NASA has pulled SR-71A Tail No. 844 off its display pole at Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB and moved it into the former Space Shuttle hangar. Commercial satellite imagery acquired by Aviation Week confirms the aircraft was removed before May 17 and possibly before April. Agency employees are now working on the airframe inside the hangar, and NASA's newly hired special projects director David Ash — a former Navy and Joby test pilot brought on in June — has been recruiting retired SR-71A engineers to support a return-to-flight effort. The agency approached at least two former NASA SR-71A test engineers over the summer: Mike Relja and Tim Conners. Both confirmed the job offers to Aviation Week. Both declined. Relja, in his late 70s, told Ash plainly that the challenges seemed overwhelming. Conners said his first instinct was to "drop everything" but his second thought was "how in the world are they going to do it." Every objection Relja raised — water and sand in cavities, unlubricated engines sitting for 27 years, destroyed ground support equipment — was met by Ash with assurances that "engineering will take care of that." The obstacles are not trivial. The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the entire Blackbird fleet in 2007. The aircraft's unique JP-7 fuel blend, triethylborane ignition chemical, specialized engine oil, and hydraulic fluids are no longer in active supply chains. Bespoke ground equipment — wing carts, engine extraction rigs, spike-pulling tools, ejection seat equipment — no longer exists. When operational, spare engines required rotation every 90 days and a run every 180 days to maintain readiness. Tail No. 844's engines have sat untouched for nearly three decades. The first public signal came from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on September 12-14, where he teased an image showing the unmistakable SR-71A profile — inward-canted vertical tails, bulbous midwing engine nacelles, blended cockpit. "In the service of the first 'A' in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet," Isaacman said. "It will not be long before NASA is once again flying as high and as fast from decades past — and then even more." An agency spokesperson declined to elaborate or confirm the return-to-flight project exists. Conners identified a potential partial solution to the parts crisis: dozens of retired Blackbirds sit in flight museums across the U.S. and UK, nine of which flew to their final destinations with engines still installed. Those subsystems could theoretically be cannibalized. He also noted that the SR-71A's architecture was "as simple as they could make it" — Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works deliberately minimized electronic and subsystem complexity. Lockheed's operational manuals still exist and are, by Conners' assessment, superb. The pilot training gap may be manageable; NASA's test pilots in the early 1990s required minimal additional instruction when the agency received aircraft from the Air Force. The strategic logic appears to be Isaacman's broader campaign to reinvigorate NASA's aeronautics mission with a new stable of X-planes pursuing breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements. Whether a Mach 3-capable airframe from 1966 can actually serve that mission after 27 years of outdoor display, with no supply chain, no trained crews, and no ground equipment, remains the central question. Relja's summary captures the tension precisely: "If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen. They went to the Moon, you know." NASA has not confirmed the project's existence, its budget, or its timeline. The gap between Isaacman's ambition and the engineering reality described by the people who actually operated these aircraft is enormous. But the aircraft is off the pole and in the hangar, and people are working on it. That much is confirmed.
