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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."
This was seen in the skies over Tokyo in the 1960s. At least the beak is the same.
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?!
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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.
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?
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.
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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You would rather they tested it over a populated area? It's the closest land area to Japan where they could test. Tests over the ocean might result in a loss of the vehicle, so they go to the Outback where they have lots of land with few people. Makes perfect sense.
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.
So the XF-103 was a Mach-3 project in 1956-7, a dozen years after the invention of the jet engine. It's now 2005 and there's just one country even trying to make a supersonic passenger aircraft. Sad, sad, sad.
According to Wikipedia:
However, in reality, NASA found itself with a rapidly plunging budget. Rather than trying to adapt their long-term future to their dire financial situation, they attempted to save as many of the individual projects as possible. The mission to Mars was rapidly dismissed, but the Space Station and Shuttle conserved. Eventually only one of them could be saved, so it stood to reason that a low-cost Shuttle system would be the better option, because without it a large station would never be affordable.
A number of designs were proposed, but many of them were complex and varied widely in their systems. An attempt to re-simplify was made in the form of the "DC-3" by one of the few people left in NASA with the political importance to accomplish it, Maxime Faget, who had designed the Mercury capsule, among other vehicles. The DC-3 was a small craft with a 20,000-pound (9 tonne) (or less) payload, a four-man capacity, and limited maneuverability. At a minimum, the DC-3 provided a baseline "workable" (but not significantly advanced) system by which other systems could be compared for price/performance compromises.
The defining moment for NASA was when they, in desperation to see their only remaining project saved, went to the Air Force for its blessing. NASA asked that the USAF place all of their future launches on the Shuttle instead of their current expendable launchers (like the Titan II), in return for which they would no longer have to continue spending money upgrading those designs -- the Shuttle would provide more than enough capability.
The Air Force reluctantly agreed, but only after demanding a large increase in capability to allow for launching their projected spy satellites (mirrors are heavy).
The original space shuttle was just that -- a shuttlecraft not designed to carry heavy cargo into orbit.
At the end of the Apollo era, the politicians had collectively decided to give in to the "spend the money on earth" socialist types and were cutting the budget of a program that had succeeded both politically and technically. NASA had plans to build space stations, go to Mars and also to develop new vehicles to ferry cargo and another for crew. The "DC-3" space shuttle was that.
Instead, to preserve any of it's plans, NASA had to fold in the triumvirate of new spacecraft into one, and that to accomodate the Air Force.
This, in turn, led to the "compromise" design that has plagued the Shuttle since it's inception. fourteen people have died as a result of these compromises, which are namely:
1. Solid rocket boosters. The SS is the only man-rated vehicle of any nation to use SRB's as a primary boost source.
2. Side-carried "payload" -- namely the Shuttle itself. The original DC-3 design was a top-payload vehicle much like every other manned spaceraft. However, the size of the compromiwe vehicle would have required a booster larger than the Saturn V in order to achieve LEO. This, obviously was not enable, so the side-payload "piggyback" design was created using engines on the payload itself as a source of thrust for the vehicle.
Thus, we have what we have, and it is a flying compromise built by the lwest bidder by a company no longer in business for itself (Boeing acquired North American Rockwell.)
Time for a new shuttle, and one that goes back to the original vision.
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.
... 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.
Nope, they are just going to wing it. According to the article, there aren't even any engineers on the project. Only anime artists who are concerned with making the shape "as arrow as possible".
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.