Lockheed Martin is developing a hypersonic spy plane, called the SR-72, that will be able to fly at Mach 6, or six times the speed of sound. 
 
 A new hypersonic spy plane, capable of flying up to six times faster than the speed of sound, is being developed by aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp., according to company officials. 
 
 The new aircraft, known as the SR-72, is the unmanned successor to Lockheed's SR-71 Blackbird, a twin-engine, two-seater, supersonic aircraft that was developed in the 1960s. The company's new spy plane will be able to fly twice as fast as the Blackbird and three times faster than current fighter jets, accelerating to Mach 6, which is six times the speed of sound, or more than 3,500 mph (5,600 km/h). 
 
 The hypersonic SR-72 also will be able to fly to any location within an hour, which could be revolutionary for the military, said Brad Leland, Lockheed Martin's program manager for hypersonics. [In Photos: The 10 Fastest Military Airplanes] 
 
 "Hypersonic is the new stealth," Leland told Reuters. "Your adversaries cannot hide or move their critical assets. They will be found. That becomes a game-changer." 
 
 Furthermore, Lockheed is designing the spy plane using existing technology, which could help the company develop a prototype in five or six years for under $1 billion, he added. 
 
 Lockheed is aiming to fly a missile to demonstrate the new technology as early as 2018, and Leland said operational SR-72s could be in service by 2030, according to Aviation Week, which was first to report on the new project. 
 
 "What we are doing is defining a missile that would have a small incremental cost to go at hypersonic speed," Leland told Reuters. 
 
 The SR-72 is being developed by Skunk Works, Lockheed's California-based advanced research program that previously worked on the SR-71 Blackbird and the famed U-2 spy plane. 
 
 The hypersonic SR-72 will feature a two-phase propulsion system, which uses a basic jet turbine to accelerate the plane to Mach 3. Lockheed is collaborating with rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne to incorporate this turbine with an air-breathing, supersonic ramjet engine to propel the vehicle from standstill to Mach 6. 
 
 The new spy plane will build upon Lockheed's previous experimental hypersonic programs, such as the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, or HTV-2, which was developed as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Falcon Project. 
 
 In 2011, the unmanned, arrow-shaped HTV-2 glider reached Mach 20 and controlled itself for approximately three minutes, before crashing into the Pacific Ocean. During the flight, surface temperatures on the vehicle reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,930 degrees Celsius), which is hotter than a blast furnace capable of melting steel. 
 
 The SR-72's predecessor, the SR-71 Blackbird, could accelerate to Mach 3.3 (more than 2,200 mph, or 3,540 km/h) at an altitude of 80,000 feet (24,400 m). The Blackbird made its first flight in December 1964, and was flown by the U.S. Air Force until 1998. The two-seater aircraft was capable of outracing potential threats during reconnaissance missions, including being able to accelerate and out-fly surface-to-air missiles if it was detected. 
 
 Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience. ||||| Lockheed Martin's planned SR-72 twin-engine jet aircraft is seen in this artist's rendering provided to Reuters November 1, 2013 by Lockheed Martin. 
 
 WASHINGTON Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) unveiled plans on Friday for a hypersonic spy plane that could fly at Mach 6, twice as fast as its famed SR-71 Blackbird, and said a missile demonstrating the new technology could fly as early as 2018. 
 
 Brad Leland, the Lockheed engineer who has headed the seven-year research effort, said the new aircraft, dubbed the SR-72, was designed using off-the-shelf materials to keep it affordable in the current tough budget environment. 
 
 He said the new plane offered game-changing capabilities to the military - and a twin-engine demonstrator jet that could reach any target in an hour could be developed for under $1 billion in five to six years. 
 
 "Hypersonic is the new stealth," Leland told Reuters in an interview. "Your adversaries cannot hide or move their critical assets. They will be found. That becomes a game-changer." 
 
 The new aircraft would travel three times as fast as current fighter jets, which can reach speeds of Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, and it could be outfitted with light weapons to strike targets. 
 
 Aviation Week first reported Lockheed's work on the project earlier on Friday in a cover article entitled "Son of Blackbird." Lockheed developed the supersonic SR-71 Blackbird, a long-range manned spy plane, 50 years ago. A few of those planes remained in service until 1999. 
 
 Details of the new hypersonic spy plane project emerged days after Lockheed, the Pentagon's biggest supplier, teamed up with No. 2 supplier Boeing Co (BA.N) to develop a bid for the Pentagon's new long-range bomber. 
 
 Lockheed, Boeing and other big weapons makers are pressing the Pentagon to continue funding new aircraft development programs despite big cuts in military spending, arguing that a retreat from such projects could undercut U.S. military superiority in years to come. 
 
 Leland, who works for Lockheed's Skunk Works advanced development arm, said missiles based on the new technology could be ready for operational use in 2020, at a cost only slightly more than the current Tomahawk or JASSM missiles. 
 
 Lockheed declined to say how much it had invested in the SR-72 project to date, or what the new airplane might cost if it is ever built. But it said it had tried to keep the current tight budget environment in mind while working on the project. 
 
 "What we are doing is defining a missile that would have a small incremental cost to go at hypersonic speed," Leland said. He said about 20 Lockheed employees had worked on the project. 
 
