Slashdot Mirror
Brits To Crash Test a Scramjet
hywel_ap_ieuan writes "The BBC is reporting that a the "Hyshot consortium" will be testing a scramjet called Hyshot III in Australia on Friday. The fun part: "If everything goes to plan, the experiment will begin at a height of 35 km. As the engine continues its downward path the fuel in the scramjet is expected to automatically ignite. The scientists will then have just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground.""
Perhaps they could team up with some Earth Sciences researchers doing work on crater formation...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
All expeirements should end in some kind of explosion! What good is being a scienctist if you don't get to blow shit up?!?
> "If everything goes to plan, the experiment will begin at a height of 35 km. As the engine continues its downward path the fuel in the scramjet is expected to automatically ignite. The scientists will then have just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground."
Revised for 2006: "We'll settle for one out of three these days... as long as you have a hell of a lot of it to compensate."
Then again, the British did usher in the passener jet age with the Comet.
ScramJet is the work of Australians Ray Stalker and Allan Paull who achieved the phenomenon with a budget of tins cans, string and glue whilst Nasa failed with a team of hundreds and a 9 figure budget.
and that will be obvious after my question........
but couldn't they build it to survive impact into the ocean, and then retrieve it?
I seem to remember the US space program doing this when they first went to the moon. And that man who singlehandedly built the rocket and went to the moon. What was his name? Apollo Creed? Anyways Tom Hanks was really great in that movie. Forest Gump I think it was.
On its descent the engine is expected to reach a top speed of Mach 7.6 or over 9,000km/ hour.
I think crash is a bit of an understatement!
This has been done before, at Woomera test range. The University of Queensland launched HyShot in 2002, and had a major success.
. htm
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/hyshot/default
i realize everyone thinks they're cute by making cracks about how we don't want to test planes by crashing them, but it's actually pretty awesome that we're to the point where we can get all of the info we need about in-flight stuff in just 6 seconds, and that we don't have to worry about making the plane able to land in order to test the engine. it should speed up development time, and who knows, maybe a plane flight to tokyo won't put you in danger of deep vein thrombosis. =p
good job, brits.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I'm sure they could suggest hundreds of places where they'd like to see a new crater. Two birds with one stone 'n' all that.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
his worst job ever ...
I heard Donald Trump is trying to volunteer the current wife now that she has given birth. Time to move on ....
... the inventor of this plan had with the senior manager in control of the budget:
"So let's see, in short your plan is to fly a plane up to 35 kilometers in height above the mainland of Australia, switch off the engine, let it drop down with a highly experimental engine - this 'scramjet' - that you suppose would then go off automatically and accelerate the vehicle to a phenomenal speed, finishing it all off with a nice crash of that same million dollar plane into the ground ?"
"Oh yeah mate, blimey, that's it - you got it in one row !"
"You ever done this before ?"
"Nah, if I would ave, I wouldn't be standing here mate, eh ?"
"And this 'scramjet', it would ignite automatically ?"
"Sure, that's what the manual says anyhow"
"And while it sores over our Australian mainland with this high velocity, and when it enters the ground in the final stage, it would not have reached any, say, 'populated' areas?"
"Nah mate, only a couple'a'dingos probably. Everything should be fine, unless things go wrong, but that's why we're testing eh, aye?"
"You're absolutely right, I guess... Here's your money, and now don't screw up !"
"Sure thing, won't screw up, and I will tell the same to the monkey that drives the controls ! Cheers mate !"
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
(Hydrogen-fuelled ramjets are useless above Mach 5, but that's about when the scramjet should ignite, so you really wouldn't need a whole lot of additional acceleration at that point. If they've got the ignition point within the limit, you could even switch directly from one to the other.)
The other thing I don't like is that this is destructive testing. It's inescapable, given the approach they're using, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Their data collection has to be wireless, since no recording device is going to survive a mach 7 impact, but wireless is relatively slow. This means that they're going to be limited in what they can collect - what parameters, what accuracy, what resolution, etc.
