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X-43A Hits Mach 7
quiggy writes "As previously reported, NASA tested the X-43A yesterday. The results are in, and the scramjet hit Mach 7, setting a new speed record. CNN is also reporting the story, with a note that a similar jet could be tested by the end of the year, hopefully reaching Mach 10."
They will need to go back and save the whales etc...
1 mach = 334 m/s , , ,
:)
10 mach = 3340 m/s = 3.3 km/s
speed of light c = 300 000 km/s
(3 km/s)/(300 000 km/s) = 1/100 000 of c
this engine travelled at aprox 0.00001c !
good work scientists
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Isn't that a shaver? You know, the one with seven blades?
and not a single Speed Racer joke. I'll reload in 30 seconds.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
And just how do you keep something going that fast from burning up in the atmosphere?
Life is not for the lazy.
is 3402 meters per second
or 12247 kilometers per hour
or 7610 miles per hour
basically the higher you go, the less air there is, and the slower sound travels. So, the mach number, which is the ratio of your speed to the speed of sound, will be higher at high altitudes if the speed is constant.
Yes, they did it in the 60s. They reached Mach 7 with a manned plane. This one is unmanned. I don't understand why it is such a big deal.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
It also could drastically cut the time of commercial flights -- perhaps shortening the trip between New York and London to less than five hours.
Considering Concorde did that in three hours, thit wouldn't be much achievement. I make it that it could do NY-LON in just over one hour.
What I think they should have said is that it could go from any point on the earth to any other, including the antipodes, in less than five hours.
Mind you, it would take three hours to get through security on departure and an hour on arrival to collect your baggage, if it had arrived with you.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
when will we see warp engines? Shortly after someone proves that its not impossible I guess.
CNN in a poor programming decision IMHO, did not carry any news of this while it was happening. OTOH FoxNews did!! Which supprised the hell out of me. They did ask some expert a few times how this would mean that missiles (in the future) could hit Osama in 15-30 minutes instead of the 4+hours it takes today. But at least they did have someone talking about the technolodgy/science behind this, and actually showed the takeoff, and launch of the plane. Quite nice of them.
Kudos to Fox, to CNN: do a better job, or you will fall further behind FoxNews.
later,
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
Turns out oxygen is heavy, and kind of a pain in the ass to package anyway. It's much more convienent if you can just use the oxygen that's laying about, which is significantly more difficult that it sounds when you're traveling at hypersonic speeds.
Damn gravity.
new speed record
African or European?
SCRAM stands for Supersonic Combustion Ram (jet). What makes this different is that the combustion is taking place in air which is moving faster than the speed of sound inside the engine. Conventional Ram jets require that the air inside the engine be moving at less than sonic velocities for combustion to occur.
Conventional Ram jets are limited in top speed by the necessity to slow the incoming air down to sub sonic velocities.
Not only does the SCRAM jet have potential military applications, it can also serve as a 'midrange' stage for a lower cost to orbit booster.
Yeah, Pete Knight went to Mach 6.7 in Oct 67....STILL a record to this day, for a MANNED airplane (X-15 isn't "really" a traditional airplane since it is air launched). Also Pete Knight earned astronaut wings by flying the X15 near 300,000 feet. Several of the X15 pilots received astronaut wings by flying near or over 300,000 feet. Joe Walker, went the highest to 320,000 feet! Sadly, he was killed in the 60's when he was in a formation of planes for an Ad for the general electric engines that all the planes were flying. His "tiny" in comparison jet got too close to the XB-70 bomber (which was suppose to be a Mach 3+ bomber) and it went inverted and smashed into the tail of the bomber, and exploded. Sorry, the early years of test pilots, NASA has always fasinated me, and buddies of mine call me a walking encyclopedia of aircraft knowledge ;)
There's one fundamental difference between an ordinary jet engine and a scram jet engine: The Ramjet has no moving parts.
The all jet engines,operate according to Newton's Third Law of Motion:
For every action, there's an equal opposite reaction
The standard jet engine, invented by Sir Frank Whittle, sucks in air at the front. Then this air is mixed with fuel, and made to combust. The combustion causes the air to exit the engine at a velocity greater than when it came in, thus creating thrust. The escaping air causes the turbine to spin, and this intern activates the compressor, sucking more air in.
The Ramjet has no turbine and compressor unit. Ramjets fly supersonically and have an inlet which injests subsonic air after it goes through a shock wave in front of the inlet. The intake is slowed down aerodynamically, and then mixed with fuel and made to combust. But after about Mach 5, ramjets don't work so well.
The scramjet is almost but not quite entirely like a ramjet. The only difference being in a scramjet the combustion takes place as the air is travelling through the chamber at supersonic velocities.
More about the scram jet. Or another more concise explanation.
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Nothing to see here
Then Quantum Leap. Where will Scott Bakula show up next??
~.Evanrude
It's not. This whole experiment is not at all about speed, and everything about a new engine design.
IIRC, Mach5 is the speed at which the scramjet is released, and ignited... up until then it's just being boosted by a conventional rocket.
During the first test, the scramjet failed.
During this test, it worked, pushing the rocket up another mach or two.
This was not meant to be any kind of speed record.. that's just how fast you need to go to get a scramjet working.
Yes, we've done Mach 7 before. And the space shuttles & space probes go much faster. The big deal is the engine. It's like comparing a nuke to some kilotons of TNT. Sure they may have the same effect (Mach 7), but one is simply a gigantic waste of resources (fuel), the other is a valuable invention. And considering it's the military, for good or bad...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, during the first test the rocket booster (the Pegasus) failed, mostly due to being released too low in the thick atmosphere. The entire package was destroyed by mission control before it went totally out of control.
