NASA Launches Unmanned Hypersonic Jet

AP News ^ | November 16, 2004 | AP

[O.C. - Old Cracker]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - An unmanned NASA jet was launched over the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday in a bid to demonstrate a radical new engine technology by flying at a world-record 7,000 mph - almost 10 times the speed of sound.

The 12-foot-long X-43A "scramjet" was carried aloft under the wing of a B-52 aircraft and released over a test range off the Southern California coast. It was to fly under its own power at Mach 10 for about 10 seconds at 110,000 feet, then glide to a splash landing. The craft was designed to sink and will not be recovered.

Unlike rockets, scramjets do not have to carry heavy oxidizer necessary to burn fuel. Instead, they can scoop oxygen out of the atmosphere.

Scramjet technology could be used to develop hypersonic missiles and airplanes or reusable space launch vehicles, with a potential for speeds of at least Mach 15.

The first X-43A flight failed in 2001 when the booster rocket veered off course and had to be destroyed. The second X-43A flew in March and reached Mach 6.83, or nearly 5,000 mph, a record for an aircraft powered by an air-breathing engine.

[Criminal Number 18F]

Did it work?

X-43 #3 now sleeps with the fishes after 10 seconds of hypersonic flight with an estimated peak speed of about Mach 9.7 (this will likely change somewhat as the numbers get crunched). That's roughly 7,000 miles an hour or 100 times highway speed.

It is the fastest anything that breathes air has ever gone. The previous record was about Mach 6.8, set by X-43 #2 back in March (#1 squibbed and had to be destroyed).

The record setting Blackbird reconnaissance plane's fastest version, the A-12, was limited to Mach 3.2 and is the fastest manned air-breathing aircraft, ever. SpaceShip One achieved a peak Mach of 3.5 in the climb and 3.9 on re-entry, which is the fastest a private manned craft has gone. The fastest non-orbital manned craft was the X-15 research plane which set an unofficial record of Mach 6.7 (which was faster than the designers expected). Of course, orbital machines achieve 18,000 to 25,000 miles an hour to break free of Earth gravity.

A high-velocity working SCRAMJET is huge for several reasons:

1. It's been postulated for decades, but never achieved. (I first read about it in a model rocketry magazine almost forty years ago!)

2. Unlike rockets, a SCRAMJET draws its oxidizer from the atmosphere -- no need to schlep a great big tank of LOX or H2O2 around.

3. It has potential for a first stage of a Two Stage To Orbit reusable spaceplane -- like SpaceShipOne to the next order of complexity/difficulty. If you can launch from 7,000 mph your orbital machine just went way down in weight and therefore cost and everything else.

4. It has potential for extremely fast freight and possibly passenger service. "I can have it on your desk in Tokyo by afternoon; London tells me they had it on the morning SCRAMJET."

5. It has the potential for economical, hard-to-intercept reconnaissance vehicles and cruise missiles.

So I guess you could say... it did work!

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

[Criminal Number 18F]

Anybody got stats on how far down-range it went?

Bout 850 miles. After it comes out of hypersonic speed it continues to glide and decelerate.

To those who wonder why they did this: combination of basic and applied research. It will be up to others to make practical products with this technology. Nothing new for NASA. Its predecessor NACA designed a lot of stuff you see on airplanes today -- cowlings, ducts, even the tricycle landing gear that made airplanes much safer to land (developed by NACA engineer Fred Weick).

Even some of the stuff in Rutan's SpaceShipOne design is owed to NASA research -- notably the ablative coating on the belly, and the materials of the rocket nozzle.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

[snopercod]

Did it fly free, or only on the nose of that booster?

Sorry, dumb questions are my specialty...

[Se7eN]

I just watched 'The Arrow' last night. This movie about a Canadian company called Avro making the Arrow to thwart the Soviets during the Cold War. What an awesome story, and it's a true story. I highly recommend it.

