Aurora Sightings?

[Anomalocaris]

I have no personal knowledge of the Aurora, but I absolutely loved the SR-71. They used to fly them right over the Soviet Union, and by the time their air defense could respond, it was already gone. The firm top speed has never been declassified, but the Russians showed it as going above Mach 3. On the ground it didn't even look like it could fly, it tended to drip lubricant and the wings sagged a bit, but that was because it was so optimized for flight that that it was a completely different Blackbird in the air.

I think the mystique of the SR-71 is heavily overblown.    I believe the SR-71 was never actually flown OVER the Soviet Union because of high confidence even in the mid 1960s that once an SR-71 is actually over the multi-layered, heavily networked soviet ground air defense system, the soviet would be able to pass tracking and fire control information from ground node to ground node and be able to readily shoot it down by sending information ahead and engaging the SR-71 with missiles and interceptors from favorable angles. 

SR-71 ever only skirted the outer edge of the outer most layer of soviet air defense,  because this approach allows the SR-71 to only remain in the coverage of one of very few ground nodes in the soviet air defense, and the. Only briefly.  This does not give the soviets enough time to position interceptors, and not opportunity to coordinate SAM fire from different nodes, before the SR-71 leaves coverage zone and escapes. 

In the late 1980s, it became clear the new generation of soviet interceptors such as the MiG-31 no longer depended on ground tracking and control, and had the radar and computer power to search for targets and manage interception autonomously.  Once this happened, it became clear SR-71 won’t be safe even skirting the edge of the soviet air defense systems because the interceptors can range out independently of the ground system and create a serious danger zone for the SR-71 so far out beyond soviet borders that it can’t see anything inside the USSR.   I think that above all else was the reason why SR-71 was considered firmly obsolete by late 1980s.

The story of aurora is nonsense not because aviation technology stood still after SR-71.   It is nonsense because manned, ultra-high speed, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, glamorous as it is, is fundamentally hopelessly on the wrong side of a technological inequality between how easy it is to improve performance of missiles vs how easy it is to improve performance of aircraft.