NASA Helping U.S. Air Force Gear Up for 2009 X-51 Flights

[mutley 4,498]

Testing is under way at NASA's Langley Research Center on a jet-fueled, air-breathing engine like the one that will power the U.S. Air Force's X-51 WaveRider vehicle as it sets out in late 2009 to set new records in hypersonic flight.

Aiming for top speeds approaching Mach 7 (around 5,000 miles or 8,050 kilometers per hour), X-51 is not intended to be the fastest air-breathing vehicle the United States has built. But it is the most complicated, designed to achieve five or six minutes of powered flight before doing a controlled glide into the ocean.

More... http://www.space.com/businesstechnology ... ights.html

cheers

[hurricanemk1c 195]

That's fast!

If the war had gone on another 20 years, Richard Brandson's 'revolionary new' plane would have dropped a air-burst bomb on New York from Berlin, going at about Mach 7 and riding the strastosphere

The above is about a proposed 'Amerika Bomber', and is also from a programme on Secert Nazi Aircraft of WW2

Kieran

[allardjd 1,853]

If the war had gone on for even another year, the Germans would have, like the Japanese, been trying to extract fuel from pine trees and probably reduced to eating the bark. They had little left to fight with as the end neared.

Germany had a number of innovative ideas, some actually built, some in progress at the end of the war, but many, like the Amerika bomber, just an idea in the head of someone with a great deal of foresight and no means to bring it to fruition.

John

[hurricanemk1c 195]

More info - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel

And it would be travelling at 22,100 km/h (13,800 mph), so a lot faster!

Still a great idea to make a plane that goes Mach.7!

Kieran

[MartinW 0]

Postwar analysis of the Silverbird design involving a mathematical control analysis unearthed a computational error and it turned out that the heat flow during the initial re-entry would have been far higher than originally calculated by S

[allardjd 1,853]

Martin,

I wasn't aware that the German concept had been found flawed, but am not surprised.

If you consider the extreme measures that had to be applied in the SR-71 to deal with airframe heating, e.g. extensive use of titanium alloys, expansion joints, specially developed heat-tolerant fuel, oil and hydraulic fluids, use of the fuel as a heat sink, etc, one shouldn't be astounded that going much faster presents some pretty significant engineering hurdles to be jumped over.

John

[allardjd 1,853]

...this is the scram-jet isn't it.

"The wedge-shaped hypersonic vehicle will be mounted atop a U.S. Army tactical missile

system solid-rocket booster that will propel the X-51 to speeds in excess of Mach 4 before

its scramjet engine takes over. After five or six minutes of powered flight, Brink said, X-51

will glide into the Pacific Ocean. "

John

[MartinW 0]

If you consider the extreme measures that had to be applied in the SR-71 to deal with airframe heating, e.g. extensive use of titanium alloys, expansion joints, specially developed heat-tolerant fuel, oil and hydraulic fluids, use of the fuel as a heat sink, etc, one shouldn't be astounded that going much faster presents some pretty significant engineering hurdles to be jumped over.

Exactly John, as soon as I read the post the same thing occurred to me, hence why I read the Wiki article. Such extreme velocities are only now becoming feasible thanks to modern materials. [As far as we now - black aircraft - :wink: ]