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Japan Plans Test of 'New Concorde'
Steve Nixon writes "Japan's space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback as early as next month in a crucial test of the country's push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde."
If the 1.1 billion yen ($10 million) experiment works, Japan's space agency plans to follow up with similar tests of a jet-powered craft, Kyodo News Agency reported.
I, for one, think it would be infinitly cooler to fly in a rocketship than in a crummy supersonic jet.
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hear the thunderbird theme while reading this?
The craft will float back to earth by parachute after the 15 minute flight.
Bert: *looks up* Is that a... what the hell is that falling towards us?
Ernie: Looks like it's just a plane, Bert.
Bert: Ohh yeah so it is. Imagine that.
This was seen in the skies over Tokyo in the 1960s. At least the beak is the same.
I saw this this morning and all I could see was the abandoned Republic XF-103.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
It ain't cool unless it got a robot.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary.
:-)
My choice would be a spaceplane of sorts that takes parabolic trajectories. I've been hearing about plans of a craft of this type that would get you from NY to Tokyo in 45 minutes.
Burt Rutan WHERE ARE YOU?!
Sign me up.
Ignore Alien Orders
Wow, when was the last time the US did an experiment for that little money?
Of course, their last one crashed into the desert in a fireball...so perhaps a little extra money could have been put to good use.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
The entire PLANE is probably a robot. With superfluous robot crew and robot stewardesses with creepy hands.
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The Concorde first flew in 1969 and became a symbol of French and European industrial acumen. But the planes were retired from commercial service in October 2003, never having recouped the billions of tax dollars invested in them.
The article did a good job writing up all the past failures of this Japanese program, but one thing that was conspicuously absent was a rationale for why Japan is doing this at all. Considering the fiscal failure of the Concorde, I would expect any article on this topic to include what the "next generation" plans to do differently other than just niftier technology.
I'm a big tall mofo.
So let me get this right. The Japanese build a supersonic jet for passenger flight. They have the design, build a prototype and decide to test it....over Australia? It sounds like somebody picked the short stick.
i think there's a decent-size market of businessmen between North American and Japan/China that will appreciate the HUGE time savings when frequently traveling across the Pacific Ocean. Instead of having to eat 3 meals, 2 movies, and 1 hibernation, a businessman can depart San Francisco at 9am, have brunch on the plane, browse the internet and work on polishing his powerpoint presentation, take a quick 1.5 hr nap, and arrive at Shanghai at 7:30am, refreshed, and ready to meet with his business partners.
what we need is a Concorde-replacement, not more bureaucracy and political bickering.
This new plane is supposed to be able to carry 300 people at Mach 2. Concorde's top speed was Mach 2 as well. It was designed over 40 years ago.
I'd have thought we'd be capable of at least twice that by now.
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How much energy does it take to break the sound barrier? I'm curious because I know that relatively cheap oil (< $200 per barrel) will end in a few decades, and there don't yet seem to be any renewable jet fuels. After it becomes too expensive to extract oil from the ground, how are airlines going to keep their birds in the air?
This deserves to succeed. Slow travel along long distances is a pain in the butt. If they can make it consume about 3/4th of the fuel that Concorde needed, that it'll probably already make a profit.
The techonology is already there, they just need to optimise it. This is a great collaboration of the two frontiers of technology, Europe and Japan.
This will probably get modded down by those American Boeing supporters, who have made nothing but new versions of 40 year old aircraft.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
When was the last time we sent someone to the moon? The 60's. And the last time a supersonic plane was developed? The 60's. Is it just money? Why else did we begin to achieve notable success in aerospace in the 60's, and then backslide to where we are now? By 2020 we hope to be back where we were in the 60's. Great.
1) Concorde was an engineering marvel that never got stepped up with the times. Japan and France are betting they can make a much more efficient engine that would save on fuel consumption.
2) Large bodies of water. You can't fly the concord at full speed over the continental united states (pretty much squashing SST in America). But you can do it over the vastness of the pacific. If you shorten that route, business men and women will beat a path to your door, check book in hand. So would international parcel carriers.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The United States definitely isn't ready for something like this. With so many airlines going bankrupt because of a super competitive market and absurd fuel costs, I don't see this taking off. (Pun fully intended) ;-)
I don't see too many people using this service, unless somehow they can keep the ticket prices reasonable. And even that isn't very likely, considering the plane is strapped to a rocket.
