http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/...ew-york-to-london-in-under-an-hour/?hpt=hp_c1 Lets hope those inertial dampeners are up to snuff!
Speed wise its all been done before with X-15 which was faster and manned.. As for the engine, hope they'll be able to test it.
Apparently one of the fin's snapped off and caused the thing to spiral out of control. I guess the main question is, was this due to an imperfection in the design or can it just not handle speeds like that without buckling under the pressure? It'll be interesting to find out in the coming days.
With things like these operating at the edge of our technology it's not uncommon to have failures but as the saying goes you sometimes learn more through mistakes. It's however frustrating to find out that the tiny thing snapped off because someone at assembly had a bad day and didn't feel like rechecking his work for example. Maybe as a retired person i will be able to travel to the US or Asia within two hours and it will be normal but that would be about 30 years in the future.. we'll see.
Yup. It takes _years_, sometimes a decade to develop a modern commercial or military aircraft platform from scratch. Even if these designs worked flawlessly today, it would be the mid 2020s before you ever flew something with an engine and air frame that can fly hypersonic. Exciting, but it seems like they've been talking about how we're on the verge of hypersonic commercial flight for decades now.
Well for some reason the military traditionally doesn't give civilian industries their cutting edge technology to use.
I don't know, but for me those multiple blade extravaganzas clog up more than cut. I'm seriously considering a switch to old fashion single edge cartridges. Best razors I ever had were some really cheap single blade disbosables a discount department store chain used to sell.
I used to go old school with the big razor with replaceable razor blades. Anyway, the possibilities for a fin failure are of course design flaw, assembly failure, or possibly an unanticipated vortex impingement. The Navy briefly stopped accepting early F-18's because the vortex coming off the leading-edge root extension was rocking the vertical stabilizer, leading to fatigue cracks at its base, which hadn't shown up with the F-17's slotted LERX. Unfortunately, they're not going to find the fin so they'll probably have to beef it up all around.
Some more info http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=16112 Pay close attention to the last statement by the moderator: My *guess* would be an over-reliance upon simulation. Back then, nobody really knew exactly what they were going to face, so they over-engineered. When something went wrong, the skins were a bit thicker, the structures a bit stouter, the margins a bit fatter. Now the goal is to shave every last gram. We have got to get away from that type of thinking. Think bigger, bolder. Hypersonics fans hoped to keep research alive by suggesting airbreathing missiles. Yet we had something even faster years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAM-87_Skybolt http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/skybolt.htm Mach 6 is about 4,132 MPH. Skybolt flew at 9,500 MPH. All solid-- It isn't as if we don't know how to make things rugged and fly fast--take Sprint http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/sprint.htm The missile was popped out of its silo by a cold gas generator; then the first stage ignited, accelerating the missile at more than 100G's. It was protected by the same ablative nose-cone technology used on the re-entry vehicles it was intercepting...Within seconds, the missile reached a speed of Mach 10+, and the extreme thermodynamic heating demanded sophisticated ablative shielding (the nose was already glowing red-hot less than a second after launch)...Entire engagement time – from launch to intercept – was 15 seconds maximum. This is what missile folks could do when men were men http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
The big problem with all the things you just linked - design life. It's obviously much easier to design something that will go mach 10 if it only has to last 15 seconds. That's not the goal here.
Skybolt was actually a bit faster and allowed a pretty deep reach. Range 1,150 miles Skybolt flew at 9,500 MPH in thinner upper air with a more gradual acceleration. Sprint flew through thick air at sea level. Skybolt's Mach 10 is 'only' 7,610mph
Lowther's point in his blog is that we try to do too much with too little. We can't even seem to have a small hypersonic test vehicle last as long as some older munitions flew.
It was a test vehicle researching new technology. If it had been built using the same tech as those "old munitions" we wouldn't be learning anything from it.