Normally, this wouldn't matter a great deal. But we're talking mach 7 speeds in a far denser atmosphere than most existing hypersonic travel (such as the shuttle re-entry) have taken place in. I believe there have been two successful scramjet flights in the past, so we have a little information on what happens under those conditions, but it seems somewhat... brave... if they are assuming they can interpolate between the few data points they'll be able to collect -and- extrapolate beyond the six seconds of flight.
Again, I'm sure they have their reasons, but for novel engines under novel conditions, I'd have thought that getting as much data as humanly possible would be worth almost any additional effort.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
it can only be deemed a failure if it *doesn't* crash? -- jeek
Heck at Mach 7.6 it's probably enough to smash an atom. Just duct tape some uranium to the tip and off you go.
It's probably cheaper than _not_ making it crash. They would have to add skids, a parachute, or something else to it for any type of landing, and that would add mass and cost, and probably make the test less accurate. They would also have to test these additional components. This way they won't have to pay for disposal or storage when they're done with it.
Of course, those savings would be negated if they somehow hit something 'expensive'...
-M
Until MythBusters decides to try this one!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Scrambledjet
The third one burned down, fell over, then crashed into the ground. But the fourth one stayed up!
The summary suggests, that the engine will be lifted 35km off the ground and dropped.
The article states, that it will be lifted 330km above the ground and dropped, with ingnition expected to occur at an altitude of 35km, after which, only 6 seconds would be left, before the engine hits the ground.
Do you see a comment by "heatdeath" responded to by "LiquidCoooled."
Computational Chemistry products and services.
I always wondered hwo thre going to cut the flight time from the UK to Australia.
looks like ther planning on taking the direct route....
It should be an awefully short video!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
However scramjets do not begin to work until they reach five times the speed of sound.
All scramjets, including this one, use rockets to get the engine up to speed - scramjets don't work at subsonic speeds.
They're trying to test an engine design here. Would you rather have them spend 200M building a whole craft to test an engine that's likely to be used only once? They're a long way from an anything that could actually be used for something practical, so cheapest is best as long as it moves the ball forward.
once we can build a reliable ramjet trhat can be reused, it could go into commercial airlines.
which mean in order to compete, they will need to by more of these planes, which means more jobs, and probably far more them 1million in taxes.
People probably said the same thing about the Moon Launch, but we have returned over 15 dollars for every dollar spent in taxes on the new industries the Moon program created.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds like a British project to me :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
... 'cos we've never left anyone up there yet.
Wow. I don't know where to begin. Oh, I know- how about the fact that NASA DID NOT FAIL(article is from 2004, by the way- and they hit Mach 10).
before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground
A million British Pounds is US$1.7 million, which would put it firmly in the "seven figures" realm for JUST THE ENGINE. So I would think it would be reasonable to assume that eight figures ($10M) have been spent on the project in total.
Lastly- the Aussies benefited quite a bit from research NASA has made over the last couple of DECADES...
Please help metamoderate.
It sounds as if they are attempting to find a true replacement for the Concorde.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Begin test in 3...2...1... START!
-At-choo!
-Dude, WTF? Hit the RECORD BUTTON!
-What?
*CRASH*
-Ah, nevermind.
Not only that, but Australians aren't Brits, and to be specific, the scientists will have 29 seconds before the crash to examine data (6 seconds of actual burn starting at 35 miles, 23 seconds later the thing will plow into the ground). But it does start out on a rocket- they're dropping it from 100 miles up to get the proper speed for the scramjet to operate.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You would have to use something other than ducktape. As we all know, ducktape is sufficent to contain a nuclear explosion!
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
Those crashed into the ocean anyway, so they might as well take advantage of gravity.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Imagine the consequences if they confused meters with metres !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If such a vehicle is launched at an angle towards the Earth, it would have a gravitational assist, that, with steering motors, could be used for an inverted slingshot effect, to launch a payload at escape velocity, expending (and needing) less fuel than would be nessesary for orbit. It would have the effect of using a hypersonic ramp for launch.
Are there any real rocket scientists out there who can correct/disprove my hypothesis?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This needs to be on an episode of Mythbusters...so they have something else to blow up or crash
If everything goes to plan, the experiment will begin at a height of 35km.
