All-in Summit, Isaacman provided some context for NASA’s overall campaign to reinvigorate the agency’s aeronautics research mission with a new stable of X-planes pursuing breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements over the state of the art.

“In the service of the first ‘A’ in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet,” Isaacman said. “It will not be long before NASA is once again flying as high and as fast from decades past—and then even more.”

🔗 https://aviationweek.com/defense/aircraft-propulsion/nasa-asked-several-former-sr-71a-staffers-help-secret-restart