Slashdot Mirror
X43-A on to Mach 10
Cat_Byte writes "On March 28 we read about the X43-A hitting Mach 7 with a successful scramjet test. Prior to that on June 2, 2001 the craft tore itself to pieces during a trial run. Well now they are preparing to hit Mach 10. The upcoming Mach 10 run of the X-43A appears to mark an end of the program. The seven-year, approximately $250 million Hyper-X program was created to provide unique "first time" data on hypersonic air-breathing engine technologies.
"At Mach 7, the front leading edge of the vehicle would see about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 10, its probably twice that -- twice the heat load essentially," Sitz explained
FYI, Mach 10 is about 2 miles per second."
Wait, maybe I'm thinking of something else...
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Godspeed.
When do you think this will be up for grabs as a "rich-persons" big dollar thrill ride?
Still cool tho...
It's great to see the Air Force putting that Ga'ould and Asgard technology to good use. That Stargate program is really paying off.
I'm some one who is impressed by interesting numbers, and I just get a thrill out of the idea of travelling 2 miles per second. That is incredibly cool.
I could do my daily commute in 15 seconds. That would be fun.
So where can I buy it as a casemod kit?
i hope that thing has killer A/C...
home of the original cupholder
...have data on its trajectory? It seems to me that if you want to reduce heat, you need to fly it in a steep climb. Of course, the air then gets thinner, thus providing less boost. Your lifting body is also less effective with that sort of trajectory.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Blinkx and You Will Miss It?
s/Mach/Warp/g; and we'll be fine :)
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
Ah, but does it get 1700 miles per gallon?
Holy crap, they're up to Mach 10 now? I guess I'm going to have to throw my old razors away. You'd think that a razor with 10 blades would be rather unweildy but I sure as hell am not going to let my neighbor Jones beat me in the male-gromming-department! Man, those old Mach 3 blades were already pretty expensive. I hate to see how much this new shit is gonna cost...
GMD
watch this
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
So how long until they can give us 30 minute flights across the atlantic? :)
Two miles per second means you can cross the Pacific in under an hour.
It's still going to take 4 hours just to get to the airport, check your baggage and get through security.
I'm Decimal.You insensitive clod!
If the temperature doubles, don't the BTUs quadruple? I've always thought of temperature as the thermal equivalent of voltage. Am I wrong?
My first thought was that the usual Family Thnaksgiving trip from Philly to Pittsburgh (300 miles) would be done in 2.5 minutes instead of 5 hours. I then realized one could cross the USA coast to coast in under a half hour... that's damn impressive, assuming the heat can be dealt with and speed maintained for that long of a time period.
I can fly to china, destroy that spammer's sever in person, and make it back from my "smoke break", before the boss even knew I was gone.
ofcourse I'm sure the jet lag might be pretty bad...
"I only know 2 things: The love for me, and the fear of me."
Most children are taught that you can count the seconds between a seeing a lightning strike and hearing a thunderclap and divide by five to determine how far the strike was in miles. This means that the speed of sound (Mach 1) is 5 seconds per mile, i.e., .2 miles per second (.5 km per second, I know...). It should therefore be well known to the same child that Mach 10 (10x the speed of sound) is 2 miles per second.
I for one welcome our mach10 overlords..
er.. wait this is a US gov't project..
screw that..
When does spaceship one get one of those engines.. the sooner we get off this rock the better.
How soon before someone overclocks it to get Mach 11?
Will they use that logical robot that wanders the universe searching for the creators to upgrade to warp 13?
to bridge the gap (cost and speed) between current cruise missiles and ICBMs.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I call dibs on a window seat. I bet that would be something to watch!
That's right, I read at +2 and post at +1. Not even I care what I have to say.
"At Mach 10 -- or 10 times the speed of sound -- the X-43A is traveling at about two miles per second. Thats in the range of 7,500 miles per hour."
Which sounds really impressive until you realize that escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour and we are less than a third of the way to an air-breathing launch vehicle.
186,000 mi/sec... it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
Guys, commercial flight isn't really the goal. Instead, NASA's Hyper-X program, the six-year, $185 million research endeavor of which the X-43A is a part, is aimed at developing vehicles that can deliver payloads into space much more cheaply than traditional rockets.
