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NASA Green-lights $16.5M To Advance Future Jets
coondoggie writes "NASA said this week four research teams would split $16.5 million to continue developing quieter, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient jets that the agency says will be three generations ahead of airliners in use today. NASA said the money was awarded after an 18-month study of all manner of advanced technologies from alloys, ceramic or fiber composites, carbon nanotube and fiber optic cabling to self-healing skin, hybrid electric engines, folding wings, double fuselages and virtual reality windows to come up with a series of aircraft designs that could end up taking you on a business trip by about 2030."
"The next generation of our jets will be three generations better than the last generation!" Huh?
I think the study cost more than that.
Award that money to a university and you might get something for it. To a private company and you might get a mock up, which says "Huggies" on the composite carbon hull, if you peek around the back side of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm always surprised with the editorial tone of slashdot when they post a figure like $16.5 million and try to draw gasps, as if that's a huge amount of money. I'm on a military contract, and the training portion alone is at about $5 million. $16.5 million for something like a new jet is peanuts.
publicizing that they're researching a self-healing outer skin might get them some extra funding in their next budget. You know congress-critters love hot-button issues...
I like the reference to studying "virtual reality windows" - more democratic fluff in my opinion - 3 generations of jets is (hopefully) at least how long it will take before those jerk-offs are back in office after elections - they might at least be smart enough to realize that if little else.
Will fuel for commercial flights even be available then, let alone affordable?
Finding God in a Dog
That's great, can we get that budget approved for high speed trains too while we're at it? I'm sick of having a horrid public transportation infrastructure. And highways are so 1950s...new please!
I want to fly on a plane with these, and I want the view to be what I'd see if the plane was flying at an altitude of about 50 feet. Whoosh!
Just junk food for thought...
Three generations ago would be the DC-3 (1935).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Fuel costs will make it so prohibitively expensive to fly that only the "jet set" will ever be able to travel by air.
Not to mention the three hour wait going through security, because by then the TSA will have to strip every passenger and perform full cavity searches and screen your blood before you can walk onto an aircraft. Also, buying an airline ticket allows the company to perform a full credit-history on you, so, really, they'll know everything about you anyhow before your flight is canceled.
By 2030, most people in the world will be limited to a 100-mile radius, not just because that's still the limit on their electric cars, but because of security. Not from terrorism, but due to class warfare.
By then, the rich will clamp down on the rest of us (and if you look around you can already see this in progress), so that we're essentially serfs.
And don't forget food wars, since the world population will be over 10 billion by that point.... Jet engines? Please, by 2030, people will be shooting each other in the street for bottles of fresh water.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This is why I have already started stockpiling bottle caps.
haha, i'm gonna get a bottling set and head east, maybe start makin nuka-cola
I just cant put my finger on it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_X-30
Chump change to Bill Gates, Nathan Myrhvold, Steve Jobs. But, being government money, most of it will go to bureaucratic waste.
And then there's the whole "quieter, cleaner, more efficient" angle. That hasn't really paid off well with cars, has it? Well, per car, yes, but how many people switched to pickup trucks and SUV's simply because the cars with these new requirements no longer met their needs/wants?
Boy, glad we're doing the investment in basic research, wow.....
Any clue how this 'hybrid turbo-electric engine' is supposed to work? Jet fuel is a good two orders of magnitude more dense than conventional batteries. Even taking account for projected advances in nanowire batteries, and the inefficiencies of gas turbine engines, you're still looking at kerosene containing several times the usable energy per unit mass than batteries. Weight is everything in aircraft, and fuel already accounts for the bulk of weight in airliners. The only thing I could see this useful for is for taxiing on the runway, powered by the APU in the back of the aircraft, rather than having those big engines needlessly idle for extended duration while waiting for takeoff clearance.
the government is promoting science without copyrights or patents! wow!
This sounds great, but why does NASA have to fund this? Can't the plane manufacturers pay for their own R&D?
We're gonna' need that more and more!
For aviation and a number of applications that are similar, wouldn't a technology similar to lightpeak help cut down weight by integrating the multiple systems that communicate across the jet to access a single bus? Seems to me that since technologies like that would cut down on A TON of traditional copper wiring that carries signals from/to the thousands of sensors and computers on a jet. I imagine even on a small scale you would also achieve some weight savings by using 1 or 2 optical cables instead of 3 miles of copper wires and their associated jackets, and since it uses a silicon to fiber tech, you wouldn't have to change much about the sensors.
The current airlines are like Chevy's and Chrystler's. They want to switch over to something like Kia's and Yugo's.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I was thinking about this a couple of days ago - the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) might actually be a feasible candidate for providing the heat energy to run one or two really big fans. One of the many advantages of the LFTR is that it can be sized for particular applications, and it's just possible that it might be made small enough to fit on a large airplane. The LFTR is a high temperature, low pressure reactor and also (IIRC) requires much less shielding than U-238 reactors.
So it's possible that an LFTR-powered plane using superheated water to drive the turbines might just work. If so, then the 'jet' output would have zero emissions (except for heat). The planes would only have to be refueled once in a while.
I'm too lazy to figure out just how big a plane it would have to be.
Full disclosure: my dad was a builder, who built some of the buildings for the very ill-fated Atomic Airplane project back in the 1950s - GE actually built a successful test engine, but the entire rest of the program was a complete mess. He got screwed for $400,000 in 1950s dollars and never got it back.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Yay! Slower, less comfortable clean, green jets. The wildlife will be thrilled.
an ill wind that blows no good
The world isn't lacking good ideas, it's lacking people who make them real.
We can barely find people who know the difference between crippling buckling. The not-horrible ones we can find have been working on the F35 for so long they think 2 years to finish one rib is about right.
If anyone wants to make an ambitiously weird new plane, they are going to have to invest billions just to get bright people back into this business. I wouldn't be surprised if it would cost hundreds of billions to get get a commercial carbon-fiber spanlifter into service because this industry is just so moribund. The organizations that are around right now couldn't make a go of it on any finite budget.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Remember this when Boeing next bleats about Airbus being "unfairly subsidised".
Do we already know what they are?
Since the current planes were mostly built in the 70's, 40 years ago, and these new ones NASA makes won't be out until 2030, which is another generation, and generations are usually 20 years, wouldn't any new jet be considered 3 generations ahead. I want a jet released this year that is a generation or two ahead of now!