I have alot more repsect for that NASA launch today having seen that film. Who knew the Canadians could contribute so much? ;)

It also really puts liberalism and conservatism in a different perspective. It almost seemed like they had it backwards in the late 50's compared to the US today. The conservatives opposed the military from what I gathered, but the PM was hard to read and follow. All I got was that the conservatives held the majority but the PM was liberal? :\

[texasflower]

I thought they were just orbiting? Are they landing the silly thing too?

[corkoman]

The craft was designed to sink and will not be recovered.

And why wouldn't they want to look at the thing after this flight?

I gotta beleive that it was tracked to a relatively small area - and why couldn't it have had a transponder?

Or maybe after 10 secs at Mach 10 it melted and is now a blob of titanium?

[the invisib1e hand]

alright. how does something this small go so fast. do I need to go over to "how things work" or can someone give it to me in a couple of sentences?

[Jaysun]

You don't care to see your tax dollars spent on innovations in aerospace technology? You'd prefer some other nation to take the lead? Perhaps we should defer to France or the U.K.? Or maybe encourage the U.N. to take over our space program? We'll continue to fund it, just let them run things.

It means something to be a leader and sometimes we have to spend tax dollars on something bigger than ourselves instead of just making improvments on your comfort zone.

Is it necessary to spend tax dollars at a rate of more than 1.3 billion per month in order for us to lead the world in aerospace technology? Is that how the airplane, the telephone, the light bulb, or the computer came to be? My beef is that they waste a hell of a lot of money, as is typical with government bureaucracies. Why can't we trust private enterprise to do some of the things that NASA does?

NASA has a role to play, but so does private enterprise. The guys that recently flew to space and back in a craft that they designed and built themselves, spent $25 million dollars on the project. NASA goes through $25 million dollars in a matter of days. How much would a similar achievement have cost if it were brought about by NASA? That's my gripe.

[Jaysun]

I think this is the technology that will allow us to deliver payloads of nastiness 1/3 the way around the globe on two hours' notice; and upgrade anti-missile defenses.
Good deterrent.

You may be right. I hope there's some practical use for it.

[Jaysun]

Picture if you will, say several thousand pounds of some really nasty stuff packed into the nose of that puppy... launched unmanned from Vandenberg, and flying at 15,000 miles per hour... and it is programmed by satellite to lay da "smackdown" on bin laden! Nose camera delivers "realtime" video evidence.

Money damn well spent!

Hope so.

[exnavy]

That defines the phrase, "the need for speed".

[jbstrick]

Great stuff!

I think NASA should get out of the transportation business focus on pure research like we see here. The free market can take the research foundation and run with it like Rutan and Co.

[Tallguy]

NASA did a good job through the Apollo program because it acted more as an agenda setter and a clearing house for technology. The aerospace companies of the day did most of the heavy-lifting. Now NASA is like an old-fashioned, government-run arsenal. Inefficient to say the least. Of course, we have far fewer aerospace companies to turn to than in the 50's and 60's.

[sixstringer]

Besides the obvious scientific uses for this machine...

Picture if you will, say several thousand pounds of some really nasty stuff packed into the nose of that puppy... launched unmanned from Vandenberg, and flying at 15,000 miles per hour... and it is programmed by satellite to lay da "smackdown" on bin laden! Nose camera delivers "realtime" video evidence.


A full load of cheese eating surrender monkeys sent to Pakistan???

[NCC-1701]

"...Mach 9; Shmock 9. What did the stewardesses look like?..."

Shania Twain.

[ElkGroveDan]

Oh big deal! The EU has a probe landing on the month that only took 13 months to get there (an earth moon, not Mars).

It's not landing. It's just an orbiter.

[rwfromkansas]

Wouldn't it be almost lethal to fly in something going that fast?

[CWOJackson]

Ah, landing might have required another 13 months.

[ElkGroveDan]

Actually landing is the easy part. They crashed an expensive pile of scrap metal into Mars last Christmas, very adeptly. Landing intact however, might be a bit harder for the EU'ies.