GMD
watch this
I really can't say that I'd envy first-class passengers in an aircraft designed with this technology unless I was assured that I would be burned alive at 4000+ degree temperatures.
"Stewardess? Can you bring me another gin and tonic. It's stifling in here. Stewardess? STEWARDESS?!"
"I'm sorry, sir. Sherry has burned a crisp after going after your last drink. Can I interest you in a shrimp cocktail instead?"
IronChefMorimoto
...the craft tore itself to pieces during a trial run.
I was under the impression that the Pegasus boost missle went out of control so they self-destructed it...not that there was a problem with the X-43.
Yes, a reasonably well-informed and thoughtful person should compute that. No, they're not going to bother in the course of that sentence, but having a sense of scale is relevant, so a good writer will tell them.
Circumference at the Equator == 24,901.55 miles
Mach 10 =~= 7,200 miles/hour (at sea level)
Gives 3.46 Hours!! Hot damn!! (i think i approached that speed once while running away fromt the cops through a corn field)
I was busy remebering the growing size of the girls chests when I was a school boy, not calculating lightening ditance.
I'll start: that's about 21 minutes from New York to LA.
why do we even know about this? Shouldn't this be some classified secret or do they already have craft that handily surpass mach 10 and thus don't care if we know about it? The stealth project was a secret for over 40 years and they're just parading this around (arguable if equal importance) for the cameras...what gives? What secret shit are they NOT telling us about I wonder.
If you happen to shave using a Mach 10 razor, does that correspond to the razor burn you experience?
Yes, there's a strange paradox in the slashdot crowd -- are we talking about the teenybopper no-testosterone can't-grow-facial-hair audience or the RMS/Mad Dog Hall full-beard-ain't-gonna-shave crowd?
I guess either way, a razor is out of the question. Nevermind then.
I thought they were already up to Mach 15... ...in Japan.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs?
The energy radiated by a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. But since there's a probably whole lot of convection going on, cooling is probably more a matter of moving the heat from the front of the thing to the back, and the naive idea of how things work is probably not too useful.
... but there is still a 2 hour checkin
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
How exactly do you propose I travel at mach 10? I don't think my civc goes that fast. Even lauched out of a cannon, I would not get close to Mach 10. But, if you know of a way, I'd be willing to make an attempt for the Darwin awards!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I don't think I can handle 10 blades.
Every time I hear about these scram jet things, I keep picturing the Ghost fighter/Guld Bowman fight from Macross Plus, where Guld's body ends up crushed like a tin can just before his suicide collision with the Ghost fighter.
While it may be possible to control the rate of acceleration to human-tolerable limits, I can't see this being open to anyone who isn't trained and endurance tested prior to flight. How would you explain a flight where half the passengers end up having strokes or heart attacks from the stresses such a beast would generate during an instance of turbulence?
8==8 Bones 8==8
...a moisturizing Indicator® Lubrastrip(TM)...
...features Micro-Power(TM), a gentle pulsing action powered by a Duracell AAA battery.
...allowing a man to shave wherever he prefers.
...and the Duracell AAA battery is easy to insert...
Ugh. Did anyone else get a little creeped out reading some of this shit? They really need to fire whoever came up with stuff like that. Unless they are trying to subliminally market it as something other than a razor.
GMD
watch this
Sounds like one hell of a razor, I'll wait for other people to test it before bringing it anywhere near my face though.
I think it should be made clear that the first run was unsuccessful due to a rocket booster failure. NASA self-destructed the booster for safety's sake.
The X-43 did not rip itself to pieces on the first run.
-AC
but Mach 10 won't be 2 miles per second because they are not flying at sea level.
... )..... (sorry, i know it's bad expressed) being about 287.15 for air
Mach number is the square root of the product of gamma, R, and T. Being:
gamma a propertie of the gas (1.33~1.44 aprox for air),
R the constant of the gas (universal R over Molecular Mass for every kilo
And T is the absolute temperature of the gas;
According to the International Atmosphere model, the temperature of air drops 6.5K every kilometer until you reach 11Km, beyond it remains constant until 22km, where it again rises.
