NASA Tests Hypersonic Blackswift 487
dijkstra writes "Blackswift was previously rumored to be a super secret hypersonic scramjet-based aircraft co-named HTV-3X, essentially a 21st century version of the SR-71. Today NASA has unveiled the real Blackswift (video link), which uses pulse detonation engines (PDEs). A PDE is essentially a modern version of the old V-1 buzz bomb engine. This engine requires significantly fewer moving parts and achieves much higher efficiency than a turbofan, and is technically able to go hypersonic without any kind of 'dual-stage' engine."
Re:Air Force != NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be the Aurora (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be the Aurora, the "triangular shaped" airplane with the "donuts on a rope" contrail that various people have reported seeing over the years? (I saw something on discovery channel about it)
UFO over Yakima Wa. in the 90's (Score:2, Interesting)
Build your own jet (Score:5, Interesting)
Pulse jets are surprisingly easy to build, and I'm going to flagrantly link to my own build log of my engine being built with videos of it running/imploding here. [frenchgeek.com]
Videos are all here. [frenchgeek.com]
Cheers.
Re:I feel dirty (Score:2, Interesting)
No, they're dumb. Fox News was unable to find people who could act dumb, so now they just hire people who really, (really, really) are dumb.
From my extensive corporate background, I can tell you that if somebody that has been hired acts dumb, he's usually dumber than he seems; all a matter of cost efficiency, a smart guy acting dumb would cost between twice and three times as much, and you'd risk him saying clever things once in a while anyway.
I dunno though. I used to post on politics where people used to post things like
"Everything I needed to know about the Middle East I learned on 9/12 when I listed to Jackyl's song 'Open Invitation' [lyricsmode.com] and got drunk on Budweiser with my buddies"
(fuck yeah, BTW)
But when I went to meet up with some of them they were all expert internet trolls and quite well read. None of them would dream of drinking Budweiser or listening to Jackyl. All of them had gone to college.
And it's quite possible that Fox just exists to make liberals rage and conservatives laugh. The head of Fox said that the "Fair and balanced" slogan was adopted because "it drives liberals wild".
The fact is that liberals have control of the networks - I saw poll that showed essentially all journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS etc vote for the Democrats.
So a right wing troll minority network trolling the majority was pretty much inevitable.
Re:Could this be the Aurora (Score:2, Interesting)
Could this be the Aurora, the "triangular shaped" airplane with the "donuts on a rope" contrail that various people have reported seeing over the years? (I saw something on discovery channel about it)
Yup, I think so
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_aircraft#Steven_Douglas_sighting [wikipedia.org]
Re:Awful (Score:5, Interesting)
The Asharites questioned the value of evidence and scientific method, because they believed that the deep properties of nature were (and should stay) beyond the realm of human comprehension. Very much like your "God fearing" Midwestern Christians.
Sadly, i fear that the irony of the situation would be lost on these people, even if it were explained in very simple concepts.
Re:Slick reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I'd heard American news was bad, but I didn't realise just how bad.
"How can a human cope with going that fast?"
What is this, 1850? The scientist didn't explain very well that you only feel any force under acceleration admittedly, maybe he thought that when the guy said 'going fast' he meant 'accelerating fast'. But OMFG, some people obviously just don't think... don't notice that travelling at 500mph on a plane feels no different to being at a 'standstill' (ignoring the earth/galaxy's rotation), it's only the acceleration that stresses the body. Later on he was saying "Surely they need some kind of special equipment?" :/ sure, they need a hypersonic plane..
Re:Awful (Score:3, Interesting)
The Asharites questioned the value of evidence and scientific method, because they believed that the deep properties of nature were (and should stay) beyond the realm of human comprehension. Very much like your "God fearing" Midwestern Christians.
It is often said that history doesn't repeat itself but I could well see a rerun of that episode one of these days.
It probably was one of the major catastrophes of the human history. Without it the Mediterranean civilisations could have grown together instead of half of them collapsing back into ignorance.
And yet few people seem to even know about this historical tidbit. :(
Re:Awful (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just the thing. They ARE proud of their stupidity. They are of and cater to that segment of society that distrusts education, knowledge and science.
You mean women aged 25-54?
Because that's the main demographic of morning shows like America's Newsroom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_television [wikipedia.org]
Breakfast television programs normally feature regular news briefs and information reports on business and the stock market, and weather and commuter travel (traffic in North American usage)--particularly in the 'early half', when the bulk of the workforce demographic is still home. Later in the program, programming will shift to more homemaker-oriented entertainment programming, to reflect a dominantly female demographic.