For certain definitions of that. :)
From aerospaceweb.org:Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
One might suspect the real purpose is more along the lines of keeping the aircraft industry ticking over at some minor level. There have been billions already spent on supersonic wind-tunnel tests. It's extremely unlikely any new design will be found that's even 10% more efficient than those already developed. And as long as oil is at the current prices, there's no chance the plane would be able to pay for itself, even at $15,000 a seat.
Hey. That one actually seemed plausible. Oh well...
OK, seriously. Yes it's all well and good to go Mach 2 but this sounds like another pork barrel (rice basket?) project on the part of the Chinese. Aircraft speed is increasingly becoming less relevant to total travel time. Traveling to Asia will always take the better part of a day. There will always be an hour's drive to the airport, a two hour security buffer time, then 1 hour of customs on the other side. It gets even worse when you consider that Japan might not be your final destination.
8 hours is optimistic because the developers don't seem to have a plan for getting rid of the sonic boom, which means the airliner will have to fly overwater instead of over Canada. That might make supersonic flight to Asia only possible from the West Coast, not the East Coast.
When enough processes have been revamped to make traveling to Japan like going to New York for a day then maybe a supersonic transport might be worthwhile.
You praise this "new" Concorde for basically being a new, slightly improved version of the old one and then bash Boieng for doing pretty much the same thing with its own models. Come on, the Concorde is 40 years old too y'know
THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE
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Yet another example of the rest of the world surpassing the US in a key engineering endeavor. We reward all the wrong things in America (think about reality TV, political correctness, the religous right, and so on) and then wonder why the rest of the world is churning out better engineers and scientists and why our technical jobs are being off-shored.
Even companies we think of as technology leaders may not be anymore. This quote:
A breakthrough in supersonic flight could help Japan leapfrog ahead in the aerospace field. The country, which does much of parts manufacturing for U.S.-based Boeing Co...
says just as much about what's going on as anything else in the article.
And, yes, I'm an American engineer.
"The Concorde first flew in 1969 and became a symbol of French and European industrial acumen." ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
Actually the Concorde was a Franco-British project, not a Franco-European one (whatever that means).
"The development project was negotiated as an international treaty between Britain and France
Surely such a rare collaboration between the cheese-munchers and the Perfide Anglais deserves to be recognised... 8-)
This concept, the piggy-backed plane, is basically the original concept for launching the space shuttle. The idea was to launch the space shuttle aboard a high altitude, re-usable airplane (rocket powered). Once at a specific altitude, the space shuttle would detach and use it's own power to continue into space.
Congress killed it because of money problems.
Over 25 years later, we see the Japanese using the same technology as a commercial airliner. There is nothing really new here, only the implementation has changed.
Nonetheless, it's a good idea.
Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary
The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).
What has fundamentally changed since then, that is likely to make this more successful? I think on the contrary when new "regular" flights such as 787 (or the new Airbus) are somewhat faster and have much better communications (internet, etc), it will make the value proposition for a super-fast, super-expensive flight even more questionable.
Tor
Perhaps our CEOs and salesmen would actually work better if they had slower travel and had to organise their lives and companies in a more structured way. Perhaps they'd have to delegate more? Find local representatives they could trust? Learn to use video conferencing properly? Even make better business decisions.
Yes, I do know this is heresy on slashdot. And you know what? I don't care. Not now I know that Linus uses potty words and my last illusion is broken.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Cool but is it tested for aerodynamics?
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Am I the only one hearing Men at Work's refrain, "Can you hear the thunder? You better run, you better take cover..."
I'm not sure what the point of transorbital supersonic transport between Japan and anywhere else is. Is there truly enough intercontinental traffic to support this? I suspect something on the order of personal shuttlepods ala Trek would be more likely to debut before this becomes a going and economically viable and sound concern, thus obviating it.
Great for Japanese national pride, but does it really mean much more than that? What are the real chances this is going to cause any real shift in the ratios regarding their aircraft industry versus ours? I hope it works and all, but I think pushing towars a bigger contribution to the international space travel effort would be better in the long run. OTOH, maybe it will be in the area of transorbital travel.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
1-
I don't think parcel carriers would be using this technology at all, they need to save money, and the fuel consumption alone would be a detering factor...maybe by 2090 when we have nuclear powered vehicles or something...