So, if depending of the height (and particular condition of the day and the state of atmosphere) the Mach speed varies
As i haven't seen at what height they are flying, you can calculate yourself the Mach speed if you find the numbers.
So is very probable that they are flying at really great heights where the mach value greatly differs from sea level Mach, what is taught to children, as other poster suggested
Values of temperature of atmosphere can be found looking for ISA model (International Standard Atmosphere)
By the way, i am using SI; so, if you find a table with Farenhait (or whatever it is spelled) you can convert a farenheit degree to kelvin via:
(TF-32)/1.8+273 = kelvin
PD: Sorry for my bad english
I can hear it now ludacriss speed GO! To me Spaceballs 2 coldnt come fast enough.
Next time the sun and the moon are out at the same time, try and figure out the distance and angle the sun has to be to make the moon light up the way it is and have your shadow get cast at that angle. It's quite impressive if you can visualize it.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
http://www.jp-petit.com/nouv_f/X43/X43_1.htm video and explanations : http://www.jp-petit.com/bio_fr/video_jpp_2003.htm B2 Modified with MHD : http://www.jp-petit.com/nouv_f/B2/B2_0.htm
the 10 blade razors..
(For those clueless people: Gillette has a 3-blade razor called the Mach 3)
I am the maverick of Slashdot
This "experiment" just seems like a pointless attempt to cross a line that doesn't need crossing. They aren't likely to learn anything from it at all. They should just tell it like it is and call it a "stunt".
General Tufnel: The Mach numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Reporter: Oh, I see. And most planes go up to ten?
General Tufnel: Exactly.
Reporter: Does that mean it's faster? Is it any faster?
General Tufnel: Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most pilots, you know, will be flying at ten. You're on ten, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your airspeed. Where can you go from there? Where?
Reporter: I don't know.
General Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Reporter: Put it up to eleven.
General Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One faster.
Reporter: Why don't you just make ten faster and make ten be the top number and make that a little faster?
General Tufnel: [Pause] These go to eleven.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You learn something new every day.
The place-hands-on-cheeks-and-pull-back dept makes your stomach involuntarily turn thinking about the times you mistakenly clicked on the goatse guy...
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
"from the place-hands-on-cheeks-and-pull-back dept."
How in the world did the goatse.cx guy convince Taco to post that caption?
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
And how does that 2 miles per second size up compared to the speed required in order to escape the Earths Gravity and reach orbit?
Does anyone know?
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
I wonder who at Dominoes pizza drew the short straw and has to fly the damn thing?
The last digit is wrong. It should be 6.
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971
I thought that was about X11 and Gnu Mach. Must leave... Go outside.... Air...
So why am I still typing?
You're aware this is Slashdot right?
Prior to that on June 2, 2001 the craft tore itself to pieces during a trial run
Actually, it's the rocket launcher that veered out of control.
A plane takes the rocket+X43 into a given altitude, the rocket launches bringing itself and the X43 to about Mach 3 and then the scram jet can take action, bringing the X43 up to Mach 7 after separation from the rocket.
It's the rocket that failed on the first attempt. Not the X43-A.
(just kidding engineers on the project, it's obviously a bit easier to learn 2 or so grammar rules than to accurately predict transonic air flows)
Are those mach speeds representing the actuall factor at flying altitude or is there a standart altitude?
Because if its at traveling altitude, your mach 6 35km altitude vehicle would be faster then your mach 7 15km vehicle (speed of sound is presure dependent).
But if it were otherwise, you could travel at mach 1.1 and still be subsonic if you are high enough, which doesnt make sense either.
So why dont they just give the speed in km/h (or mph)? Mach may be usefull if you are dodging around the speed of sound, but at mach 2,3 (or 10), who cares?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Shaves so good, it's smooth down to the marrow.
Damn! The Onion has gone to a subscription model for past issues, but who else remembers the funniest story they've had in awhile?
From the 18 Feb. 2004 issue:
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
You're so rugged!
Why won't the scientists just hurry up and finish Ununpentium in a solid state so we can start building nice space ships instead
How long would it take to fly around the world at Mach 10?
circumference of the earth at equator = 24,901.55miles
Mach 10 = 2miles/sec
24901.44 / 2 = 12450.72 seconds = 207.512916 minutes = 3.458548611111111111111..... hours.
now all you have to do is fully grasp infinite ones.
go to Kelvin scale, which is an absolute scale. It's got a zero that you can't go below.