I wonder if the team declined to comment on what might happen if "everything goes to hell."
Well actually, the headline says 1m pounds, so wouldn't that be 1 milli-pound?
The engineering behind the ramjet and scramjet couldn't be any more different. Ramjets are basically scramjet engines that purposefully slow the air intake so that combustion can occur. In a scramjet the big problem is that the air is moving so fast that when you ignite the fuel/air mixture, the combustion will actually take place outside the engine. It would be ridiculous to slow the air, so the problem lies in how you get the mixture to ignite sooner. To this end they are testing ionizing mixtures, etc. Some scramjet geometries are highly classified.
Here's a good link that talks about the combustion issue: http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-4/p24.htm l
And of course some general information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
... the crash doesn't awaken the green ants. I still have things I want to do!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
(They can't necessarily get the internal info from a one second test in a wind tunnel and I can't see how they can get the external info at all by that method. Computational Fluid Dynamics is messy for turbulant flow, is very messy when you've a mix of hypersonic, supersonic, transsonic and subsonic airflows in the same system, and is a menace to the brain when you've no obvious way of knowing what the numbers are even supposed to look like.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anything worth doing can be done in 6 seconds! ;)
... Windows 98. No, seriously, think about it:
The scientists will then have just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground.
Replace the word "scientists" with "consumers", "£1m" with "$5b", and "engine" with "OS." Also, add the phrase "If it boots," before the statement.
Latewire
Tonight we will be testing the myth that "At high speeds, an object can pass through the earth" as brought to popularity by the series Stargate.
... story continues above.
To do this we will be
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Like what?
Basic science and engineering research is cheap, and the dividends are colossal.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yeah, I first read this headline as "Birds to crash test a scramjet", and man, I thought... those birds should be flying pretty high up!
A colleague of mine is the project manager for the HyShot trial. It is being conducted at the Australian Defence Force's Woomera test and evaluation range and shooting north-west across the Australian desert.
Woomera and nearby areas has a long history of trials; several British designed rockets were trialled there, and several satellites were launched to earth orbit. Maralinga was one Australian site of British atom bomb tests in the late '40s and '50s.
HyShot is intended to be recovered, but it is a large area in which it might land. Watch this space!
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
And yet, when I tried to apply this in my Biology labs, the professors got REAL cranky...
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The word you want is DUCT as in DUCT tape. Of course there is a company called "Duck" that makes "Duck Tape" which is actually duct tape, which no doubt adds to the confusion.
Yes, Duct tape can contain nucular explosions. Duct tape can be used for anything*!
* except taping ducts; it's no good at all for that.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I wonder what they do if they can't set up the video or forget to push the record button? Six seconds before the person is out of a job?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Are they also going to try to find out what happens when you fling a frozen chicken at the windshield?
And the brethren went away edified.
Two ramjets wouldn't be cheap, but it would cost a lot less than one scramjet plus rocket. So, if we assume the "next run" would also collect 4-6 seconds of data if it's on a purely parabolic orbit, then your ramjets might only need to add another 3-4 seconds of data to pay for themselves. Because the descent path would be very much stretched out (you now need gravity to sustain the engine's speed, not to accelerate it), it should be easy to add at least that much to the data collection time. Possibly more.
If you can add a whole 6 seconds to the actual scramjet burn time, you've eliminated the need for an entire run (as you've that much more data) and have data on how the engine alters over a longer period of time, which could avoid the sorts of design errors which have led to other scramjets failing to start at all. (NASA's first scramjet failed to ignite by the time it impacted, for example.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All scramjets, including this one, use rockets to get the engine up to speed.
Not this one.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
You misspelt Holy Shit. Thanks
do you see someone notice something like that...
Wisest is he who knows he does not know.