2-
also, can you imagine the look of horror when the pilot realizes that with that much g force, the parcels all picked up enough velocity from not being tied down, that they take off the whole back end of the plane....
"Hey Vern, did you forget to tie down dem' dere'packagers ergain?"...
Did anyone else read JAXA as AJAX? ~_~
Damn that horrible buzzword. Damn it to hell!
" ... an annual research budget of about $1.84 million over the next three years ... "
This project sounds like it is in the very early stages. If this does come to fruition, it will be many years from now.
Given the rising cost of fuel, they might be better off researching slower methods of transport.
They've got a long, long way to go before commercial (even unprofitable) viability.
Anyone else notice the price tag (US$10 Mil)?
Revised headline should read:
Japanese Company Fails Bid to Win X-Prize; Japanese Government Picks up Research Tab
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Certain segments of the market might be competetive, but the US market as a whole suffers from the opposite problem, too much of it /isn't/ competetive. A good deal of the hubs are owned by single airlines who then fix the prices.
The reason that so many US airlines are going broke is because of incompetent management, not because of a supercompetetive market and increased fuel costs. I'll concede that the fuel costs don't help much, but the problems are far more systemic than a single marginal cost presently going through the roof.
Soviets had the first Supersonic aircraft; Tupolev TU-144
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu-144
Concorde was NOT the first supersonic passenger aircraft.
"We've made some improvements so that won't happen again," Takaaki Akuto, a spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, said Tuesday in Tokyo.
Gee, I guess having it NOT CRASH would be a good thing. Glad they fixed that issue.
I wouldn't call a trip to the movies a `fiscal failure' even though it invariably brings about a net loss on my financial worth. But, as I'm not going to the theatre to make money, I don't think that a fiscal failure is quite the right word unless by going to the movies, I'm stepping outside of my budget. And, in fact, if my goal of going to the movies is to help the projectionists keep their jobs, and the theatre does stay in business and the projectionists do keep their jobs, then there is a limited sense in which my net loss is a fiscal success.
If the goal of the Concorde project was to make money off of the flights, then I would agree with you that it was a fiscal failure. But if the goal was to improve R&D or simply to put highly skilled workers to work, then the word failure doesn't make much sense unless the project failed at its stated goals.
Point-to-point travel is the future - we may not realize it, but there's a lot of economic activity that goes on in places that aren't well served by the airlines. That's why Southwest is eating everyone's lunch. I'd think it would save more time in the long run to develop "free flight" systems so that air taxis and passenger services could fly people from smaller airports. Now that avionics manufacturers are really getting onto ease of use, flying a plane could become not that much harder than driving a car.
Potentially, "free flight" could be as disruptive as the Internet.
Read the WHOLE fine article. This is an experiment to test aerodynamics. If successful, they intend to test something with a jet engine. This one is by no means the intended passenger carrying configuration.
... if they incorporated research into sonic boom supression/elimination like this, or this.
I think finding a way to supress the sonic boom so that it can fly over any country is critical to the success of any future supersonic plane.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
We had the Cold War making the US and Western Europre scramble for every visible indication of technical, cultural, and economic superiority over the totalitarian/communist model (good thing, too - we were right). OK, so that's done now, and we're all down to squabbling over cheese tarrifs and in what particular way to express ourselves about crazy jihaddists, etc. But the next stop will be the looming competition from the Indian/Chinese zone - and that will light it all right back up again. Moon bases, fast planes. Sorry, no flying cars - that appears to be unachievable for some reason.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There were orders from dozens of airlines. But noise problems and the rising cost of fuel caused all of them to cancel. Thus they only ended up selling to the flag carriers in the two countries who made the plane. And the planes sold for far below what they cost to make.
So they ended up losing a buttload of money, when they didn't expect to. It sounds like a financial failure to me.
I guess these days it's important to get from Tokyo to Fukuoka in 10 minutes....
... Mostly because of a bad business model. They only built a handfull of planes running on a select route. Mass production and a better selection of flight times would have helped. One thing the Japanese are doing that is a great improvement over Concorde is they are going faster. Once you break the transsonic barrier (Mach=1) your drag is at a local peak, it then decreases for a bunch of mach numbers. There's a sweet spot around Mach 3 where the drag is really low ... much lower than the Concorde was operating at. Faster speeds and lower drag mean less fuel consumption. Hence, more economic AND FASTER supersonic travel.
