Thursday, November 18, 2004

Education Rebellion: New Speed Record

Yesterday, a NASA (unpiloted) aircraft testing out its experimental scramjet engine hit a speed of Mach 9.7. To give that a little perspective, the Concorde generally cruised right around a meager Mach 2 and the SR-71 ran around Mach 3.

The upside of this research is a good one…flight from New York to Tokyo or Sydney in 2-3 hours. But then, you’d also be traveling at 100 times faster than you’d travel in your car on the highway…and over 10 times the speed of a 747. A crash at hypersonic speeds like that could be devastating. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops (I’ve been keeping an eye on it for a while) and see what kind of safety hoops it’ll have to jump through before going commercial.

Sources:
New York Times x-43A article
Popular Mechanics Hyper-X article (2001)

exporty ... 12:17 am  
"Side effects of being a writer may include heartache, headache, calloused fingertips, and insanity."

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.



Powered by Inebriated Web Weasels
©2001 -2007 Jeffery A. Stevenson/Seth Damoose. All Rights Reserved. Any duplication without expressed written permission is strictly prohibited.