Re-orienting a spy satellite is no small matter. These immensely expensive orbital platforms can only carry a limited amount of fuel onboard and there is currently no way to refuel them in orbit. This means that any time a satellite is forced to expend fuel to adjust its orbit or orientation, it directly shortens its operational lifespan.

If Bruckheimer’s story is true, it seems unlikely China would sacrifice the precious fuel of a high-end spy satellite over a movie they already knew was in development.

But, China may have been willing to expend some valuable fuel to get a peek at a real aircraft that its intelligence apparatus already knew was in development or testing… Maybe even one that bore a striking resemblance to the Darkstar itself. 

Top Gun: Maverick began filming in May of 2018 – eight months after witnesses first reported seeing an SR-72 demonstrator flying over Palmdale, four months after Lockheed Martin executive Jack O’Banion said their SR-72 FRV was flying, and just two months after the program went dark.

LOCKHEED MARTIN USES DARKSTAR TO NOT-SO-SUBTLY HINT AT REAL CAPABILITIES

To be clear, Bruckheimer’s spy satellite claim may have been a bit of creative storytelling meant to sell the movie to airplane nerds like us, but claims about the realism depicted by the Darkstar were not limited to Hollywood. Lockheed Martin soon rolled out a marketing campaign of its own that was ripe with not-so-subtle hints about just how feasible the technology might be. 

On March 12, 2023, Lockheed Martin tweeted an image of the SR-71 in a hangar along with a caption that said, “The SR-71 Blackbird is still the fastest acknowledged crewed air-breathing jet aircraft.”

The word acknowledged stands out for good reason, as it suggests there may be faster record-holders that have yet to be disclosed to the public. Things got even juicer when Lockheed Martin put out a press release that said this:

“With the Skunk Works expertise in developing the fastest known aircraft combined with a passion and energy for defining the future of aerospace, Darkstar’s capabilities could be more than mere fiction. They could be reality…”

It was evident that Lockheed Martin was not shying away from comparisons between Top Gun’s Darkstar and its own SR-72 program, though, to this day, there is still not a single mention of the SR-72 anywhere on their website, even amid the flurry of Darkstar-related promotional materials. 

In another statement that has since been removed from Lockheed Martin’s Darkstar materials, the company seemed to even say the quiet part out loud:

“Darkstar may not be real, but its capabilities are. Hypersonic technology, or the ability to travel at 60 miles per minute or faster, is a capability our team continues to advance today by leveraging more than 30 years of hypersonic investments and development and testing experience.”

And this brings us up to the present day, and the recent claims made by Vago Muradian. In a future article, Sandboxx News will compare what we learned from this timeline to Muradian’s comments and other known technological breakthroughs, before drawing our conclusion.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.