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NASA Aeronautics Budget Proposes Return Of X-Planes (phys.org)
If President Obama's recently released federal budget request is approved for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2016, next year will be the first in a bold 10-year plan by NASA Aeronautics to achieve huge goals in reducing fuel use, emissions, and noise by the way aircraft are designed, and the way they operate in the air and on the ground.
One exciting piece of this 10-year plan is New Aviation Horizons -- an ambitious undertaking by NASA to design, build and fly a variety of flight demonstration vehicles, or "X-planes." The demos included advancements in lightweight composite materials that are needed to create revolutionary aircraft structures, an advanced fan design to improve propulsion and reduce noise in jet engines, designs to reduce noise from wing flaps and landing gear, shape-changing wing flaps, and even coating to prevent bug residue buildup on wings.
One exciting piece of this 10-year plan is New Aviation Horizons -- an ambitious undertaking by NASA to design, build and fly a variety of flight demonstration vehicles, or "X-planes." The demos included advancements in lightweight composite materials that are needed to create revolutionary aircraft structures, an advanced fan design to improve propulsion and reduce noise in jet engines, designs to reduce noise from wing flaps and landing gear, shape-changing wing flaps, and even coating to prevent bug residue buildup on wings.
corporate welfare.
I don't think they actually stopped doing X-planes. It's just that the recent batch weren't heavily publicized.
Beware of hacked ISOs if you downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th, 2016!
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"I'm sorry I have to come with bad news.[1]
We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn't impact many people, but if it impacts you, it's very important you read the information below.
What happened?
Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.
Does this affect you?
As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition.
If you downloaded another release or another edition, this does not affect you. If you downloaded via torrents or via a direct HTTP link, this doesn't affect you either.
Finally, the situation happened today, so it should only impact people who downloaded this edition on February 20th.
How to check if your ISO is compromised?"
Continued @: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2...
[1] Written by Clem on Sunday, February 21st, 2016 @ 1:44 am
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https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...
https://lwn.net/Articles/67661...
https://twitter.com/Linux_Mint...
Okay, that's all we need to read of this article.
For far too long, the US Congress has whored itself out to aerospace corporations that have paid more attention to making sure some part of their grossly-overpriced new plane was built in every district in the country than building a plane that actually worked stretched the limits of what was possible.
Is there anything in the air today that can compare to the X-15 or the Blackbird? What has the US accomplished in the last 50 years that can even touch those accomplishments? And when was the last time an astronaut went further into space than anybody with a half-assed camera and a cheap pair of binoculars can photograph?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Why they spend the budget to create aircraft emission in outerspace ? We need to reduce the emission on our earth
Basically, it is saying, more weird shaped, remote controlled x planes, a quiet supersonic x plane, and an x-48 plane big enough to carry humans. Maybe an LNG airplane. All that talk about the x-48 blended wing body is finally going to result in a real product.
I think high oil prices is the biggest factor driving this research.
My country does useless stuff with the tax-payers money but who (ok, maybe someone) didn't wanted to experience space travel in their life time and so on?
USA & NASA has done so much in the area and I think it would had been ok if other nations such as mine (Sweden in this case) would had chipped in to do even more. ESA may do some but to get the really big things done you need the real big budgets I guess =P.
Guess the same could be said about say the North korean rockets and the money spent previously in Germany and later in USA vs Russia. Guess there's a benefit in coming up with different designs too but I guess we would had reached further without duplicated efforts.
As for the big guns isn't that for national (power struggle and might) conflicts whereas maybe the actual human conflicts (self-rule and protection) could had been solved with smaller arms instead. :D https://youtu.be/XNkMzWPbM0o?t...
Accurately played music for this topic
The anti bug stick stuff would have many aviation applications, where laminar flow is important.
A sailplane can lose 30% or more performance in increased drag from bugs on the leading edges.
Zuckerberg invest 1 billion in Barack Obama ideas
This sounds like a project that the private sector should be able to fund all by themselves. The small NASA budgets are better spent on different goals.
Wow now thats news good thing I read at -1 or I'd have missed that. /. News for nerds just a bit on the slow side nowadays. From the blog it says they had to shut the server down following a second attack it was a Wordpress vuln.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Is there anything in the air today that can compare to the X-15 or the Blackbird?
Sure. On what specific basis are you comparing? Speed? Stealth? Utility? Efficiency? Avionics? Reliability? I'd be happy to provide you examples in any specific category you care to mention. We retired the Blackbird because we've exceeded what it could do in most ways. The X15 was an experiment and we've long since had the capability to exceed what it can do in literally every respect. What is the point of duplicating it today? Sure they were cool and cutting edge for their time but that time was a loooong time ago.
Furthermore remember that some of the most advanced stuff is still classified. We didn't know much about the SR71 for much of its early operational history. Stuff like the B2 and F117 were almost complete surprises when they were unveiled. Quite likely there is some pretty nifty classified stuff the US military is working on that we know little/nothing about.
What has the US accomplished in the last 50 years that can even touch those accomplishments?
