Slashdot Mirror
New Jet Engine Tested
SpaceAdmiral writes "A revolutionary new jet engine has recently been tested in Australia. It is hoped that the engine, designed by UK defense firm QinetiQ and capable of Mach 7.6, will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel. Scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engines have no moving parts and take all of the oxygen they need (to burn hydrogen fuel) from the air, allowing for larger loads than rockets which must carry oxygen for fuel."
This was covered earlier!
2 3/2011251
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/
Scramjet's are a revolutionary "new" type of engine, they have just been difficult to get from the concept to pratical stage.
From what I've seen in all those documentary films showing people testing rocket engines, they were also difficult to get from the concept to the pratical stage.
New ideas bring new challenges.
I'll make my own prediction: Some time in the future we will have unbelievably fast ocean-going vessels. They will be mostly used for passenger transport and, err, transport of goods. And warfare, of course.
Sorry, but your "coincidences" sound more like pointing out the obvious to me. It's not very difficult to foresee that strong propulsion engines would be used to transport things and people from Alice to Bob at high speed, flying at a high altitude due to advantages in air resistance. Not even for a writer in pre-airtravel times.
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating. The weight of the rocket fuel saved is less of a penalty than the increase in mass needed for structural reinforcement and insulation. Further yet, rocket fuel is cheap in bulk, it would be nearly twenty times more expensive expensive to fill it with unleaded down at the local mini-mart, scram jet fuel is expensive, even in bulk. (And we haven't even gotten to billions of dollars needed to build the aerodynamic stage.)
Scramjets are a solution looking for a problem, not an answer to any question.
And then you get stuck in traffic, customs, and luggage claim for the 5 hours after your flight. We have the real-world version of Niven's "Long Shot" - a vehicle so fast that the setup/takedown time vastly exceeded it's useful travel time, so as such it was generally useless compared to a vehicle that went a tenth as fast.
Well, I hate to spoil the party, but we already have the technology for Mach 3+ flight (since, say, 1960: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird and it's not like we've solved the problems with creating cost-efficient passenger versions of that yet.....
r ound" trip appeals it a loooooong way off.
I wouldn't be reserving those tickets for Mach 7 too soon, considering how much harder that's gonna be. Unless the return "go-one-mile-straight-up-and-then-slam-into-the-g
Super fast maglevs will be first - betchya!
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Is anyone working on quiet jet (or other fast) engines? If we want "flyign sportscars", their quiet features are more important than any other except safety. Who wants to get caught up in the "sidestream noise pollution" wars of the mid-21st Century?
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make install -not war
Yeah sure, too bad the first use of scramjets will be in missile weapons.
Why is that too bad? It's a given that the technology will be practical long before it's mature enough to be considered safe for human use. So weapons applications are guaranteed to come online first anyway.
And every dollar the military-industrial complex spends perfecting its scramjet-based weapons systems is a dollar spent on R&D towards a safe, profitable, commercial passenger scramjet.
And it will be far from the first time things have worked out this way. Good things flow out of military research all the time. From medicines to materials to machines, not a day goes by that your life has not been made better in some way courtesy of the military-industrial complex.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well if you were trying to get to Australia then it might be frustrating, but in fact two weeks on the open ocean is mighty fine. I did four weeks once and regard it as one of the best times of my entire life.
The focus of technology shifted after the space race away from physics and towards electronics (which were at the time, a serious limiting factor to a great deal of research). Most of the study of rocketry pretty much died right then and there, which is why we are still using the same space shuttles and suits many decades after their invention and application. It is only in the past few years that we have seriously begun examining rocketry and physics as a whole again. The reason this has occured is because the growth of technology, much as it is accelerating, is approaching it's glass ceiling so to speak, and is high time for another phase shift in technological focus. While it might possibly be physics (and obviously rocketry if so), it may also be Biology's turn, as indicated by the heavy interest in gene research that we have also begun to see. Chemistry hasn't been given the full interest of a generation of people in quite awhile, which is unfortunate because I would be very interested to see where it might take us. C'est la vie.