Objects of my Life: SR-71

Sr-71, originally uploaded by Andres Kütt.

Read about it in the book "Skunk works". The story goes that after developing the U2 surveillance plane, the people behind it realized that at some point Russians are going to develop a way to shoot it down. And then they would need to build better plane and the Russians are going to develop a better weapon and so forth. The only way to succeed, they decided, was not to take one but _two_ steps at a time. So they went and built a plane that is still to surpassed.

The attitude behind it and the way it was built in record time have always impressed me deeply.

Got this model from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.