<shrug>  the Aurora has been around for some time.  Photos of an alleged sighting (by my omniscient guess) were posted in the "Photos" section here.

My gut feeling is that the SR-71 would not have been "retired" if something better wasn't already either on the drawing board (CAD monitor?) or already in promising test flights.

To think that we were fascinated in the '60s by "spyplane shots" showing blurry finned cylinders alleged to be missles, and now we can download from the Internet photos that show the spacing of the ribs on my pool enclosure!

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Yes, along with missiles will end the need for manned interceptors and bombers, so we won't need the Advanced Lightning nor TSR.2, .....

I see that at a young age you're following K. Philby and Co.

It's likely there's something being designed. We havn't moved on at all. As felix said, it was thought that by the late 1960's UAV technology would be so advanced that manned aircraft would be obsolete, so the EE lightning was a 10 year stopgap model that went on to serve for 40 years because those who said it would become obsolete were wrong.

Good as satellites are you have to wait for them to go over the piece of ground you want to look at and they're a pain in the arse to move about off their orbits. There'll always be a use for Spyplanes and if the SR-71 has been retired then I'll be surprised if there isn't already something that's replaced it.

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The current US spyplanes are UAVs and the U-2. Satellites can actually be moved a lot quicker than most people think, and there are enough of them to have them just about anywhere you think something might happen. As the US CoS said - he is interested in one thing - it's called sensor to shooter time - and now they can do it darn quick. The target is to get it under 10 secs I think...

End of conspiracy theorys....

The funny one was the black tarpaulin at Boscombe Down in the mid nineties. Everyone say they'd see "a twinned tailed aircraft" or the "Aurora" crash on the airfield. When the black tarpaulin disappeared, there was the simulated moving deck, used for helicopter trials where it had been. Didn't stop the rumours though. Apparently secret stealth aircraft fly from there every week...

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sattelite paths are known... even when the things can manouver a little they usually are put in such a trajectory that they pass over a few hotspots (China &  CIS, CIS & DPRK, Libya + mideast)

The U2 is used for sigint or in situations where SAM is nonexistant (like in 1991) the thing can already break apart in normal flight quite easyly.

They de-mothballed the SR-71 for the beginning of gulf war #1, as they needed instant pictures of the area(probably not enough camera deflection on the satelite that monitors iran) and expected some resistance (SR-71 files higher and faster compared to the U2 and apart from a big SAM network, iraq had MiG-25P's)

Yes, but AFAIK they have one or two that can be made active on short notice.

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Isn't this what was said 40 years ago?