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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...
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.
In this case, it's splash!
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!
Yeah so now every time a plane overshoots a runway we have a radiation leak...
Nuclear energy is great for things like space travel and for generating electricity. It isn't so great for earth-bound transportation where it could easily leak. Not to mention the restrictions on a plane. Who cares if it can go from New York to Paris in an hour if it won't be able to be landed in Paris due to the fact it has nuclear material...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
quick! Nobody tell the Navy they've been using numerous nuclear powered aircraft carriers for earth bound travel for almost 50 years without incident!
moox. for a new generation.
"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. " -- Dwight D Eisenhower, 1961
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?"
Aren't you forgetting about nuclear subs? Quite a few incidents.
And airplanes not only are more prone to those, they also don't enjoy the comfort of generous weight budgets and being essentially buried after any accident.
All of this is beside the point though - experiments with nuclear aircraft propulsion were performed by both the US and Soviet Union (the latter apparently actually had it propelling an aircraft, at least partially). If there's one thing they have shown, it is that even with the small crew and lack of comfort of a bomber, radiation shielding is a major concern. You simply don't have enough weight budget for it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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
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.
Insightful? That's the US Navy, not a public or private corporation. Your sarcastic remark would seem to indicate that we could trust corporations to use nuclear technology to create transportation solutions for us.
Well if air travel is any indication, and the massive screw ups there with security theater, maintenance irregularities, cheap greedy bastards that would not outfit their planes with technology that could of prevented PanAm Flight 103, I doubt the airlines have the competency or the interest in our safety and security to pull off nuclear travel.
Sorry, if they can't afford to give me more than 6 fucking Styrofoam peanuts on a flight, I am not going to trust them to give me a nuclear plane flight either.
Of course, that is just the airlines. Car manufacturers could come in save us being paragons of humanitarian virtues and competence right? Hmmmm, maybe not. Well then we could trust the rail road system to.... Uh... Amtrack.... Huh.... Well maybe let's give a company not involved in transportation a shot at this.... Microsoft?
The reason why we don't have nuclear based transportation outside of a few dozen (at most) instances of military transports is that as a people and society we lack the responsibility, attention to detail, and competency to deal with something as dangerous as nuclear based power at that large of a scale.
Not that I am against nuclear power. Let's just be careful and limit it to reactors providing us the electricity where it would be a more manageable endeavor.
Personally, I am very inspired by Aluminum-Galium based power sources for travel that is extremely safe compared to the alternatives, and nuclear power is very appropriate to allow us an easy way to provide such an infrastructure to deliver refurbished AG power sources that can deliver on-demand hydrogen to transport vehicles.
While true government investment in research is vital for our growth and continued economic performance it is not solely responsible for it. The government did start the first internet, but it was business investment that also largely pushed the further development and refinement of the microcomputer.
The solitary inventor is largely pushed out of state of the art engineering. Like it or not much of science and cutting-edge research is a large, time-consuming and labor intensive practice that requires more work than a single man or woman can provide these days. Though it is still possible for a single person to "invent" something truly revolutionary it is exceedingly difficult and far more revolutions will come from organized large-scale efforts.
There also is the myth of the "Great Inventor" just coming up with an idea that revolutionizes the world and without whom that revolution would never have come. If you look at history, this is rarely the case as often many scientists are working on similar lines and the credited inventor is just the first to succeed. If they hadn't someone else would have; it might have taken longer and been slightly different but it would have come.
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...
You have no clue... A mach 6 fighter/bomber would very much be useful in the armament. At that speed it can outrun most missiles used to shoot it down. Very few weapons platforms can track and engage an aircraft flying faster than mach 4 at the moment, let alone something flying mach 6. There are only a handful of missiles (surface-to-air or air-to-air) which can even travel mach 6 or faster, which means you can only attach from a forward vector and once it passes your position or is flying away from you, your missiles will not be able to catch the plane. This assumes that your radar system can even detect a plane that fast and can instruct the missile how to intercept the target.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Seriously? Please tell me you're kidding. That's the F/A-37 Talon from the movie, "Stealth." I know it was a lousy movie, but, come on.
Hypersonic technology isn't just blow-stuff-up research- this is closer to just plain science. It is extremely difficult to maintain stable flight over mach 5 or so, not to mention the feats in engine and materials technology required to reach such speeds. This is interesting science and engineering, so I think it is a good thing there is military interest to fund this- it is too expensive to very easily get funding otherwise.
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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."
How long we have been waiting for this? 10, 20 years?
Maybe you've been waiting that long. Some of us have faithfully adhered to the proverb, "never wait for a scramjet."
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
If DARPA never funded Internet we would use probably other set of protocols (like BITNET) but a global computer network would still exists.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
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.