Step 2:
Take temperature, in degrees Kelvin, and multiply by two.
Step 3:
Conver temperature back (if you really want).
This new temperature is twice as big as the last one. Really. The zeroth law of thermodynamics doesn't have much to do with it.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity :
It is a theoretical quantity, because it assumes that an object is fired into space like a bullet. Instead propulsion is almost always used to get into "space". It is usually in "space" that the idea gets a more concrete meaning. On the surface of Earth the escape velocity is about 11 kilometres per second. However, at 9000 km from the surface in "space," it is slightly less than 7.1 km/s. Continual acceleration from the surface to attain that speed at that height is possible. At no time would the "escape velocity" of 11 km/s be attained; yet at that height, even with zero propulsion now, the object can move away from Earth indefinitely.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity :
It is a theoretical quantity, because it assumes that an object is fired into space like a bullet. Instead propulsion is almost always used to get into "space". It is usually in "space" that the idea gets a more concrete meaning. On the surface of Earth the escape velocity is about 11 kilometres per second. However, at 9000 km from the surface in "space," it is slightly less than 7.1 km/s. Continual acceleration from the surface to attain that speed at that height is possible. At no time would the "escape velocity" of 11 km/s be attained; yet at that height, even with zero propulsion now, the object can move away from Earth indefinitely.
The New NT Technology myself...
Getting beaten right in the "male gromming department", that is.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
.5 km per second, I know...
speed of sound at sea level = 0.34029 kilometers per second, or for us non-scientists, 1/3rd. Again usually used in the opposite manner, count seconds and divide by 3.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think it should be made clear that the first run was unsuccessful due to a pilot error. The Pegasus is normally launched at a much higher altitude with much thinner air. When NASA launched the Pegasus/X-43a they launched much lower and hadn't properly calculated the aerodynamic forces that would be acting on the control fins on the Pegasus booster. This led to loss of control of the booster necessitating is destruction. The rocket booster didn't fail, we just launched it in too thick of air.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Temperature is in degrees Celsius or degrees Kelvin. You should translate ancient forms to current usage before posting.
I've done Mach 5.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
At mach 10, 2 miles a second, how long would it take an observer on the ground, at say sealevel, to watch it cross from one edge of the horizon to the other?
-e
Comes out a lot funnier when you drive by the Walgreen's or CVS pharmacies that have it on sale, but in order to save space on their signs, they refer to it as --
"MP3 Razors"
That, I just have to laugh at the very idea. I wonder how big a flash card you can actually store inside that little razor handle, considering you'd probably also need some sort of headphone amp and so on. Of course, you just know somebody is going to hack it and rewrite it for Ogg Vorbis or AAC support.
Only a factor of 88099 to go!
I know... Einstein is stirring in his grave.
The objective is to be able to hit your opponent before the TV signal reaches them... The signal announcing that we're now at war. And they won't care if the front leading edge is 2400 degrees Fahrenheit or Centigrade. 2400 degrees, isn't that the temperature of a CUTTING TORCH? Maybe when the nose reaches that temperature it should invert and turn into a supercalifragilisticepditioucess ion drive.
Of course in the IAF, this one gets told in a slightly different manner.
The way it's told, MD were called in to see the aircraft after it landed. Their engineers came, inspected the aircraft, photographed, took measurements, went back to do some wind-tunnel tests, called back after several weeks and concluded:
It cannot fly.
-
4800 Degrees Fahrenheit. That's insane. Totally and completely insane.
Why can't they work on reducing friction to conserve fuel and increase speed simultaneously instead of simply focusing on the engine design? It seems to me that some type of atmospheric deflection technology would be more-deserving of DOD dollars than the make-it-so-fast-it-might-spontaneously-combust technology.
