Japan Solicits NASA's Help on Supersonic Jet

An anonymous reader writes "Since the Concorde supersonic jet is now retired, Japan is looking for the next generation supersonic flight solution. Japan's space agency is planning talks with NASA next month. They are looking for a partner since they have experienced a 'string of glitches, including a nose cone problem during the latest test flight in March.'"

Comments

Cooporation is the way of the future.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

From the article:

The United States has already carried out a flight test with a scramjet engine, while the European Union, Japan, China, Russia and India are in different stages of testing their technologies.

*sighs*

Think how much money, time & effort could be saved if resources were pooled. (maybe this thing would be ready before 2025).

I guess we'll all have to learn to get along first (oh & hopefully, the cooporation will be more equal then it was on the Joint strike fighter project between Britain & the US)

Re:Cooporation is the way of the future.

[colganc]

If everything is pooled and one giant project is undertaken there is a good chance many interesting and novel solutions to supersonice transportation might not be discovered. Many different projects almost guarentees a couple of good and different solutions. Each solution will have it pro's and con's. Be better for one thing and slightly worse for something else. Competition is good.

Re:Cooporation is the way of the future.

[Aglassis]

I agree completely. When you pool resources you get things like the ISS. At this point in that project can we really say we haved saved money by doing it the international way?

One of the big things that you lose when you pool resources is adaptability. Now that's fine if you are building a piece of technology that is completely understood, but it is death to people who want to compete in emerging technologies.

Would the US space program be better off if we were able to cut off funding to the ISS and focus on the CEV? I think so. But that is not possible because we have international agreements. We have to finish our share before we abandon it.

These international resource pools remind me of the old engineering maxim:

• How long will your project take?
  
  • Two weeks.
• What if we double the amount of people on it?
  
  • Four weeks.

Re:Before re-inventing the wheel...

[hcdejong]

That's because it used an afterburner to fly through the atmosphere like a fighter jet.

Actually, it didn't. The afterburners were only used on takeoff, and during the accelleration from Mach 1 to about 1.7. For the second part, afterburning wasn't strictly necessary, but turned out to be more efficient than accelleration on dry thrust.
Can't find good data on required runway length, but Concorde typically took off at 400 km/h, which is rather high. Accelleration from dry thrust may not have been enough to achieve 400 km/h on a typical runway.

IOW, people who refer to the F-22's supercruise ability as something new or unique, are wrong. Concorde could do this. (So could the English Electric P.1, prototype for the EE Lightning, by the way).