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NASA's X-43A Vehicle Ready for Flight
Aielman writes "NASA has set March 27 as the date for testing the X-43A vehicle over a Navy range in the Pacific. It will be testing a non-rocket air breathing scramjet engine at approximately 5,000 mph. This is the second attempt, the first ending in intentional destruction due to course deviations shortly after launch."
How fast would that cross the horizon?
More than enough BS
(all from guinnessworldrecords.com)
:)
Fastest Winged Aircraft
On October 3, 1967, an X-15A-2 piloted by USAF Major William J. "Pete" Knight, was released from its B-52 mother plane at 10,668 m. (35,000 ft.) above the Mojave Desert where it achieved an absolute speed record of Mach 6.7. (4,520 mph)
Fastest Airliner
The Tupolev Tu-144, first flown on December 31, 1968, was reported to have reached Mach 2.4, or 2,587 km/h (1,600 mph), but normal cruising speed was Mach 2.2. The Tupolev TU-144, which Nato codenamed 'Charger', was built as a competitor to the British and French Concorde supersonic jetliner, however one of the aircraft crashed during a presentation at the Paris Air Show in 1973.
Fastest Biplane
The fastest biplane was the Italian Fiat CR42B. The plane had a 1,100-hp (753-kw) Daimler-Benz DB601A engine, which propelled the craft to speeds of 520 km/h (323 mph) in 1941. Although only a single CR42B prototype was built, 1,780 of the CR42B Falco were produced. It proved invaluable to the Italian Air Force in World War II.
I realize this last one isn't about speed, i just thought it was cool
Longest Paper Airplane Flight
The level flight duration record for a hand-launched paper airplane is 27.6 sec., by Ken Blackburn of the USA, at the Georgia Dome, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, on October 8, 1998.
The BOMARC was a early ramjet-powered missle from 60s. You can see one in Dayton Ohio at the Wright-Patterson Air Forcebase Museum. One can walk up to the BOMARC and look up inside the ram jets which are nothing more than a hollow tube with a grid of fuel injection nozzles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
... but why weren't we doing this 40+ years ago? The X-43 seems to me like a logical evolution of the X-15, which is the kind of thing we should have been working on all this time. Big dumb one-shot boosters to get heavy materials that we never intend to bring back down into space, combined with winged air-launched reusable vehicles for carrying people, instead of hybrids like the Saturn V and the Shuttle ... it seems so obvious, now that we've had decades of a space program which now can't even reliably get people into and out of LEO.
I'd like to think that we will, in the next decade, see a manned descendant of the X-43 which will use scramjets to achieve orbital velocities and rockets for maneuvering in orbit, and will provide human transportation to/from LEO orders of magnitude cheaper than the Shuttle. It's certainly technically possible. But I'm not holding my breath.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I started wondering about how fast 5000 mph really is. From simple math, thatt's 1.38 miles per second. That is, in fact, faster than the fastest speeding bullet (how fast is a speeding bullet?) So what could you do with a vehicle that fast?
Well, my commute (from Brooklyn to Manhattan) takes 35 minutes to go 7.63 miles. I could cut that commute by 34 minutes and 54 seconds. On the other hand, if I didn't mind the commute but wanted to live a little further out from the city, I could live in Los Angeles - my commute to Manhattan would still be just 33 minutes.
Segway, shmegway! I want a personal scram jet!
This link provides some more information on the project.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Now, if we can just combine cryogenics with our ramjets, perhaps we can finally make it out of the Slow Zone to the edge of the Lower Beyond...
This is the second flight in the X-43A project. On June 2, 2001, the first X-43A vehicle was lost moments after release from the B-52. Following booster ignition, the vehicle deviated from its flight path and was deliberately destroyed. The mishap investigation concluded there was no single contributing factor, but the root cause of the problem was identified as the control system of the booster --NASA
The first X-43A flight ended in failure June 2, 2001, after the modified Pegasus rocket that carried the plane veered off course and was detonated. --WFTV
I wonder how this flight will pan out?
I had paper planes flying longer than that when I was a kid and lived in Ukraine. They would get caught in an updraft of a 10-story building and soar really high and take a while to come back to the ground... probably a minute at least.... mine was also probably folded very diffently from an American concept of a paper airplane.
Then again, this world record is for a level/linear flight. I wonder if he launched it from the top row of the bleachers...
I wonder if the military applications for this include manned flight? Imagine shooting through enemy territory so fast, that when you were picked up on radar you were already out of "unfreindly territory." Though how many g's would a pilot endure at 5000mph? And to say the least what of manueverability, could you also imagine touching the stick and moving less than the width of a hair, and spinning endlessly. How would they overcome the problem with an egress system. At that speed as soon as the canopy went off, so does the pilots head.
All this in mind there are only a few uses for this type of engine, space flight isnt one of them as the jet needs air. Last I heard space had a shortage of air. Seems that the US government has gotten away from Defense Department spending, by having NASA foot the bill. Can anyone say "SPY PLANE"? I thought about a bomber, but the variables would make that impossible. Accuracy for one. And speed the thing just goes too fast. It would be useless as a fighter. The cost will like the Concorde just keep this engine as a dream to commercial flight.
Expensive though the Concorde was, it is still by far the safest aircraft ever to have flown!
I'd like to thank my government for giving me and other taxpayers the shaft by wasting our tax dollars on a useless project.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It proved invaluable to the Italian Air Force in World War II.
As I recall, the allies took most of Italy in under 2 months. Unvaluable seems to fit better than invaluable.
German reinforcements were the only reason the rest of Italy managed to stand as long as it did (though they DID surrender 2 months after the invasion, it was a moot point, as the fighting continued)
I honestly don't think that it would have been physically possible for the allies to capture the country any faster. The planes certainly didn't save italy.
BTW, about the paper airplane thing, wouldn't it be easy to attain a realy long flight by hand-launching the thing off of a really tall building or an airplane. Or you could pull a dirty trick and launch it on Nasa's "Vomit Comet" antigravity plane or another suitable gravity-free enviornment)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
At altitude, slghtly less.
Actually, slghtly less than one G at sea level as well, due to the curvature of the Earth (i.e., following the curvature of the Earth means the plane is travelling in a slight arc, producing a slightly negative G force).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
..you can see up to seven miles; so assuming you mean 'cross form horizon to horizon' say across the Salt Flats - less than ten seconds.
In average visibilty, and on normal rolling countryside - probable about 1-2secs. Whoosh!
The record is for level flight.