-everphilski-
I'll gladly concede that the Condorde was billed as a profit making venture. But that doesn't mean that a profit making venture was the real reason for the Concorde. I'll admit to being largely ignorant of European politics. Yet, I can't imagine that it is all that different from US politics in that the reasons politicians give for their pet projects are seldom the real reasons for those projects.
Somebody send an e-mail to Japan and let them know about this 1kW PSU they can use to power it.
In this case, I'd venture that the Concorde got subsidies for the same reasons that Boeing gets subsidies for its ventures. Airbus, like Boeing, is a large corporation with lots of political clout to bring in the pork.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
How on earth did the parent get modded "troll?"
For sale: one sig space, gently used. Inquire for details.
I think you want passenger*Machs rather than passengers per Mach, since increasing passengers and increasing Mach are good things. ;-)
Old Concorde 200 passenger*Machs new plane 600 passenger*Machs. 10 passenger*Machs/year improvment!
also, can you imagine the look of horror when the pilot realizes that with that much g force
Erm, I don't think you understand G forces. Just because the plane is flying fast doesn't mean it will be undergoing high G. A Mach 2 plane flying straight and level (or making a steady climb or dive) will be at 1G.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
I think instead of being like a fast airliner, the next SST will be like a fast business jet and/or commuter plane. I wrote an analysis The Japanese/French Son-of-Concorde vs. the Quiet Small Supersonic Transport that goes into more detail.
U2 is the one that drips fuel: that's because there isn't an internal fuel tank and the fuel is directly stored in the wing; at high altitude the pressure makes sure fuel doesn't leak out, but on the groud it sprouts from every seam. usually there are buckets catching dripping fuel lined roughly in the shape of the plane in any U2 hanger.
as for SR71; the only relavent fact i can remember about it is that due to thermal expansion at cruise (which is a tad over M.3, IIRC), the entire plane extends in length about 11cm. May seem to be just a trivial interesting fact until you consider that with different thermal expasnion coefficients, every seal on the plane must be checked to make sure nothing leaks or become structually weak at such temperatures (say, all those windows).
I liken civilization to a flower, it grows, it blooms and then it dies. We reached our peak. There is way too much entropy in our society (ie. all the red tape, religious resistance, corporate corruption) to continue forward.
If you don't believe me just look at the USPTO and see how the corporations own it and use it to prevent any little guy with an idea from making a dollar on it.
The only way we will see it again is if another civilization supplants us or if we die back immensely and grow again to get rid of the stuff holding us back.
We have to break the system to save it. Its the only way out.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
wow, you must be single.
nobody in their right mind would want to make a two day trip into a six day one (even with your 70-knot super-boat, which is just absolutely nuts*).
Besides that, with the sea-sickness and end up at your destination smelling like a rotting tuna and all the salt condensated on your suit and the extra laungry and having to eat boat-food and whatever... get real.
There is a tradeoff between cheap conveyance and comfort: you are not going there on a cruise ship, and the best bet is to make sure that the travelling phase of the trip is as short as possible.
*there are no technology that would enable that kind of sustained performance - a hydrofoil will only get you ~60knots, and that's usually a small boat not suited for transatlantic/pacific travel; it's easier to get a speedboat to 60knots that get a cruise ship at that speed
They should call it the "Nipponcorde"
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
There are rumors that the Canadian Space Program is working on a way to transport passengers over the intarweb. Firewalls are a concern however...
a Quiet Small Supersonic Transport. I think it has a much better chance of being successful economically.
The FAA ADS-B program has been running for a while including free flight with terrain following maps for improved safety.
a nadsbprojpg3.html
http://www.ainonline.com/issues/12_01/12_01_alask
With speeds like this (Tokyo to L.A. in four hours) the issue is ground transportation to and around the airport and then security lines.
A cross country flight for me, from Denver to Washington D.C. takes about four hours from aircraft door closing in Denver to opening in Washington DC.
But due to security constraints and the volume of air travellers I have to leave my home 2-1/2 hours before the flight leaves. It then takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes to park and walk to the terminal or park in an outlying lot and taking the shuttle bus.
