[decimon]

AFP/EADS

[decimon]

Ping

“You don’t pollute, you’re in the stratosphere.”

[TheZMan]

That picture, and the implications of a failure mean I’ll be taking the slow, old fashioned route instead.

[aruanan]

To land, the pilot cuts the engines and glides down to Earth before reigniting the regular engines before landing.

Pilot: "Uh, folks, we have a little problem. We're failing to reignite and as you know, with these wings of ours, we have a glide path of approximately straight down. Please prepare for a rough landing."

[Brett66]

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.

[Bean Counter]

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....

[Tijeras_Slim]

Paris to Tokyo in 2.5 hours

Yeah, but I'd still have to get to Paris or Tokyo.

[Sonny M]

bump.

[LS]

Lessee, I think the USA worked on this in the late 1980s in a program I was the official historian for, the National Aerospace Plane, only we were trying to do it with scramjets, not rockets. The advantage is that if you can get the scramjets to work, you can achieve airplane-like turnaround times. And, yes, we used liquified hydrogen as fuel---one of the most successful parts of the program.

We could never get the scramjets to perform anywhere near the needed thrust ratios, though, so the program was broken up into three research programs to work on this.

If you can get it (limited release), see my book, "The Hypersonic Revolution, vol. III: The Quest for the Orbital Jet."

[mc5cents]

To land, the pilot cuts the engines and glides down to Earth before reigniting the regular engines before landing.

"O.K. We will now reignite the engines! Stand by..."