Posted on 06/19/2011 6:26:36 AM PDT by decimon
PARIS (AFP) European aerospace giant EADS on Sunday unveiled its "Zero Emission Hypersonic Transportation" (Zehst) rocket plane it hopes will be able to fly from Paris to Tokyo in 2.5 hours by around 2050.
"I imagine the plane of the future to look like Zehst," EADS' chief technical officer Jean Botti said as the project was announced at Le Bourget airport the day before the start of the Paris International Air Show.
The low-pollution plane to carry between 50 and 100 passengers will take off using normal engines powered by biofuel made from seaweed before switching on its rocket engines at altitude.
The rocket engines, powered by hydrogen and oxygen whose only exhaust is water vapour, propel the plane to a cruising altitude of 32 kilometres (20 miles), compared to today's passenger jets which fly at around 10,000 metres.
"You don't pollute, you're in the stratosphere," Botti said.
To land, the pilot cuts the engines and glides down to Earth before reigniting the regular engines before landing.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping
“You don’t pollute, you’re in the stratosphere.”
That picture, and the implications of a failure mean I’ll be taking the slow, old fashioned route instead.
What could possibly go wrong!
Worked for Magellan.
So it’s only 49 years off?
Way to go out on a limb there. IOW- it’s just a couple of cool artist’s depiction.
Seaweed ?
What about my osembe crackers ?
Your trip will cost 5 times what it cost to fly on the Concorde.
And if the thing crashes.... I can only imagine.
Give or take.
LOL! Must be a british pilot.
Just FYI...in about 7 yrs 4 1/2 months we will elect a very bad president.
Even if your jet engine burns “biofuel” it still puts out nearly as many combustion by-products products as regular jet fuels do. All it accomplishes is to enable someone to have warm fuzzy feelings about this without shoving a hamster up their butt.
Count the windows on that plane, figure the cost of this fantasy divided by the number of available seats, and estimate what a ticket might cost you, one way. 50-100 passengers on that flight?? No way.
And if you are going to fly at that altitude, the passengers will need some sort of space/pressure suit, because even the tiniest leak of air at that height would be horribly and painfully fatal to everyone who was not wearing a suit. In other words, you will not simply board the plane and take off like you were flying down to Miami...
Not to mention that the only aviation facilities I am aware of that have the ability to handle large amounts of cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen belong to NASA. To my knowledge there is no space launch or support facilities in either Paris or Tokyo, so that relegates this entire story to Science Fiction.
Great outline for a novella though....
Correcting your sentence for grammar and punctuation.
I'm helpful that way.
Yeah, but I'd still have to get to Paris or Tokyo.
bump.
Are you sure you got my sarcasm?
Cheers!
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