In the pantheon of spy plane models, there is perhaps no aviation vehicle more renowned than Lockheed Martin’s SR-71. From its 1965 introduction to its 1998 retirement, the SR-71 collected a long list of impressive accomplishments, including speed records from trips from New York to London (an hour and 54 minutes), St. Louis, Missouri to Cincinnati, Ohio (8 minutes and 32 seconds), or Los Angeles to Washington D.C. (1 hour and 4 minutes). Despite the fact that the SR-71 hasn’t seen any use in 15 years, the plane still has a stranglehold on some of those records. It is, quite simply, a legend of the aviation world.

However, according to a new report from Aviation Week, Lockheed Martin may be poised to break its own speed records at long last. Lockheed has long been rumored to be at work on a successor to the legendary SR-71, but the news was finally confirmed this week. The working name of the plane is, appropriately, the SR-72, and early reports and conceptual drawings confirm that the plane will be similar to its predecessor in size and design. Still, the SR-72 will bring something new to the table: speeds that supposedly double those that the SR-71 was capable of reaching.

Whether the SR-72 will actually be able to make it from L.A. to D.C. in 32 minutes remains to be seen, but the plane’s Mach 6, hypersonic cruise speeds would handily outstrip the SR-71’s Mach 3 Supersonic speeds. It won’t be the first plane to make Mach 6 a possibility – the North American X-15 broke Mach 6 with a top speed of 4,520 mph – but since the North American was rocket powered and was used exclusively for research rather than military service, the SR-72 still  stands to be an aviation game changer.

Of course, Lockheed’s Mach 6 plane will take a good deal of work and testing before it is actually in the air trying to break the speed records of its successor. Lockheed isn’t using rocket power to reach hypersonic speeds and must instead rely on more traditional jet turbine engines to move well beyond the sound barrier. Since traditional turbines don’t do much good beyond Mach 2, Lockheed is working on blending traditional turbine performance (for lower speeds) with what is called “scramjet” (for higher speeds) to make high speeds possible. The scramjet can only be used at hypersonic speeds, so the plane essentially has to have two different engine sets to viably reach Mach 6 benchmarks.

Currently, Lockheed has an eye on 2023 for the first SR-72 flight tests, and 2030 for its entry into military service. In other words, the company isn’t looking to break any speed records in building and manufacturing.

Photo credit: Lockheed Martin