 One key factor in keeping the new project affordable was a decision to limit speed to Mach 6, rather than reaching for higher speeds that would require more expensive materials such as those used on the space shuttle, Leland said. 
 
 He said top Pentagon officials had been briefed on the program's progress and they were very interested in the new technology as a possible way to counter work by potential adversaries on technologies that could detect stealth aircraft. 
 
 He said the company and its partners had developed and tested key components of the proposed new aircraft using their own internal research funding, but the program needed additional funds to move ahead with larger-scale demonstrations of the technologies involved. 
 
 Rob Stallard, analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said in a note on Friday that the new aircraft could help the U.S. military quickly identify or hit targets that were intentionally hidden or protected by an enemy's air defenses. He said the previous SR-71 was "the coolest airplane ever made, rivaled only by fictional aircraft." 
 
 Leland said Lockheed had worked closely with Aerojet Rocketdyne, a unit of GenCorp Inc GY.N, to develop a propulsion system for the new aircraft, which uses an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet engine to reach the hypersonic speeds. 
 
 The project builds on HTV-3X, an earlier hypersonic project funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that was canceled in 2008 after its turbojet engines were found not ready for further development. 
 
 (Editing by Matthew Lewis) ||||| November 01, 2013 
 
 
 
 Ever since Lockheed’s unsurpassed SR-71 Blackbird was retired from U.S. Air Force service almost two decades ago, the perennial question has been: Will it ever be succeeded by a new-generation, higher-speed aircraft and, if so, when? 
 
 That is, until now. After years of silence on the subject, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has revealed exclusively to AW&ST details of long-running plans for what it describes as an affordable hypersonic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike platform that could enter development in demonstrator form as soon as 2018. Dubbed the SR-72, the twin-engine aircraft is designed for a Mach 6 cruise, around twice the speed of its forebear, and will have the optional capability to strike targets. 
 
 Guided by the U.S. Air Force’s long-term hypersonic road map, the SR-72 is designed to fill what are perceived by defense planners as growing gaps in coverage of fast-reaction intelligence by the plethora of satellites, subsonic manned and unmanned platforms meant to replace the SR-71. Potentially dangerous and increasingly mobile threats are emerging in areas of denied or contested airspace, in countries with sophisticated air defenses and detailed knowledge of satellite movements. 
 
 A vehicle penetrating at high altitude and Mach 6, a speed viewed by Lockheed Martin as the “sweet spot” for practical air-breathing hypersonics, is expected to survive where even stealthy, advanced subsonic or supersonic aircraft and unmanned vehicles might not. Moreover, an armed ISR platform would also have the ability to strike targets before they could hide. 
 
 Although there has been evidence to suggest that work on various classified successors to the SR-71, or some of its roles, has been attempted, none of the tantalizing signs have materialized into anything substantial. Outside of the black world, this has always been relatively easy to explain. Though few question the compelling military imperative for high speed ISR capability, the astronomical development costs have made the notion a virtual nonstarter. 
 
 But now Lockheed Martin believes it has the answer. “The Skunk Works has been working with Aerojet Rocketdyne for the past seven years to develop a method to integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6 plus,” says Brad Leland, portfolio manager for air-breathing hypersonic technologies. “Our approach builds on HTV-3X, but this extends a lot beyond that and addresses the one key technical issue that remained on that program: the high-speed turbine engine,” he adds, referring to the U.S. Air Force/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) reusable hypersonic demonstrator canceled in 2008. 
 
 The concept of a reusable hypersonic vehicle was an outgrowth of Darpa’s Falcon program, which included development of small launch vehicles, common aero vehicles (CAV) and a hypersonic cruise vehicle (HCV). As structural and aerodynamic technologies for both the CAV and HCV needed testing, Lockheed Martin was funded to develop a series of unpowered hypersonic test vehicles (HTV). 
 
 In the midst of these developments, as part of a refocus on space in 2004, NASA canceled almost all hypersonic research, including work on the X-43C combined-cycle propulsion demonstrator. The Darpa HTV effort was therefore extended to include a third HTV, the powered HTV-3X, which was to take off from a runway on turbojet power, accelerate to Mach 6 using a scramjet and return to land. 
 
 Despite never progressing to what Leland describes as a planned -HTV-3X follow-on demonstrator that “never was,” called the Blackswift, the conceptual design work led to “several key accomplishments which we didn’t advertise too much,” he notes. “It produced an aircraft configuration that could controllably take off, accelerate through subsonic, supersonic, transonic and hypersonic speeds. It was controllable and kept the pointy end forward,” adds Leland.
– Lockheed Martin is working on an unmanned spy plane that can travel at six times the speed of sound—meaning that no matter where it needs to go, it can be there in an hour, LiveScience reports. The SR-72, under development in California, is a follow-up to the SR-71 Blackbird, developed in the 1960s and used by the US Air Force until 1998. At mach 6—some 3,500mph—the upcoming plane will go twice as fast as its predecessor, and three times as fast as today's fighter jets. "Hypersonic is the new stealth," Lockheed engineer Brad Leland tells Reuters. "Your adversaries cannot hide or move their critical assets. They will be found. That becomes a game-changer." A missile showing off the technology could be ready in five or six years, at a cost of less than $1 billion, he says. But the plane itself will take a little longer. It could be ready for service by 2030, notes Aviation Week via LiveScience.