this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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I was worried at first, why do they need that right now? But looking over the specs, this would be like taking a classic corvette to a bank robbery. So this is for sure for show and possibly to add more sensors to record data they couldn't previously record. Me thinks they want to make another that could maybe go to space proper and deploy something.
This is pure speculation, I'm not an expert.
Whenever nasa's involved it's always something to do with airflow dynamics or something. If it was the US military I would assume that though.
We know that NASA is doing research on both supersonic and hypersonic airflow. There are extremely few existing aircraft they could use for hypersonic testing
I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to use it to concept test something related to aero for the x-37
To speculate further, the stated reason for attacking Iran was nuclear weapon development. Perhaps there are sensors to track that, that can’t operate from satellite
If it were about Iranian nuclear weapon development, it wouldn't be NASA doing the surveillance. Although weather phenomena is in NASA's purview.
We already had high confidence intel before the war Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But since then, Trump has expressed that a nuke is the only thing he would respect.
If there were, they'd probably be on the U-2.