Surely they'd be able to try and get the engine to *move* during those 6 seconds and maybe gain altitude? What is stopping them from trying to get the engine out of a nosedive, especially at 1M pounds/unit?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
It is remarkable how similar the intended future use for scramjet technology is to that described in a Philip K Dick novel by the name of Man in the High Castle, namely passenger airliners and space travel. The extremely fast ascent, followed by a relatively brief period in the lower stratosphere, and finally another period of intense speed, this time descending towards the relevant destination. Of course, in the novel the "Rocket ships" described are probably intended as an evolution of the V1/V2 bombs used in World War 2, a technology very different from scramjets - and completely neglectful of the potentially massive chemical costs per launch far outweighing even the most ostentatious of passenger fares :) . But even so, the similarity in timeframe description and such is remarkable considering the V2 was little more than a predecessor to the SCUD missile, and that scramjet tech was unheard of at the time of writing (1962).
Once again, sci fi has "predicted" a potential new technology, though it isn't surprising as it has occured since the dawn of the genre. H.G. Wells predicted something resembling an atomic bomb, aswell as tanks during Edwardian times. It would be interesting to examine trends in developing technology, to see whether the cause and effect correlation with sci fiction predictions is beyond the aesthetic. We can already observe that many aesthetic features of say, some of Star Trek's technology, has made its way into the modern technology of today. Eg. The flip communicators -> mobile phones etc.
That's going to cost in a number of ways, but perhaps the most obvious is interference. The atmosphere has become very very noisy. This doesn't affect satellite communication much, precisely because you're working on a directional system. (You also don't have a sodding big scramjet blasting ionised gas out the back.) If you're having to collect any and every signal in the general direction of the engine, you're going to get a LOT more gunk, which is going to cap the speed well below what you could get under better conditions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's interesting to note that paull has used some of his new budget to get some kind of conical metal prosthesis added to his chin, one can only assume that this is intented to improve his aerodynamics.
g /_41471360_paull_230b.jpg
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41471000/jp
The launch has been delayed until Saturday 25 March (Central Australian time.) See my earlier entry.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
It weighs a million pounds!? No wonder the thing is expected to crash after six seconds.
Galileo proved that weight has nothing to do with it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
<jamz> hmm
<jamz> I have a bottle of waterless hand cleaner
<jamz> for car work and grease and stuff.
<jamz> It's almost empty.
<jamz> So, in order to stretch it out, I added some water to it.
<jamz> In retrospect, not the smartest thing to do.
<dan0_> this had better end with an explosion of some kind
<jamz> and there was a huge explosion that could be seen from space.
http://www.bash.org/?88661
I don't get it.
We're not, but the Qinetiq engine being tested tomorrow (supposed to be today, but delayed due to bad weather) is British.
The HyShot program is an international effort coordinated by several Australian universities, but particularly the University of Queensland, with testing performed at Woomera rocket range in South Australia. In another four days, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) engine will be tested and in June, our own Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) version will be fired up. That one's expected to go past Mach 10.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Do you realize that hypersonic wind tunnels routinely test thier models for what amounts to a maximum of around 8 seconds?
Given that they can collect tons of data within those 8 seconds to do real, pratical measurements that they then extrapolate over the relatively (but longer) durations of missle flight, etc. I'd wager that the 6 seconds of scramjet powered flight won't pose much of a problem for the data gathering phase.
But don't believe me, just check Slashdot's January (2006) posting about the relatively silent (aka laminar wind flow) mach 6 wind tunnel put together at Perdue. It is vacuum driven, with only 8 seconds of measurements per run, and nobody seemed to be upset about that at all.
Mod you as troll for bashing Windows?
You must be new here.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Mate this IS the research NASA has been doing for the last couple of decades, seem my previous message re: taking credit...
You never catch me alive
When he wrote: "Flying is the art of being able to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Yes, a scramjet is an utterly useless device for transportation of human civilians. The vast majority of people can't handle the (very) mild forces experienced in a 747 - let alone a plane which will achieve Mach 7.
Imagine it: 2 Gravities by rocket to the edge of the atmosphere. Switch to scramjet such that the plane skips out of the atmosphere, and then engage the scramjets again when the plane gets back into the breathable stuff... 2 minutes of 2G acceleration, followed by 2 minutes of free fall... yeah.... 95% of peeps would be throwing up violently within the first two minutes, and that would be the lucky (sedated!) ones.
