Video Above: New Army-Raytheon Radar Can Track and Destroy Maneuvering Cruise Missiles
By Steve Weintz,War Is Boring
In late 1964, China detonated its first nuclear weapon and joined the front ranks of world powers. But the CIA had few ways of peering into the Middle Kingdom. Human intelligence was very limited and the shoot-down of a U-2 over the USSR in 1960 demonstrated the need for better spy planes.
This piece originally appeared in 2013.
Lockheed’s Skunk Works was hard at work developing the U-2?s successor, the legendary SR-71, and its chief, Kelly Johnson, had given much thought to the problem.
His solution? The first near-hypersonic drone.
The D-21 was a Mach-3 drone that shared a lot of technology and design with the SR-71. It was designed to be launched from a carrier aircraft at high speed, sprint over foreign territory with a camera, return to international airspace and eject its film pod for aerial recovery.
