Slashdot Mirror
NASA Testing Supersonic X-51A Jet Tomorrow
First time accepted submitter littlesparkvt writes "The NASA and the Pentagon's experimental aircraft could go from NY to London in about an hour. With a cost of 140 million dollars USD. During the test the X51-A will reach speeds of 1700 meters a second and climb to an altitude of 70,000 feet."
Still costs less than a F22 Raptor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
Pretty sure it won't go 1700 miles per second
That would be 6.12 MILLION miles per hour. Somehow, I doubt that.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
> 1700 miles a second
This is obviously a mis-print, right?
...is here
You have to account for jet lag.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yeah, it can get to Iran fast enough to beat them into submission so that we... have enough gas to get back.
I'm pretty sure there are more cost effective ways to achieve military... umm... Oh crap. Yeah. You're right. It's a weapon.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
1700miles / second or almost .1C ... ...
You might want to check your math.
Surely that's more likely 1700 m/s (meters per second), not miles per second. Though if the latter, sign me up for a test ride!
The Libyans will never catch you
the x-7 from 1960:
Performance
Maximum speed: Mach 4.31 (2,881 mph, 4,640 km/h)
Service ceiling: 106,000 ft (32,317 m)
glad to see what darpa came out with after absorbing the x-43.
In all seriousness, i do hope this does well. We could use this type of launch vehicle.
Is this thing powered by neutrinos?
With a cost of 140 million dollars USD.
That's a nice complete sentence!
-- QED
The Pentagon is using them to develop military projects like this. This is what the frigging Military Industrial Complex and DARPA are for. Leave NASA and they're limited and continuously dwindling funds for space research, or we're going to be left in the dust by China, India and the other space faring nations.
Note: If this and projects like it are funded separately and outside of NASAs budget, then, never mind. Carry on...
--- Keep the choice with the user..
When they add three more zeros to that speed. I wanna go to Alpha Centauri.
Yeah, but you don't get as many dead brown people with the NASA Curiosity. That's how Congress measures these things. Dead foreigners per million dollars.
Guess which type of project is going to disappear first with our new austerity-minded overlords?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I hope Steve has a better bail-out option this time around. All I've seen so far are some half assed bionic eyes, unless the OSS is keeping the best for their own agents... No running at this point baby!
This isn't a jet-plane. It's a fucking missile.
Okay. So it could blow up London in about an hour.
Since in the goodol'days NASA got a jump-start with rockets originally designed to reach London, blowing up London adds a very nice touch.
On your uber fast missile. I'll be impressed when you can put a human in it without killing him/her.
Not to mention the lack of a SUBJECT!
This is just a small test vehicle. It's to answer the question "How do we make a scramjet that actually works"? There have been scramjet projects since the 1950s, but only in the last 10 years has there been much success. The problems are huge.
There's some hope that this might eventually lead to launch vehicles that are air-breathing up to Mach 15 or so, allowing a bigger payload fraction for the vehicle size. At one time, it was hoped this might bring down launch costs, but probably not.
As a weapon system, it's an awfully expensive way to put one non-nuclear bomb on target.
It can go from NY to London in an hour? Wow, it must have a big fuel tank and be really efficient.
Nate
Maybe the flight only takes one hour, but with the long, slow security check lines, the entire trip still takes a day.
NASA should invent something that makes the TSA work faster.
Or, even better, with Stealth technology, maybe they could make it disappear altogether?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Okay, it's metric, sure, but so is km/hour. The weather center where I work reads out windspeed in m/sec, but the wind usually isn't blowing at 3,800 mph, and I've never seen m/sec used for vehicle speeds before. All it does is give you a number about half as big as mph, or 1/3.6 of km/h - is this complain for some reason?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Above Mach 5 or so you have to start considering different physics about the air flow.
Reminds me of the big missile the baddies tried to kill Superman with in no. 3
When you hire military contractors, you get rigorous testing, thorough code and design reviews, and an engineering process that can be duplicated. What increases the cost of a program is requirement changes, and from someone who works for a contractor, the government changes their requirements CONSTANTLY, but never wants to pay for them. When you read about Nunn-McCurdy breaches, it's typically because someone decided to change a major requirement AFTER design reviews had been completed, or during low level production!
And way more expensive.
You don't even need to get that complicated. The projectile will provide a hole, with that hole you will be able to tell which direction the projectile came from.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Whereby flying it you are both dead and alive at the same time?
I can't help noticing that these "New York to London" metrics spouted by the Pentagon are carefully constructed "spin" to frame the X-51 in a "civilian transport" context.
And every time a distance or area is expressed in terms of football fields, the statistic was sponsored by the NFL? Or maybe New York to London is a common metric for describing how fast something flies (especially from when you could compare that flight time to the Concorde).
My webcomic
~0.01c - just an order of magnitude and a capitalisiation away from being right :)
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
...
...
Glad you got the capitalisation of c correct (unlike a lot of other posts here) but you should really look up what a mile is in metric.
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Word on the news is that the flight didn't go well, and the aircraft broke up less than a minute into its flight.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/15/usa-hypersonic-flight-idINL2E8JFBYF20120815
Its not a plane, its a missile.
While the X-51A is launched with a rocket, it has an air-breathing engine on board. It has control surfaces rather than directional thrusters. Are those not the key differences between an aircraft and missile? I would call the X-51A an aircraft.
I hope they've factored in the 6 million dollars it'll cost to repair the pilot if there's a crash.
Also, Rudy Wells needs to be put on stand-by.
Missiles go from point A to point B. Craft take something from point A to point B, deliver it, and are then ready for use to go to point C. Like an ox-cart, instead of an arrow. Does that work better as a distinction?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"