There's an old Airforce saying:
A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible: A new engine makes a new plane possible.
That's why when NASA went for the moon a critical development was the F-1 first stage rocket engine. Capable of 1.5M lbs. of thrust it allowed the Saturn V first stage to be built with only 5 engines. Compare this with the Russian failed manned lunar rocket the N-1 which had 20 engines. They never were able to work all together (vibrational problems) and abandoned it after several launch disasters.
So why is NASA stopping development? (The successor the X-43C will not be flown). Why are we freezing this enabling technology? Are we (under Bush's program) sacrificing everything to plant a flag on Mars and not making space flight practical? It might be worth it if we ever got to Mars but it looks highly doubtful that his proposal is a serious attempt at anything but votes!
Sorry for the (mostly) repost but I really wish we would move "faster" towards developing the technologies towards practical* spaceflight.
*As noted in previous posts, by not carrying the oxygen on board you save a LOT of weight. Remember the reaction is H2 + O = H2O (and energy) and since the atomic weight of oxygen is 16 compared to hydrogen for every kilo of hydrogen you carry you carry EIGHT of oxygen. The weight savings (could be in the millions of pounds) makes up for the turbo-fans/rocket engines you must carry for the takeoff/orbital transition parts of the flight.
NASA overclockers RULE!!
Let's sum it all up. 1) Escape velocity is IRRELEVANT in the discussion. That applies to unpowered vehicles - not a vehicle under constant power such as this one.
2) As has been already posted. The speed record isn't for ANY vehicle. The record is for a vehicle with an air breathing engine (ramjet, scramjet, etc). It doesn't apply to vehicles such as the X-15, Apollo capsules, the space shuttles, etc as their speeds were/are either rocket powered or unpowered reentry.
3) During the first test the scramjet engine did NOT fail. It was never even fired. The booster engine that was supposed to get the scramjet to mach 5 is what failed. If I remember right the fins or something fell off and it went out of control so the remote detonated the booster and consequently the scramjet testbed attached to it.
4) The toyota corolla attachment won't be out until 2006.
good work scientists :)
ENGINEERS had more to do with getting this ship up to Mach 7 that did the scientists!
From cnn It is the first time a supersonic-combustion ramjet, or scramjet, which uses air for fuel, had traveled so fast, flight engineer Lawrence Huebner told reporters. The University of Queensland Launched the HYSHOT in July 2002. It Hit Mach 7.6. The first people who did this
brrrrrrrrrppp 'Ey Homer...Why don't girls like me?
it's not impossible, it's just infinitely improbable.
Take a look at the photo of the actual X-43.
All the pics were of the Pegasus booster rocket which was dropped from a B-52. You can't even resolve the X-43 in those photos.
That X-43 is smaller than most of the bombs that B-52 has dropped in its lifetime.
One G is about 22 mph/s, so 1400 mph/10s is a about 6.4 G's.
"A worthy cause has never been harmed by the truth" - Gandhi
It was taken to mach 5 by the Pegasus, then it accelerated under the scramjet to mach 7
This is not true. The pegasus booster took it all the way to mach 7. The scramjet proved it could make positive thrust, but it did not accelerate, it actually decelerated during those 10 seconds. Maximum speed was at booster burn out. This is according to their press conference yesterday.
Also, see this video: (remove the space in the URL)
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/videos/metafi les/ksc_032504_x-43.ram
Alcubierre's idea was that the ship doesn't move. Instead, it modifies the space around it much like an esclator.
I'm with you so far.
However, at this time, there was a problem with obtaining the required energy, which was quite alot [think total solar output of the sun in its current life, per second].
The main stumbling block to Alcubierre's drive is that it requires negative energy. My understanding is that the human race can't produce that right now, at least in appreciable quantities.
All of the FTL drive concepts that I've seen involve something currently unobtainable (or outright impossible) like this - infinitely long neutronium rods, creation of a pocket universe to put the ship in, etc.
In 1999, however, Thomas Valone spotted an answer. Zero Point Energy.
No. Pseudo-science can solve lots of problems theoretically, but it is not the answer to real-world problems.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/:
9 :
As the spent motor and its attached payload falls back to Earth, they gather speed, and the trajectory is designed so that between 35km and 23km, they are travelling at Mach 7.6
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=346
The recent HyShot(TM) launch was designed to take the scramjet engine to a speed of Mach 7.6 (or more than seven times the speed of sound) for the experiment, using a Terrier Orion rocket. The rocket and payload reached an altitude of 314km before the rocket was configured to fly in a new trajectory pointing the payload back down to earth.
HyShot was simply free-falling to earth in order to reach Mach 7.6 so the engine could be ignited. It achieved that speed regardless of whether or not the scramjet fired. The X-43 was flying horizontally, and was actually powered by the scramjet engine during a controlled flight.
So there is a difference between what was accomplished. The distinction is that HyShot achieved combustion, while the X-43 was the first scramjet powered craft to be flown.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
In the scramjet reasearch buisiness, 10 seconds is an eternity. Most institutions who are researching this technology are universities and the like who don't have access to B-52s, rocket boosters, and the other equipment needed to actually flight test scramjets. Rather, they are forced to rely on less expensive wind tunnels. To simulate >mach 6 airflow (scramjet operational range), they either use an enourmous piston driven system, or a series of pressure build ups with a simultaneaous release. Regardless of the method, these techniques generally can't provide more than 5 milliseconds of flow time to test the engine. If you compare testing engines in 5 ms bursts to one sustained 10 s flight, the perspective kind of changes your opinion on how long 10 s is.
If you want a good paper on the subject, I suggest this one from the Australian National University.