So from closing my door at home to stepping onto the airplane at the airport I'm looking at three hours for a four hour flight. Toss in a weather delay here in Colorado and I can often spend more time on the ground than in the air.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
So they just have two or three engineers working on this?
We could easily make nuclear powered planes today, we just choose not to. When this decision wqs first made, "roll-up" was a real concern, and no one wants a plane crash tuning into a weak dirty nuke. Those concerns are misplaced today: it's mostly our irrational fear of everything nuclear that keeps reactors out of planes.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ugh. Forget all the way across the big pond. I have a tie for "worst flight ever" - Chicago to Honolulu nonstop in a DC-10. That's it. The thing is, I've did it a dozen times before finally deciding to stop on the west coast to board a 747 first. The length of flights over the pacific are enough to cause even sane people to go nutz. It's really an ugly experience, even in the relative comfort of a 747.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
I just hope they design these things to be secure (however you do that) against hijacking. Imagine what a supersonic plane or two could do to a city... ouch. Well, hopefully we'll get flying cars and floating highways soon that allow people to spread out more and not be so concentrated in cities.
You know, those Super Doors :o
just a song before I go
a lesson to be learned
traveling twice the speed of sound
it's easy to get burned.
Some are afraid, but I noticed with both the Spider-Man and Hulk series, nuclear stuff was the cause of those characters in the comic books, but in the movies the thing that caused the damage was the "fear" of the time, bio-engineering. In other words, people were afraid of nuclear stuff back then, now they are more afraid of bio-engineering stuff.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Let's see here. A news item about Japan. What shall we do? Pick one:
1. Hentai joke
2. Godzilla, Rodan, or Mothra joke
3. Mecha (giant robot) joke
4. Pearl Harbour reference
5. Rice reference
6. Irrelevant mention of India stealing our jobs
Choose one, choose them all.
The windshear must be murder.
... assuming you can live through it.
I mean, you'd get to work and your corpse would be naked from having all the clothes ripped off.
Actually, I suspect that its an even better ratio with the MTA (New York City subway.) 8 million riders per day at $2.00 per ride, its bound to be worth the trip
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
We could send people from Nebraska to Beijing in a half-hour AND solve the ICBM stockpiling problem!
This is one of the most hilarious "they" boogeymen I've seen lately. Yeah, "Boeing supporters" will probably try to silence your extremely profound "the technology exists, 'they' (another they??) just need to optimize it" observation.
Similarly, Boeing lackeys have stifled my own "The technology to live underwater exists, they just need to optimize it" and "The technology to colonize the moon exists, they just need to optimize it" arguments. Boeing sees how underwater living would obviate the need for air travel. They've set their astroturf posters loose on Slashdot to keep me quiet. It's, like, censorship...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
and do it anywhere on earth that requires the deliverable.
Supersonic speed is S-L-O-W compared to light speed.
What keeps me commuting every damn day is that my manager INSISTS on my showing up at the office.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
17 hours with a one-hour stop in either Honolulu or Fiji in the middle of the night (nothing open), and a full plane. I haven't done it, but IIRC the longest such flight is New York to Johannesburg - 18 hours?
IMHO the only advantage of flying over the bus is that the total travel time is shorter, and the passengers (slightly) less smelly, though the air in a bus is usually fresher than that in an airliner. The seats are equally bad - maybe worse in an airplane. And I've never been bounced around in a bus to the point where people threw up!
Where possible, I like trains. The seats are (usually, at least in the US) bigger, more comfortable and have much more legroom. I have room to move, I can get up and walk around, hang out in a different car to work or play cards, go to dinner with real forks, knives and plates and perhaps a good bottle of wine, and even pay extra and have a real bed. Trains, when reasonably well stocked with passengers, is supposedly the second most energy efficient method of moving people after bicycles - better even than walking.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I would like to be able to afford to ride the ship. a rocketship at 65K feet is not really that exciting, but it is going to plenty expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What a joke. You cannot even develop a new toilet seat on that budget.
Someone who doesn't like him probably got mod points. And think about it, you're dealing with teenagers here, can you get more petty and vindictive? And just to prove my point, this post will get modded troll.
I'm an aviation buff and pilot, so naturally I agree with you that supersonic travel for the masses is a desirable goal.
