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Air Force Sets Date To Fly Mach-6 Scramjet
coondoggie writes "The US Air Force said it was looking to launch its 14-foot long X-51A Waverider on its first hypersonic flight test attempt May 25. The unmanned X-51A is expected to fly autonomously for five minutes, after being released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern coast of California. The Waverider is powered by a supersonic combustion scramjet engine, and will accelerate to about Mach 6 as it climbs to nearly 70,000 feet. Once flying, the X-51 will transmit vast amounts of data to ground stations about the flight, then splash down into the Pacific. There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle, one of four built, the Air Force stated."
The next generation in civilian transportation.
There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle
NY to Paris in 30 minutes! However, only one way tickets are allowed.
..accept it, is to go and get this baby. It should fetch a good price on ebay. I can only imagine the difficulties of finding this craft in the Pacific Ocean, but if you could... Legend status is yours.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
a mach 6 submarine sitting under the ocean ready for the picking!
thats a seriously fast plane, hope it goes well.
liqbase
So we built several multi-million dollar tests to chuck into the ocean?
This sounds sick. I wonder if its going to be visible? Too bad its a one way trip.
So little for civilian.
Hopefully the tech will filter down sooner than later.
I don't see much of a military need for this tech, however, when we've had military launch capability that could reach any location on earth well within a day, including the time it takes for authorization, for close to half a century.
Short of a massive nuclear response to a nuclear attack, there simply isn't any application where it's necessary, and where time to better consider other options is a bad thing.
But then again, we are probably on the verge of global resource wars amongst nations that have not.
What a sad state our greed and short sightedness has brought us to. Our capabilities as a species have changed enormously in the last century or so, but our insight into ourselves has not.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I would suspect that there is some secret stuff in this plane....so unless it plans on breaking up into a huge fireball right before it hits the ocean.....wouldn't it be foolish to drop something like that and not retrieve it?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
We need to find a way to fit nuclear powered engines onto planes if we are to make a leap into next chapter of aviation.
How long we have been waiting for this? 10, 20 years? It looks that designing, simulating and building was harder than it was initially projected.
And this is still prototype.
The concept is not new but it is very difficult to turn it into practice. These guys at University of Queensland and others have been working on this for several years and have trialled severa prototypes before. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=20718 Not bad without military budgets - beat them to the punch!
Putting aside this strawman example, the idea of push-button assassination is terrifying. "Comrade, you will sell me your oil. Remember what happened to your predecessor?"
I know where my towel is!
If you want the jet to scram, send it into the ocean at Mach 6. Just hope it doesn't land on a ship.
Does anyone else think it is odd that the fastest plane in the world is still the SR-71, which came into service in 1964.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I do believe that used to exist. For over thirty years the Concorde jet flew passengers at Mach 2 over the Atlantic. FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
6.40 times the speed of sound should be fast enough for anyone. ... it only needs to go a little faster now ...
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You're presuming that it's solely for weapons delivery. The first application that came to my mind was reconnaisance. It's all well and good to be able to deliver a warhead to "any location on earth well within a day", but intel as near-real time as you can get it is just as critical to the military, and the ability to get sensors over an area of concern as quickly as possible is immeasurably valuable. That's the reason the SR-71 Blackbird was built, and it performed it's mission admirably for decades.
At that altitude, it should be moving just a little faster than 1 mile/sec. Hopefully, it will go where directed to - like North Korea...
However, it was cancelled because the subsidies paid by the governments were getting rediculous. Yes, it flew passengers, but it NEVER was economical and when the time came to put in some serious maintenance costs they dumped the program.
What makes this interesting is the speculation surrounding the SR-91 Aurora. Due to treaties between the US and (at the time) USSR the SR-71 Blackbird had to be retired because manned intelligence flights were against the terms of the treaty.
Of course the treaty didn't say anything about unmanned flights and this is where the SR-91 comes into it. This *might* be a picture of a SR-91. The cockpit makes me wonder what I'm looking at, if it can be piloted/unpiloted. I don't know for sure. Kudos to Yankee engineering though, it looks fast.
The scramjet powering the test aircraft is one thing aside, the avionics to remotely control something this fast is what I'm interested in. The B2 bomber was criticised for being so far over budget but it would be if two aircraft that share control system technology were being developed. Both would have inputs to computer controller flight surfaces. The game of subterfuge in military craft is fascinating especially when it the politicians that wear the heat for a failure that is actually, secretly, a success. I know, it's all speculation.