So, the only time the toilet on the plane is accessible is on the final glide in to landing. Half the time the toilet is unreachable, and the other half it's out of order. :P
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
The picture is awesome, by the way.
Yeah! I mean, that's long enough to perform an utterance sufficient to rewrite the laws of physics with enough time left to move 30 feet.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
So how is this different than say, dropping a rock?
Well, if they have to crash the plane, so be it. Maybe they can finance it by selling the publicity rights to someone...
YES! Sounds great! Sign me up! I'll make sure and wear old clothes!
Ever since I took up hang gliding I can't help grinning when there's turbulence on a plane. People getting that sick worried look... turbulence hanging off something built with the same construction materials as a good pup tent!
Supposing two planes carried it together....
I hear they're paying the test pilot quite a lot. Here's a picture of his car.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Everyone looks at me funny when I throw up my hands and say "Woo" everytime there's a good bump. Or maybe it's my disappointed look afterward when the turbulance fails to meet with my excitement expectation...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
huh? are you saying it'll be like 6 minutes to travel to anywhere then? I think people would put up with the nausea for that kind of time savings.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I know what you mean. I get the same looks when the captain comes on the intercom to promise turbulence and I get a big grin on my face, then I demand my money back when the turbulence fails to materialize.
Umm, did they think about pointing it upwards? Oh wait, it's happening in Australia. I don't know whether to think this is the Australians' doing, or the Brits' for having their up-vector aligned with the North Pole.
LOL. They screwed up a CRASH test? Did it fly off-course and make a successful landing?
I didn't think purposely crashing experimental was "proper" behaviour. It sounds so objectionable, so unpardonable. Surely this course of action only comes from those ill-mannered individuals with poor upbringing.
Make the flight expensive enough and eventually you'll find enough rich human civilians who will actually pay for it. Good marketing helps, too.
Surely that's why bird feathers crash into earth regularly ;-)
Galilei's result only holds if there's no air, or if air resistance can be neglected. When taking air resistance into account, the speed goes aup to a final value which depends, beside others, on the weight. In air, heavier things indeed fall faster.
Not to mention that the GP post was a joke anyway, which makes your comment a bit besides the point.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
On any of these flights, has the scramjet accelerated the aircraft?
I've been under the impression that so far all they've really been doing is trying to sustain supersonic combustion, and remember that after one flight it was going to take a lot of effort reading the telemetry to see if any thrust had been produced.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Never mind the ground it's bird strike I'm worried about!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
This is the sort of attitude that allowing your children to watch Mythbusters will foment. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence.
Huh? What? Ropes? Zzzzzzz.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I've talked to a lead engineer on a NASA/DARPA scramjet project that hasn't made many headlines (intentionally.) There is a way to get a scramjet to develop thrust at 0 speed. I suspect it involves a very long tube that has a backwards-directed jet at the front, to make the air moving through the tube run at scramjet speeds. Once the thing gets off the ground and up to speed, they start injecting fuel at the front, where the jet is. The problem is that at these speeds you can't get the fuel and the air to mix sufficiently before they're out of the back of the craft, which necessitates long combustion/mixing paths (and use of hydrogen as a fuel because it disperses faster.) Once you have a long combustion path you might as well use the remainder of it, at low speeds.
The person to whom I was speaking wouldn't answer *any* questions about developing thrust at 0 speed, but from the other questions I'd asked, I'd gotten a good feel of the geometry and design of the project, and I know that people have used jets to light up other jet and ramjet engines in the past.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Have been tested in the '80's. I spent an interesting afternoon talking to a NASA engineer who was working on an American scramjet that got very little publicity. It was hydrogen-fueled and it "worked" (was all I really got from him.) He mentioned that the Russians were also testing scramjets and contrasted their techniques: the Americans built fantastic test suites and had all this fancy instrumentation but were having a lot of troubles actually getting the scramjets tested. The Russians were launching theirs on rockets from Poland and their instrumentation consisted of where the crash site was: if it hit within 200 miles of launch, the scramjet hadn't worked, but if it hit Siberia it had. Apparently they were consistently hitting Siberia with what they were running at the time. Both systems used hydrogen as the fuel. The Americans were presuming that the Soviets were doing the same thing they were and using hydrogen slush, a mix of solid and liquid, and forcing it through the nose of the scramjet to simultaneously cool it off and prevent it burning off, and also vaporize the H2 into burnable fuel. They used hydrogen because their primary limitation was the diffusion of fuel into oxygen: at the speeds this was designed to run (I think I recall hearing Mach 20 in the conversation) they were having a lot of trouble getting sufficient mixing for combustion to occur within the craft structure.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I was all like; WTF? Why have a story about some Brits crashing a Scanjet?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
So let me get this straight: The new and highly advanced $1.7 million (USD) scramjet that took 3 decades to develop only works going downhill??