The one constant about flight that you can depend on is that airspeed is inversely proportional to the amount of fuel you burn -- the faster you go, the more fuel you're burning for less increases in speed. This is why airliners almost *NEVER* fly at their maximum cruise speed...they fly at the airspeed that will get them to their destination using the least amount of expensive Jet-A.
Efficiency increases in the development of jet engines has mostly stalled and now the airline manufacturers are focusing on materials to improve efficiency (i.e. the Boeing 7E7 long-range aircraft).
The free market will decide the type of planes people will travel on. This is why Concorde is no longer flying. As beautiful as she was, she was a government project funded by European tax payers developed only for the purpose of showing European ingenuity and technological innovation. I would have loved to have flown in Concorde, but the airplane never recouped the billions spent developing/maintaining her. The project was a net loss -- big time.
Perhaps there is some future in Scramjet/Ramjet engines, but in today's market with high fuel prices it's all about fuel consumption per passenger per mile.
After my last trip from Miami to Australia I got curious about the longest scheduled airline flight these days. It seems that as of last summer there's a Newark-to-Singapore flight, SQ 21, that lasts 18 hours and 35 minutes non-stop on a stripped-down (no first class!) Airbus 340-500. (The return, SQ 22, is a bargain at only 18:25.) The distance is 9534 statute miles (8285 nautical miles); the article is in error on this.
Of course, things were worse in the old days. There used to be 21-23 hour nonstop flights from London to the U.S. west coast on Lockheed L-1649A Super Constellation Starliners (see Starliner if you'd like to buy your own), but perhaps the all-time record is held by KLM:
I rather doubt that the bus ever makes it up to ~65MPH in typical use, though. Most city busses spend there time in the 30-40MPH range, I'd guess. Maybe charter/tour busses?
Busses and Toyotas aside, the "new Concorde" still compares poorly to ordinary aircraft. A Boeing 747-400, at 416 passengers and 0.85 Mach, yields 489 passengers/mach.
On the other hand, the more useful Mach*passenger metric, as proposed by someone else in this discussion, would put the 747-400 at 353 passenger-Machs, making it less, umm, "efficient" than this new jet (600 passenger-Machs) but more than the old Concorde (100 passengers at Mach 2, or 200 passenger-Machs.)
I can only hope you're correct. We could switch a large part of our fossil-fuel-based infrastructure over to nuclear very quickly (in civil engineering terms) if we weren't scared to. Sadly, those who object loudly to burning fossil fuels almost always propose some alternative that's not really practical (doesn't scale, or isn't on-demand power, or can only be deployed in limited locations), and condemn nuclear. That, or they are simply more interested in making a political/fashion statement by complaining loudly about SUVs than they are in practical solutions to real problems.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Or worse yet, what if you had AIDS from unprotected gay sex? What if you had to wait for the much needed treatments that are so readily available in the United States? This should matter A LOT for this poor soul, who must be considered an at risk person due to the constant ass-thrusting he receives on a daily basis from his dad.
There are many routes to a destination. Given a semi-decently designed network the routing would simply redirect passengers through a different line, very much like packetised data. You could take out lines here and there and it would maybe cause a bit of delay and congestion but it would otherwise continue functioning. I mean you could build a pod which could travel at 100mph, 2,400 miles/day.
The problem with the idea is actually passenger comfort and vehicle weight for very long distance travel.
You'd have to have a vehicle a bit like a trailer/caravan with a bed, toilet, shower, TV etc. The weight of the vehicle would be a couple of tonnes which means the infrastructure would have to be able to cope, which means it'd be expensive to build the infrastructure so you're back to the train/sleeper services.
Deleted
You can't fly the concord at full speed over the continental united states
Is this reallythe case? What exactly is it about a gentle rumble of distant thunder that people find so objectionable? The scare stories about a trail of broken windows and burst eardrums is bullshit. SST flights across land are banned only because of politics - the US would have allowed it if it was their bird that was up there doing it. Military low-level supersonic flights on the other hand, well that's quite another story.
The most controversial part of the DC-3 was the straight wing reentry design. Straight wing craft famously had stability problems at hypersonic speeds (fatalities in the Bell X-2, one of Chuck Yeager's more harrowing moments as a test pilot). Faget's take on the straight wing is that his vehicle would pancake in on reetry so the straight wing profile was like taking a cookie cutter to the Mercury heat shield profile, and Faget knew how to make that stable. The only scary part was making a transition from this pancake entry to gliding flight at subsonic speed.