Plenty! Just off the top of my head: Stealth, hypersonic aircraft, drones, private spacecraft, engine efficiency/power, avionics, GPS, the list goes on and on and on. If you think we haven't exceeded the SR-71 or the X15 then you haven't been paying attention. Just because we aren't making drop-in replacements for vehicles whose service life is complete doesn't mean we aren't progressing.
And when was the last time an astronaut went further into space than anybody with a half-assed camera and a cheap pair of binoculars can photograph?
1972 but you knew that. Unclear what that has to do with experimental aircraft.
The President's budget is DOA.
It's not faster, higher, bigger any more.
It's "green" and quiet as to not disturb the environmentalists in the million dollar condos built next to airports.
This is like NASCAR having a research project on building a self driving car.
would welcome a coating to prevent bug residue buildup.
But how about going faster or higher? Airlines speeds have plateaued at around 0.85 Mach for the last 50 years. How about cheaper and quieter to go faster?
I remember when NASA put men on the moon. Today, NASA is trying to save United and American Airlines (the idiots behind 9/11) some money.
This is an election year and Obama has launched a dead-on-arrival budget that put his usual anti-NASA tactics on steroids.
In his first NASA budget (proposed in the spring of 2009, as the Fiscal Year 2010 NASA budget), Obama tried to eliminate American manned spaceflight. BOTH parties in the congress rebelled so severely that they did the ONLY truly bi-partisan thing that year - they trashed his 2010 NASA budget and ORDERED him IN LAW to build the SLS rocket, even taking the unusual step of specifying the rocket's performance so he could not build something else and pretend to be obeying the law.
In every year since the FY2010 budget debacle, Obama has sent his administrator to congress with four claims: [a] we're "going to Mars" [b] we have too much money for the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule, and [c] the schedule on the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule will slip further because there's not enough money, and [d] we need more money for spaceX. Congress keeps pushing back by pointing out that Obama's people have admitted under oath that they actually have no plans and have asked for no budget to EVER go to Mars, that the SLS and Orion claims are contradictory, and that they are unwilling to give Obama more money for SpaceX as long as he keeps playing games over the legally-mandated SLS and Orion.
This FY2017 budget proposal doubles-down on the fight by stripping nearly a billion dollars from the SLS rocket (about a 30% cut), which the administration's foot-dragging has already stalled from an early2017 first launch to an end of 2018 first launch. There is no way on this green Earth that Obama's 2017 election-year in-your-face budget insult will get approved by congress. Even the Democrats will not tolerate this.
pretty affordable to, especially if you are NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SeqBox
We easily could be traveling halfway around the world in 4-5 hours instead of 15-16 as we have today if we kept on advancing.
Drones aren't new, they're just cheap now.
Sigh... Just because somebody did some piece of the technology before doesn't mean the current versions aren't new. If you think there is nothing new about drones today over the versions we had 50 years ago you need to pay better attention. Drones aren't just cheaper. They are better too. Lots better. They are FAR more capable in literally every measurable way. It's like comparing the wright flyer to the Bell X1. They are both manned aircraft but only a fool would argue there is "nothing new" between the two. You managed to completely miss my point which is that aircraft today are routinely pushing frontiers of things not previously achieved.
Where are the game-changers? A hypersonic plane? Really? Great description of the X-15.
The X15 was a manned rocket with wings. The X51 is a scramjet powered unmanned hypersonic aircraft. If you don't see where the boundaries are being pushed there I suggest you conduct a little study session. We've gone FAR past what we learned from the X15 program.
GPS? You're proving my point! The concept was understood since before Sputnik, and it was first implemented 40 years ago.
Who gives a shit when the "concept was understood"? We understood the concept of supersonic flight before WWII but that didn't mean we could do it. You claimed that there had been no progress in the last 50 years which is complete nonsense. GPS is a great example. GPS has HUGELY changed navigation particularly in the last 20 years. Do NOT make the mistake of underestimating the importance of that.
"Utility, efficiency, reliability"...Buzz words that essentially mean "more of the same but a little bit better".
Correct. What you don't seem to get is how much those things matter. ALL aircraft design is incremental and builds on what existed before. Including the SR-71 and the X-15. If you don't understand this then you don't understand how the engineering for this stuff is done. The improvements are always incremental. Big changes happen when those incremental changes add up to something that changes the paradigm we've been operating under. That gets harder as a technology matures. 50 years ago it was a lot easier to push boundaries in aviation than it is today and that isn't because people aren't trying.
Also I have to say I disagree with your assertion that satellites can replace the SR-71. They don't have the same flexibility...not even close.
Your error is in presuming that the military relies solely on the satellites. You can be certain they do not. They retired the SR-71 because it cost a fortune and the few corner cases where it added value were too rare to justify. Once you have sufficient satellite coverage (which we probably do) the SR-71 becomes redundant 99% of the time AND carries higher risks both operational and geopolitical. Much of the remaining cases can be covered by more conventional aircraft and drones. The SR-71 survived by being fast compared to what was shooting at it. Today there are missiles that are MUCH faster than the SR-71 and a better survival strategy arguably is stealth. People routinely make the error of thinking that the best way to replace a groundbreaking aircraft is with one that does the same thing but better. We don't understand when things have progressed beyond that operational paradigm. It's a really easy mistake to make and we've all done it at one time or another, myself included.