Could you use an EM field of some kind to "push" air out of the way? You just need a small gap where there's nothing (a vacuum), say a 1-2mm bubble around the aircraft, in order to slip through the air almost as effortlessly as in space. This technology might be a ways off, but it's far more interesting. It would have applications in a variety of departments, including the leading edge of ships, planes, re-entry vehicles for earth (or interplanetary) landings and so forth. (Not to mention what it'd do for NASCAR)
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Explanation for the 97% of the world's population who have no idea what this Fahrenheit crap is about: Fahrenheit is an obsolete temperature scale, originally intended to have its 0 at the lowest attainable temperature (Mr Fahrenheit wasn't much good at refrigeration techniques and didn't travel a lot) and its 100 at human body temperature (maybe he had flu when he measured this one).
It's the same sort of posturing that Saddam Hussein used
Ah yes, and it worked for Saddam (holed up and captured).I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
somebody please mod this up for humor. That gecko/insurance comment was very funny.
I'm not sure if you're conscious of the hype and level of progress gere.
The german V-2 rockets produced during IIWW could travel at mach 5. Is mach 7 well over 50 years later really such a great gain?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How do you multiply temperatures in Fahrenheit? In Kelvins I can understand; the Kelvin scale has a zero point that is actually meaningful. 2 * 2400 Degrees fahrenheit is less than 2 * 1590 K.
By the way, all this would have been totally meaningless to me without Google calculator. I don't mind miles so much, they're a bit more than 1,5 km but a tad less than 2 km; 'bout 3 feet to a meter; 2 pounds to a kg. But what the fuck is a degree Fahrenheit?
Maybe
Does it double from 2400 degrees Fahrenheit to 4800 degrees Fahrenheit? That would take the total heat content from 1588 Kelvin to 2922 Kelvin, an increase of 84%. If you expressed the temperature in Celcius, 1315 degrees Celcius, the "doubled" it, you get 2903 Kelvin, or a thermal increase of 82%. Doubling the actual thermal energy from 1588 Kelvin to 3176 Kelvin takes the temperature up to 5257 degrees Fahrenheit or 2902 degrees Celcius.
See this article on a joint experiment at Woomera, also aiming for Mach 10.
See this description of Hermes B-1.
That came in handy when they found the Chevy... floating in... space.
Another (of many) bad writing examples in Voyager - the truck actually started...after floating in a vacuum for centuries.
According to Google's nifty calculator 10 Mach would be:
speed of sound at sea level times 10 = 2.11446403 miles per second
The way I saw it documented and reported was:
Engineers appear and see aircraft. The insist that it could not fly and furthermore, assume the impact occured while the craft was on the ground. After being assured that the damage was done in the air and that the craft landed with the damage, they then went to the tunnel. There, they decided that as long as enough airspeed was retained, there was a lifting body effect, which provides something like 20%-30% of the total lift for the craft (not clear to me if it's lift before or after the wing was removed). Thusly, they determined, air speed was critical. Had the pilot attempted an approach at normal speeds, he would have crashed. Luckily, bravily, or smartly, for the pilot, he brought it in rather hot and that saved his bacon.
Go away! Shew fly, shew!
Yea, chevys dont start after sitting in a driveway for 2 days, much less floating in space for centuries.
Gah! I wish I could remember the name of the story... There was a science fiction story I read in college involving a worker somewhere in the distant future rediscovering arithmetic. (The skills had been lost in the years of computers doing all that tedious math for us) The leaders were overjoyed because it meant that if they trained these workers, they could be stuffed in these missiles to guard them to their targets. After all, with all that overpopulation, human beings were cheaper than the computers...
Obviously written during that time period when people assumed computers would stay room-sized and expensive, but still quite interesting in its implications.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
CmdrTaco is suspiciously similar to the goatse man.
BTW, you find the goatse man yoo's self. I don't URL that bozo, because in Soveit United States it URLs you!
What you say is, of course, the documented course events took, and the more likely one to have actually happened.
The way grandparent post told it is the way this incident is recited by mothers to thier children around the fireplace in the Israeli Air Force.
I know because I served there.
That is... if there were fireplaces.
-
General Chuck Yeager (I believe) said of the F-111:
There isn't enough thrust in Christendom to make that plane fly well.
(give or take the quote).
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
speed of sound at sea level times 10 = 20 461 245.5 furlongs per fortnight
gOOGLe it and find out.