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.

[demlosers]

A B-52 plane carries the X-43A and its booster rocket.

[RightWhale]

Would this be a sub-scale model?

[Richard Kimball]

Wow.

[Frank_Discussion]

Full-scale for the X43, but subscale test of the eventual technology. Hopefully, this'll work out.

[RightWhale]

The X-43A is what was destroyed in the first launch. Something about the Pegasus booster interface.

[Dog Gone]

I wanted to be onboard until I got to this line.

The actual powered-flight is expected to last about 10 seconds and reach Mach 7 before gliding for six minutes and plunging into the Pacific Ocean.

[Frank_Discussion]

This would be an X-43A, Mark II, or something like that. Redesigned to accept the launch dynamic loads, I expect.

[blackdog]

That would require a lot of hydrogen. The Hindenberg comes to mind............I'd hate to be riding pressurized hydrogen at mach anything.

[Servant of the 9]

First of all, this is gonna make one nifty cruise missile, and secondly a great air superiority fighter. Commercial flight is a long way off.

So9

[CasearianDaoist]

And the future of the program could be hindered by budget cuts as NASA attempts to establish a moon base and launch a manned Mars expedition under an initative by the Bush Administration.

This is total nonsense. there is money in the budget, there is money in the Air Force budget too and there is most likely black budget money too. I hope that this flight goes well as we really need to develop this technology. I bet it will take less then 20 years to get workable civilian prototypes, biut the real uses are as a orbit transfer vehicle and as an un-manned deep strike platform.

It is great stuff.

[blackdog]

Talk about shootin yer load in a hurry! Again, the amount of hydrogen needed to propel an airfoil of close to zero lift with any sort of payload would be prohibitive to commercial flight.

It'll still be kick the tires and light the fires, on Jet-A or kerosene for another hundred years.

[NonZeroSum]

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

This is a solution looking for a problem.

[Alas Babylon!]

Good catch, and you're correct. Just another leftist media back-hand slap at Bush. They never quit, do they?

[CasearianDaoist]

Actually thre long term plans would be to have a detachable robotic craft thet would really just be a like any other supersonic platform that would get it up to speed and then release it. They would probably have to wait until the technology improved to the point were there were very powerful and very light all composite/cermaic engines, which may be twenty years away but most likely not 100.

Even so it would make a great space entry vehicle.

[Riley]

Whaddya mean over the Pacific? I want to see this thing fly cross country on the deck at that speed! Yeeehaaaa!

[shadowman99]

No mention of the fact it's unmanned.

[CasearianDaoist]

transfer form earth to orbit not to a trasfer orbit. The solution is that it requires much less fuel and can be done from an airstrip. The notion is to cheap, routine and at will flight to orbit.

[NonZeroSum]

"transfer from earth to orbit" is usually called "launch." Orbit transfer means from one orbit to another.

Anyway, there's no particular reason to think that this would be cheaper than a well-designed rocket. It would certainly be much more complex. We haven't even begun to mature rocketry yet, and can do much better than we currently are without airbreathing.

[null and void]

But can it keep up with the Aurora???

[blackdog]

I thought this stuff is old hat. I thought the area 51 base has been flying at mach 5 and making right angle turns at mach 7 for decades now?

At least that's what the Groom Lake Tin Foil Brigade declares.