I reason that this might include deliberately understating the capabilities of craft such as this. The SR-71 engines are reported as most efficient at mach 3.5 but that doesn't indicate top speed - which is probably still classified - and the SR-91 (that officially doesn't exist) which may cruise somewhere between mach 3-6 reveals a lot about how quickly intelligence gathering about any part of the world can be done. Say a rough estimate of any part of the world within 3 hours, maybe there are things that just can't be done with a satellite?
It says much about the intelligence capability that the US doesn't readily advertise, and where that capability (that doesn't officially exist) is going when a prototype vehicle is aiming for Mach 6. Kudos for the Univerity of Queensland to for getting the first test engine going.
Personally - I just like fast planes ;-)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
After the test, the jet will be baked. And then there will be cake.
If there was a plane faster than an SR-71, there's no guarantee that it would be public knowledge.
That said, a fast plane isn't as necessary for spying as it was in the 60's. Who knows what kind of crazy tech is out there doing the hard spy work now, the geek in me hopes that there's something more interesting than satellites...
"There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle"
Really? You want to just let a potential security threat sit around in the ocean for someone to salvage and copy?
Goddamn, let me call China right quick and let them know where they might want to start looking. If you're just going to leave it out there I might as well get paid to clean up your damned mess!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah, all several hundred billion pieces of it, after it smacks into the ocean. If the plane retains even a small fraction of the velocity it picks up in the test flight before impact, it's a goner.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Depending on how you define a "Nuclear" train, you could have a single, central, fixed location Nuclear power plant, and an electrified rail system (or wires, or a pair of superconducting rails, etc) to power the trains, so there's no reactor on the trains themselves - just electric motors, or maybe a mag-lev propulsion system, etc.
Buy / build a model rocket and shoot it off - never to come back. That was lots of fun when I was a child; supposedly they'd come back down on a parachute but that wasn't necessarily going to happen. We'd send all kinds of interesting balsa and cardboard creations into the sky and it was big fun.
The kids at the Air Force never got over it. Now their toys are bigger and much more expensive - but they're still fun to shoot off in a blaze of glory - never to be recovered. I love this country - and how our tax dollars get used.
They have had this in France for years. France is largely nuclear powered and sells electricity to it's neighbors. The train is a very sensible tech platform - uses existing rail lines for up to 140mph, and can go up to 200mph on specially graded track. I took the TGV from Paris to Marseille - a few hours for what would have been a six or seven hour drive and at least 3 or 4 hours through an airport.
Most Americans have no idea how convenient rail travel is. I bought my ticket 10 minutes before the train left, and a few minutes after boarding I was enjoying a cup of coffee while I sat in the equivalent of first class on an airplane for about $50. I had a table, a full size restroom nearby, and dining car at my disposal. If you've really got the dough or don't have the time, you can walk on without a ticket and pay the conductor the highest rate.
Planes are still the way to go for cross-continental travel, but a regional electric train system is a no brainer. Well, if you have a society that wants reality based solutions instead of empty rhetoric like "Drill, baby, drill."
they want their supersonic combustion scramjet back.
Why would we not recover this? If found it would allow a rival nation technology that would make a great kinetic cruise missile. I can see foreign subs taking up tracking and recovery plans in international water now. We are governed by idiots.
It's an article about a stunningly awesome bit of engineering and technology... and I see the last line of the summary, and can only think "Hey! Free jet!"
powered by a supersonic combustion scramjet engine
guess what the S and C at the beginning of scramjet mean?
But then again, we routinely enter our PIN number into an ATM machine and Microsoft released an operating system based on NT technology....
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
I grew up when and where the U.S. Navy and Air Force tested and flew supersonic on a daily basis. I was a navy brat. On many days there were a number of sonic booms, sometimes as many as 5 or 6 a day.
My father, a range director, once told me that the purpose of some of the tests were to see if changes in aircraft design could result in smaller sonic footprints. They were never successful.
Now, imagine a somewhat regular commercial aircraft route going supersonic. The public wouldn't put up with regular booms.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The Air Force describes the X-51 as virtually wingless, designed to ride its own shockwave.
Fucking righteous!
Doesn't this ignore the existence of the Hyper-X program that's already proven scramjet technology? Remember, the one that crashed into the Pacific on the first test flight because the rocket-booster lost a fin?