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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."
... 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.
Atmospheric drag is a square law on speed. The drag has to be overcome by spending fuel unless you plan on leaving the atmosphere, but doing that means the scramjet stops working... it's all a bit self defeating really.
And then there's the slight problem of a sonic boom- didn't you learn anything from the commercial failure of Concorde? And that only went at mach 2.2.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"