5,000 mph jet ready for test flight

cnn ^ | Thursday, March 25, 2004 | Michael Coren

[demlosers]

The space agency's dogged pursuit of extreme speed, officials hope, will ultimately make space flight easier to accomplish.

NASA will roll out the X-43A, capable of reaching speeds more than Mach 7, in a test flight over the Pacific Ocean. The Hyper-X, as it is called, could also give rise to commercial planes that zip passengers between London and New York in less than two hours.

[SauronOfMordor]

I'd hate to be riding pressurized hydrogen at mach anything.

It would be liquid hydrogen, which is what we've used in rockets since before the Apollo program. In a liguid-fueled rocket, most of the weight comes from liquid oxygen. If your sub-orbital stage can get you to Mach 7+ and an altitude of a few dozen miles using atmospheric oxygen, you save a lot.

I think the plan is to use this as a booster for the final stage, or have it carry along some liquid oxygen for convential rocket thrust the rest of the way

[frithguild]

Budget cuts, 20 years. All plausible deniability, IMHO.

[frithguild]

Turbofans to get it off the ground. Existing technology.

Scrams to get it above the atmosphere. Amount of thrust it produces is classified. You don't know how much hydrogen produces how much thrust. No moving parts. Not much more than a specially shaped tube. Simple to produce.

Chemical rockets to achieve escape velocity. Existing technology.

[jpsb]

How would one use a scramjet for orbit transfer, which occurs in space?

As I am sure you know, one could not use any kind jet in space for any purpose, since all jets require air flowing into their engines.

It looks like the "plan" is to build a craft that can use turbo fan or whatever jets to get moving fast enough (3,000 mph) to switch over to scram jets to get to the edge of space and then switch over to rocket engines to get into space. Seems like a reasonable idea, if they can get the scram jets working. A civilian version would skip the going into space part and operate at a very high speed and a very high altitude.

There are a number of folks researching scram jet engines. I didn't know they needed hydrogen for fuel, that kinda surprises me.

[jpsb]

Aurora, hmmmm, some say yes some yes no, Aurora might be urban legend, but retirering the sr71 without Aurora would be crazy!

[Atchafalaya]

Yeah, but you would be in the shallow water on the beach in Hawaii.

[jpsb]

"Existing technology."

Propulsion yea, but I bet the airframe design is a nighmare! Imagine dsigning an air frame that can takeoff on a runway and accelerate to 25,000 mps switching populsion systems as it goes. Thank God for computers.

[rogueleader]

All right!

Combine that with the cold fusion project (just restarted) and we are almost caught up with the aliens.

[Defender2]

That's just a shade faster than what was reached by the X-15A2. Probably has more range though. Outside of orbitting space casules, deep space probes and the Space Shuttle, he previous winged aircraft records were held by the X-15A2 during the sixties.

[Defender2]

,he = meant the. sorry for the typo.