As to the cost and the less-than-reusable compromises, I think there is a major chicken-and-egg problem with developing a reusable spacecraft. Jerry Pournelle and his DC-X friends notwithstanding, it would probably take 10-20 billion to develop such a craft if you were on a development path with no surprises -- similar costs are required to launch a new airliner. You then would have to amortize that development cost over x number of flights, and the problem is that the payloads aren't there. If you could drive the cost down, there may be a "if you build it, they will come effect" -- at a low enough cost, people would think of all kinds of creative uses for low-Earth orbit. But given that most of the commercial payloads go to geosynchronous orbit, you would need an expendable upper stage or perhaps an aero-braking transfer stage, and you are talking another 10-20 billion to develop that, and the volumes just aren't there.
The deal is that the Shuttle is a commercial failure, but if you read Jenkins book and see the size of the fully-reusable booster-orbiter designs, if we had gone ahead and built one of those, it may have been an even bigger failure.
Perhaps the most pragmatic proposal I have heard to drive launch costs down would be to decide on an expendable booster, order enough of them to keep a production line open, and just keep flying the things, boosting cement into orbit if you don't have any payloads (or perhaps you could boost stuff like water and steel into the orbit of a space station and make the purpose of the space station to see what you could do with all of this stuff in orbit). The idea is that you could drive the cost of low-Earth orbit enough that a market for payloads would develop which in turn would spark the development of a reusable system.
As it is, we can't seem to get over the hump of enough LEO payloads for economy of scale to kick in.
The earth was in a slow warming stage prior to the industrial revolution.
CO2 levels have be going up steadily, CO2 is a greenhouse gas but accounts for a small percentage or the greenhouse effect in earths atmosphere (by far the largest greenhouse gas is water vapor).
Statistical data showing an recent increase in the rate of warming is questionable, there is no consensus there.
The key question is at what rate will the small increase in temperature attributable to industrial activity contribute to increases in water vapor in the atmosphere (positive feedback, still more heat). That is the modelers fudge factor that allows computer models to produce any result desired by the investigator (as all models do). Back casting should be the primary activity of climate modelers (being the first one with a validated model would/should be valuable but for the ilnumeracy and lack of science eduaction among the public). Not trying to get on the evening news with predictions of doom.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As to the practicality of fission-powered aircraft, I'm not convinced it's as practical as you make out. Building a reactor that has a sufficient power-to-weight ratio to make the plane perform acceptably, and is sufficiently shielded that a crashed one wouldn't pose a radiation hazard, would seem to me to be a considerable challenge that hasn't changed all that much since the 1950's. Materials science has improved considerably, but not *that* much.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Now, if people start acting more rationally about "terrorist threats" we might have shorter security-lines as well. Machine-readable passports and electronic tickets also help get through to a flight faster.
They are about the size of a learjet. If the USAF retired them, could some wily entrepenuer buy them up, remove the bomb-racks, put in some windows an comfy chairs, and turn them into supersonic executive jets?
And if the passenger is unruly, those bomb-bay would sure come in useful.
The Russians built something comparable. If the USAF won't auction off their jets maybe the Russians will auction of theirs.
Part of the expense is making something fully reusable, and another part of the expense is making something big. Some things have to be big if they are to do any useful work at all.
I am wondering if the DC-3 was small enough to compensate for the cost of fully reusable. Of all of the should-haves and could-haves, there is the matter of blaming Nixon for the current Shuttle instead of a true reusable, but if the fully-reusable and full-payload Shuttle would have been a white elephant, you can't blame Nixon on that one. The decision to not go with the DC-3 was made much earlier on.
One of the questions is what you do with a shuttle. I guess the DC-3 ideas was that you hauled supplies up to a space station, and you don't need a 60,000 lb payload capacity to bring up milk, tea, water, and TV dinners.
Please tell me this is a troll.
_ C.all You'll see that the raw data and you can see there is very little to indicate a warming. The data goes up and down, with overall a tiny positive trend but not significant.
If you can PROVE Global Warning beyond a doubt just as the laws of physics are, then do so, otherwise shut up about it.
