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."

Comments

Always money for military space projects

[shadowbearer]

  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