Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
American SR-72 Darkstar Is FINALLY Taking Flight!
The whispers have turned into screams — the SR-72 is here. It’s been here all along, hidden in front of our very eyes. Darkstar, a dark, mean, hypersonic jet that took Tom Cruise around the world in the Top Gun movie sequel, was in fact designed and built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Division — the same division that builds virtually every groundbreaking aircraft of the company — the F-117 Nighthawk and F-22 Raptor for instance. The Darkstar’s Lockheed Martin ancestry isn’t much of a secret — there’s an entire webpage of the aircraft on Lockheed Martin’s official website. But what’s a lot less known is that the Darkstar shares many outward visual similarities with an unmanned hypersonic design that the company publicly pitched to the US Military in the past — an aircraft known as SR-72.
John Neilson, Lockheed Martin’s Director of Communications for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, had also made a post on Twitter, now X, implying that Darkstar could offer a sneak peek at what might be the Lockheed Martin SR-72. The SR-72 earns its name from being the spiritual successor to the one American jet the Soviet Union could not stop, the fastest, highest flying jet in history — the SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-72 Darkstar aims to be even more unstoppable — a sleep-depriving nightmare for rivals of the United States. So while Top Gun 2 is officially over, we’ll still live in a world ruled by hypersonic jets like the Darkstar and SR-72.
American SR-72 Darkstar Is FINALLY Taking Flight!
The whispers have turned into screams — the SR-72 is here. It’s been here all along, hidden in front of our very eyes. Darkstar, a dark, mean, hypersonic jet that took Tom Cruise around the world in the Top Gun movie sequel, was in fact designed and built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Division — the same division that builds virtually every groundbreaking aircraft of the company — the F-117 Nighthawk and F-22 Raptor for instance. The Darkstar’s Lockheed Martin ancestry isn’t much of a secret — there’s an entire webpage of the aircraft on Lockheed Martin’s official website. But what’s a lot less known is that the Darkstar shares many outward visual similarities with an unmanned hypersonic design that the company publicly pitched to the US Military in the past — an aircraft known as SR-72.
John Neilson, Lockheed Martin’s Director of Communications for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, had also made a post on Twitter, now X, implying that Darkstar could offer a sneak peek at what might be the Lockheed Martin SR-72. The SR-72 earns its name from being the spiritual successor to the one American jet the Soviet Union could not stop, the fastest, highest flying jet in history — the SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-72 Darkstar aims to be even more unstoppable — a sleep-depriving nightmare for rivals of the United States. So while Top Gun 2 is officially over, we’ll still live in a world ruled by hypersonic jets like the Darkstar and SR-72.