Um. I'll pass...
Oh wait, this was developed by Aussies? Well that makes sense. They live on the bottom of the world, so the plane thought it was climbing. Yeah, that must be it.
No. I'll still pass...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
"I wanna explore the far reaches of aerodynamics and materials science, and discover flight characteristics that have never been discovered!"
"Look, you're British, scale it down a bit, all right?"
Only if it is 1/1000th of a pound (off my head, not 100% sure thats correct at the moment).
1 million pounds would be 1 megapound? Something like that maybe.
Ugh, I just realized I missed the point of your post. Making my response just plain stupid.
Or are you saying the other jet is attached to the front of the scramjet. That doesn't make sense to me, as all the oxygen would be gone from the air as it entered the scramjet.
The latter: you fire one jet down the throat of the second jet. You run the first one significantly lean so that you're only burning a small fraction of the available oxygen, the remainder of which is burnt in the second jet. You use high pressure and, presumably, combustion chamber geometry or possibly even resonant pulses to make sure that the thrust from the first jet is primarily backwards, then constrict the duct to increase the speed to the point where the compression conditions are right for the second jet. Once you get the whole thing off the ground and moving at a reasonable rate, you stop injecting at the back and just inject at the front. Presumably you'd have to reconfigure your exhaust chamber geometry. He was not keen on giving me lots of details, but really wanted to talk about the project.
By the way, piston engines only use a fraction of the oxygen from the air that passes through them, and turbofans used on commercial jetliners use maybe only 5% of the oxygen, if that. Pure turbojets use more of the available oxygen but not, as I recall, all of it.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
the engine doesn't "cost" a million bucks
these things should be pretty cheap to build
it may have cost a million bucks to develop it, but replacing it should be wicked cheap
now...building the booster rocket and launching the whole mess...that's an expensive proposition
An' change yer name to Bruce. It's less confusin' that way.
On the other hand, if you put a lightweight scramjet with waverider airfoil in the shuttle payload bay, then flung that into a survivable re-entry trajectory, it might work. The waverider would simply glide until the engine ignited and would then resume gliding once the burn had finished.
In the end, this is what they'll be building to carry any cargo/people anyway, and modular testing only goes so far on a mechanical system.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The news stories are fine and all that, but they miss out on the facts. The science journals do the facts, but have no context. An intrepid Slashdottian Reporter, "on the scene", would be able to cover the sorts of things that just don't get reported. Because Slashdot journals are updated faster than news websites, there's a chance you could even get the scoop on what happens.
(I'm not pressing for a strict story, as it's so unpredictable as to what'll make it through the queue - unless CmdrTaco talls you to mail him the story direct - and I believe that if you can put something together, it'd be the most important news story on ANY tech/geek site.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can't find if someone has said it here already, but... the media has reported that HyShot it was a successful flight and trial.
Also, unlike other comments here, you'll notice that the rocket went (not to 35km altitude) to around 300 kilometres. The joke in our office among the trial managers has been that the HyShot team was trying NOT to shoot down the International Space Station (see my earlier comment). It appears that they also succeeded in this aim. (And, before anyone asks... yes, there is an international coordination of all such launches and they DO get a 'launch window' time when the rocket is unlikely to hit anything.)
Well done to the Space Cadets!
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Dijaroo?
You mean a Didgeridoo?
Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo