YEEE HAW!! Strap a rocket to your ass an' light the fuse!!

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/2 ... index.html

I believe they're interviewing death row inmates for the position of test pilot.

   

I'll be damned, it worked!

http://www.yahoo.com/_ylh=X3oDMTB2cTNid ... -/s/169565

Unpiloted...
Kinda takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?

   

Yeah i saw this on CNN yesterday. It's unpiloted becasue its not 100% stable. And do you want to be the pilot of a highly unstable, untested, experamental super fast jet.

   

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. But then, I jumped off a 65' cliff into a lake last summer and many of my friends who were present at the time were questioning the sanity of that as well.

I had my glider pilots license when I was 15 (I could fly before I could drive legally), my private license by the time I graduated highschool, and my commercial license shortly after.

But yea, you kidding? The chance to do 5,000 mph? Sign me up!!

   

Ever seen the really old movie "The Right Stuff"? It's about the first pilots that were trying to break the sound barrier, the first astronaughts came out of the same bunch of guys. Unmanned flight tests were unheard of back then, I wanted to be just like those guys!!

I highly recommend this flick anyways.

   

I'm afriad of high places

   

I have not seen it but i will check it out...I do own Vertigo what im not that bad haha

   

who do you think Chuck Yeager is and also the first 7 astronauts were?? They knew the risks then too..

   

Yup Looks like it did workj, for a short time any ways...

http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/2004/03 ... jet_040327


NASA jet reaches world-record Mach 7
Last Updated Sat, 27 Mar 2004 22:57:54 EST
LOS ANGELES - The U.S. Space agency used a special engine to send an unpiloted plane on a brief but historic, hypersonic flight off the coast of California Saturday.

The jet, called X-43A, reached its intended speech of about 8,000 km/h, NASA later confirmed.

"It's been a great, record-breaking day," said Larry Heubner of NASA's Langley Flight Research Center in Virginia. "This was a world-record speed for air-breathing flight."

The needle-nosed jet is designed to roar to speeds of Mach 7 or faster using an experimental engine called a supersonic-combustion ramjet ? also known as a "scramjet." In theory, refined versions of the planes could fly around the world in just a few hours.

Unlike rockets, which have to carry their own oxygen to mix with fuel, scramjets can scoop oxygen directly out of the atmosphere and force it into a combustion chamber. But to work, the engines must already be going about five times the speed of sound ? which is why they need the initial boost from a rocket.

The X-43A, mounted on a modified Pegasus booster rocket, was launched from a B-52B bomber aircraft at an altitude of about 12,000 metres Saturday afternoon. It streaked upward to about 30,000 metres before the rocket dropped away and the scramjet kicked in.

The plane reached Mach 7 during a 10-second powered flight, and then glided for several minutes before plunging into the Pacific Ocean about 650 kilometres from California.

"Today was a grand-slam in the bottom of the 12th," said Joel Sitz, the X-43A project manager at the Dryden Flight Research Center.

"It was fun all the way to Mach 7. We separated the research vehicle from the launch vehicle, as well as separating the real from the imagined."

NASA has spent about $250 million on the X-43A program. Three years ago, its first test flight ended in an explosion. The space agency hopes to fly a third X-43A by this fall.



Written by CBC News Online staff

   

ROFL - you bunch of testosterone filled Canucks. Some quick math, which may be defective, I make no guarantees, this thing pulled at least 24G's to get up to speed in 10 seconds. Meaning I would weigh a meager 4000 lbs.

Now that's faster than your average slapshot.

Then again, that is 10 seconds our time, not the rocket's. At that speed it definitely aged differently than we did.

m

   

Hmm, yer math is kinda crude there m.

The article reads that the solid rocket booster took the X-43A to aproximatly 3,500 mph before it made its 10 second powered flight (meaning under its own power, the scramjet) to 5,000 mph. Not to mention it was probably dropped at a speed of about 660-700 mph (B-52 speed).

So, in 10 seconds it accelerated from 3,500mph to 5,000mph.

That gives us a 150 mph-second acceleration. (not the easiest units to work in but I've got the conversion factors handy)

This would mean, under scramjet power, the X-43a pulled aproximatly 6.83 Gs.

I personally can pull 7Gs before I start to get tunnel vision (I've been tested) I don't know how many I can pull before I black out. They wouldn't let me push it that far!

There is a new G sute under development that so far allows fighter pilots to stay fully conversive at 9 Gs, no tunnel vision or nothin'.

I hold a commercial pilots license and am currently employed as a mechanical engineer, m. I'm no rocket scientist but after crunching the numbers, I'd deafinatly still take that ride!

   

That's right, some good 'ol boys from down under flew the first succesful scramjet!! Check out the link:

http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/

Funny how we didn't hear about it untill NASA had it figured. At least I hadn't heard about it...

NASA did one-up them with the new speed record though.

   

Yup. I read it as Mach 7 in a 10 second flight Oops. Then again, we don't know how long it was at 5000mph in that 10 seconds of flight.

Thx for the correction.

m