Why would the blackbird fly so high? I looked it up and it says they can fly up to 90,000ft.
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There were three main reasons. First, you simply can’t fly that fast unless you’re up high enough that there’s practically no air. Your aircraft would heat up and burn. Even so, they got pretty hot at 80,000 feet. Second, the SR-71 was faster than any missiles of the time, but if someone fired a missile in front of it, they still might hit it before it could turn away. At 90,000 feet (that’s 17 miles up), it was beyond the range of a lot of missiles, and even the few that might reach it were slow enough that they could turn and run away long before the missile reached them. Third, at 90,000 feet, the horizon is 368 miles away, so if you have the proper cameras, you can take pictures pretty far inside the Soviet Union without actually crossing into their airspace (or maybe just crossing over a little bit, due to “navigation errors.”)
That all combines to let you know the locations and capabilities of their aircraft and missiles, as they try intercept you. You can also see what kind of air defenses they’ve sold to places like Libya by watching what kind of missiles they fire at you as you fly past.
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