Waverider X-51A, Hypersonic Aircraft, Could Fly From NY To LA In Less Than An Hour

[Crow]

Imagine being able to fly from New York to Los Angeles in under an hour.

If Boeing and the US Air Force succeed in getting its hypersonic aircraft to stay in flight for more than a few minutes, we will be one step closer to both commercial and military hypersonic flight.

On Tuesday, the unmanned X-51A WaveRider will take off from the Edwards Air Force base in Southern California's Mojave Desert. It will be attached to a B-52 bomber's wing, and once it is dropped from the wing, it is expected to fly at Mach 6, which is six times the speed of sound and over 3,600 miles per hour, as explained in the Air Force factsheet. The hypersonic speed is expected to last only 300 seconds, but that's twice as long as it's ever gone at that speed.

The WaveRider is not carrying weapons, but is designed to pave the way for hypersonic weapons. NASA and the Pentagon are financing hypersonic flight research in three national centers across the country, calling the technology "the new stealth" for its capability to outrun enemy fire, KTLA reports.

Hypersonic research advocates often point to when the US sent missiles from naval vessels in the Arabian Sea into training camps in Afghanistan in a 1998 attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, the Los Angeles Times reports. By the time the missiles landed, 80 minutes later, Bin Laden was gone. If the missile had gone at hypersonic speed, like the WaveRider, it would have landed in just over 12 minutes.

Continued at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1776269.html

[Roo]

I'm at work on hold so I'm not going to watch the video now but have you heard of this? http://www.et3.com/

[Crow]

Sounds nice, but it would require dedication from the international community for it to be feasible. Also, has that ETT been proven to work in a controlled environment or is that just a stated goal?

[Darwin]

ETT is just vaporware at this point. It might work but what is completely bogus in that press release are the cost projections. One tenth the cost of high speed rail? Bollocks. Also running a vehicle in an evacuated tube at 6500mph would be an unbelievably fault intolerant situation. No thanks.

[sgreger1]

That sounds like the most uncomfortable ride ever, spending an hour going faster than the speed fo sound lol. Do the passengers all have to wear G suits too? I don't know if this is something we should relaly hold our breath for as far as commercial travel is concerned.

[truthwolf1]

This reminds me of a line from Hell on Wheels from AMC. Imagine one day you will be able to travel from New York City to San Francisco in Six days!!!!!!!!

I wonder if we will get it down to six minutes in my lifetime.

[CoderGuy]

I believe in today's test flight it disintegrated after a few seconds of flight. So guess it's not quite ready for passengers yet :P

[Frosted]

I'll take the 5 hour flight from London to NY instead.

[Crow]

Hypersonic X-51A falls into ocean when part fails during test flight

"An unmanned experimental aircraft failed during an attempt to fly at six times the speed of sound in the latest setback for hypersonic flight."

LOS ANGELES — A closely watched test flight of an experimental aircraft designed to travel up to 3,600 mph (> 5,793 km/h) ended in disappointment when a part failed, causing it to plummet into the Pacific, the Air Force revealed.

The unmanned X-51A WaveRider was launched Tuesday over the Pacific from above the Point Mugu Naval Air Test Range in a key test to fine-tune its hypersonic scramjet engine.

The aircraft was designed to hit Mach 6, or six times the speed of sound, or about 3,600 mph (> 5,793 km/h), and fly for five minutes. But that didn't happen. The engine never lit. About 15 seconds into the flight, a fault was identified in one of the WaveRider's control fins, and the aircraft was unable to maintain control and was lost.

"It is unfortunate that a problem with this subsystem caused a termination before we could light the scramjet engine," said Charlie Brink, program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. "All our data showed we had created the right conditions for engine ignition, and we were very hopeful to meet our test objectives."

The hypersonic vehicle is being developed by the Air Force, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing.

This is the third time a WaveRider has flown. Not one flight has gone the distance.

Engineers thought they were on the right track with the WaveRider program in May 2010, when the high-speed aircraft made its first flight. In that test, the WaveRider sped westward for about 143 seconds at 3,500 mph (over 5,793 km/h) before plunging into the ocean, as planned.

But in another WaveRider flight in June 2011, a lapse in airflow to the jet engine caused a premature shutdown.

In the test Tuesday, a B-52 took off from Edwards Air Force Base and flew to 50,000 feet (15.24 kilometres) near Point Mugu. The B-52 then dropped the aircraft, and it fell like a bomb for about four seconds before its booster rocket engine ignited and propelled the aircraft.

It was supposed to separate from the rocket and speed across the sky, powered by the air-breathing hypersonic engine, but the control-fin flaw caused the craft to fail.

The Air Force said program officials would investigate the malfunction.

Continued at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...cflight16.html

[Darwin]

This research is being done on the raw ragged bleeding edge of propulsion and materials science so failures such as this are to be expected. I suspect that developing this technology all the way out to a safe passenger vehicle will take, at a bare minimum, another quarter of a century. Even developing it into a reliable non man-rated weapon might take that long--or much longer.