The laws of physics aren't proven beyond a doubt. In fact, quantum physics and general relativity outright contradict each other -- does this mean that all physicists should just "shut up about it"?
When we have a planet that is 4 BILLION years old and we have a record of perhaps 1-5 Million years, that is NOT significant.
Global warming is a short-term phenomenon, on the order of centuries or even decades. The life of the planet is an irrelevent time scale.
Also look at this chart: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/land_o
a) Do you even know how much change per decade is considered "significant"? (clue: obviously not, given the quote you used just before this)
b) I look at that chart, and the numbers are overwhelmingly positive since 1979
atmospheric CO2 levels do not fit changes in the CET [Central England Temperature] at all well
So what? Global warming is defined as the change in the global average temperature. CET is irrelevant. Some places in the world are actually cooling currently, but that doesn't change the fact that the world, on average, is warming.
And the amount that the world's climate is changing coincides very closely with our current models of CO2's effect on the atmosphere (along with all other climate forcings such as sunspots and volcano eruptions).
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Bill Weaver : SR-71 BREAKUP
Among professional aviators, there's a well-worn saying: Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. And yet, I don't recall too many periods of boredom during my 30-year career with Lockheed, most of which was spent as a test pilot. By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966. Jim Zwayer, a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist, and I were evaluating those systems on an SR-71 Blackbird test from Edwards AFB, Calif. We also were investigating procedures designed to reduce trim drag and improve high-Mach cruise performance. The latter involved flying with the center-of-gravity (CG) located further aft than normal, which reduced the Blackbird's longitudinal stability. We took off from Edwards at 11:20 a.m. and completed the mission's first leg without incident. After refueling from a KC-135 tanker, we turned eastbound, accelerated to a Mach 3.2-cruise speed and climbed to 78,000 ft., our initial cruise-climb altitude. Several minutes into cruise, the right engine inlet's automatic control system malfunctioned, requiring a switch to manual control. The SR-71's inlet configuration was automatically adjusted during supersonic flight to decelerate air flow in the duct, slowing it to subsonic speed before reaching the engine's face. This was accomplished by the inlet's center-body spike translating aft, and by modulating the inlet's forward bypass doors. Normally, these actions were scheduled automatically as a function of Mach number, positioning the normal shock wave (where air flow becomes subsonic) inside the inlet to ensure optimum engine performance. Without proper scheduling, disturbances inside the inlet could result in the shock wave being expelled forward--a phenomenon known as an "inlet unstart." That causes an instantaneous loss of engine thrust, explosive banging noises and violent yawing of the aircraft--like being in a train wreck. Unstarts were not uncommon at that time in the SR-71's development, but a properly functioning system would recapture the shock wave and restore normal operation.
On the planned test profile, we entered a programmed 35-deg. bank turn to the right. An immediate unstart occurred on the right engine, forcing the aircraft to roll further right and start to pitch up. I jammed the control stick as far left and forward as it would go. No response. I instantly knew we were in for a wild ride. I attempted to tell Jim what was happening and to stay with the airplane until we reached a lower speed and altitude. I didn't think the chances of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and 78,800 ft. were very good. However, g-forces built up so rapidly that my words came out garbled and unintelligible, as confirmed later by the cockpit voice recorder. The cumulative effects of system malfunctions, reduced longitudinal stability, increased angle-of-attack in the turn, supersonic speed, high altitude and other factors imposed forces on the airframe that exceeded flight control authority and the Stability Augmentation System's ability to restore control. Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride. My next recollection was a hazy thought that I was having a bad dream. Maybe I'll wake up and get out of this mess, I mused. Gradually regaining consciousness, I realized this was no dream; it had really happened. That also was disturbing, because I could not have survived what had just happened. Therefore, I must be dead. Since I didn't feel bad--just a detached sense of euphoria--I decided being dead wasn't so bad after all. AS FULL AWARENESS took hold, I realized I was not dead, but had somehow separated from the airpla
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
If this isn't a wake up call, then give up. Airlines wonder why they are going bankrupt? Their product has not changed since the 60's and guess what? When a product dosen't change it becomes a commodity (Marketing 101 for those MBA's that skipped that day) The airline industry has done a great job with safety, but NOTHING to innovate, sounds a lot like Detroit....Wake up Seattle!