If you can make it to Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California Oct. 14 -16 this is the first time in 13 years Edwards has opened its gates!
The Navy apparently told Top Gun’s producer, legendary filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer, that China re-oriented spy satellites to get a glimpse of the full-size mock-up they built for filming. Darkstar bears a striking resemblance to artist renderings of Lockheed Martin’s long-awaited follow-up to the SR-71 Blackbird, the hypersonic SR-72. As it turns out, that may not have been by happenstance. According to Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinski, the film’s director, they actually worked with engineers out of Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works on the design.
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works will put a secret hypersonic airplane on static display at the Edwards Air Force Base airshow from October 14 to 16.. It is the Darkstar full-scale model that is featured in the opening scenes of this year’s hit movie “Top Gun: Maverick.”
The exhibit looks set to be the main attraction, at least on the first day of the show, when some 12,000 students from high schools in the region will attend. Lockheed and the show organizers hope that it will stimulate interest in aerospace careers.
Skunk Works is currently on a hiring drive, having secured multiple, mostly classified contracts from the Pentagon over the past few years. Last year, it opened a new 215,000-sq-ft advanced manufacturing facility at its Palmdale headquarters.
“Darkstar may not be real, but its capabilities are. Hypersonic technology is a capability our team continues to advance today by leveraging more than 30 years of hypersonic investments and development and testing experience,” Skunk Works said when the movie debuted in April.
Rumor and speculation about such developments at Palmdale, California, have circulated for years. First it was the “Aurora” and later the “SR-72.”
Meanwhile, the locally-based Flight Test Museum Foundation (FTMF) will be celebrating the raising of the roof on the new building that it is constructing just outside the main gate at Edwards. The building will replace a smaller museum inside the base that was closed to non-military visitors some years ago for security reasons. So happy to read about the raising of
the roof on what will be a fabulous museum right outside of Edwards Air Force Base open to the public. This is a move that is positive for the Blackbird family~ posted by Linda Sheffield-Miller