Personally, I'd say it's somewhat insulting how the programming turns lightweight and airy once the menfolk have gone off to work, but that seems to be what the morning viewers are interested in, even accounting for their political/religious/philosophical bent.
So while it must feel nice to rant about Fox and the "segment of society that distrusts education, knowledge and science" which watches them, what you just saw is pretty much par for the course during the 9:00-10:59 AM time slot.
Re:I feel dirty (Score:4, Interesting)
Bill Hemmer is probably one of the dumbest they've got too. Not all of them are quite so bad, but he is really a bubble headed empty suited talking head.
I watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. I also watch BBC news and read from various outlets. NONE of them are without a bias, but generally if you use diverse sources you can get a better picture.
If I happen to have Fox on when Hemmer starts yapping, I change the channel. He is one of the most annoying talking heads on ANY network.
sekrit planes! (Score:5, Interesting)
I really do wonder what they're dicking around with out there. The two bits of evidence I heard of supporting the idea of a fancy post-SR-71 wonderplane were the donuts-on-a-rope contrails (which the link says can be produced by conventional aircraft under the right conditions) and linear earthquakes picked up on seismographs that do not follow any existing fault line that seemingly originate in the atmosphere. I've seen that "fact" mentioned before but have no idea how accurate it is.
http://tinwiki.org/wiki/Aurora#Contrail [tinwiki.org]
I have no proof one way or the other, I just think it would be surprising for the government to retire something as valuable as the Blackbird without having an even better replacement in the works. Then again, using logic to explain government decisions is often a losing proposition.
I'm glad to finally find out what that is (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard what I thought was a strange-sounding small plane. Found the contrail, and the head growing far ahead of where the sound was coming from, and I couldn't see the contrail source. Maybe 20 seconds from hearing the sound from the north to seeing the head of the contrail disappear to the south. It was flying down the Front Range of the Rockies. I was just north of Gunbarrel, Colorado.
I googled around and found conspiracy nut sites talking about "Aurora", which fit my observations well. Since then, I've just been waiting for it to finally be revealed. I guess the research has gone on far enough to start production.
Re:American TV (Score:3, Interesting)
The key point that you have to remember about America is that there is a far greater range from high to low than in other nations. We have great leaders like Kennedy and Roosevelt punctuated by boobs like GWB. We have put men on the moon but cannot record votes accurately. The top 10% of US high school students outperform the top 10% from any other nation, yet our average is below almost any developed country.
Re:Slick reporting (Score:2, Interesting)
My, what a brave new world [wikipedia.org] we live in :)
Re:Slick reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
In fairness, humans DO have a problem with high speeds, but it's biological, not physical. A person's reaction time has a lower limit, and it is quite possible to exceed that limit and cause problems with a person's control of a vehicle regardless of gee forces. If this were not the case, then all it would take to be a race car driver would be an extra capacity bladder.
That being said, I'm pretty sure the anchor meant "wouldn't they be crushed?" Given that the main viewers of morning news programs are soccer moms killing time after their spawn have gone off to what passes for education in this country, I'm sure tat was their interpretation as well. After all, minivans are DANGEROUS when you go fast - that's why you have car seats and a cell phone. For emergencies.
Re:I feel dirty (Score:5, Interesting)
apologies if I've butchered it a bit, but damn if it isn't spot on.
Re:Could this be the Aurora (Score:3, Interesting)
It might be. I seem to recall the aerospace media calling it Aurora. There were a number of sonic booms over the LA area that were attributed to it that weren't traced to known military planes. And I seem to recall the Brits took a picture of a pulse trail of something attributed to Aurora
It could easily be that Blackswift is the military name for Aurora. It would be kind of like the stealth 'fighter' from a number of years back. I believe it flew for about seven or eight years before the Air Force admitted that it existed. And the Air Force name for the project was definitely not what the aerospace media called it. (Nor was it shaped anything like the Revelle model that was created representing a stealth fighter.)
Re:Slick reporting (Score:3, Interesting)
Videos like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeMhxvYq1Ww [youtube.com] really don't help :p
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGmesn5WXeE [youtube.com] is another hilarious but sad one. My impression is that the general american public just isn't very well educated as to geography and cultures outside of the US. Most people in the world understand american culture (even if it is a skewed version) because of all the stuff that comes out of america - movies, music, fast food places, etc. So when people visit America they generally know what's going on, but I doubt it's the same when your standard American visits, say, China.
I admit that I'm not very well versed on American geography of course - I could name a lot of the states but I couldn't point out where they were on a blank map or what most of the capitals were, I tend to just think of the US as a big blob, just as I think of Russia and China mostly as big blobs and don't know much of the internal geography of each, but I know roughly where most countries in the world are on a map. I reckon that's how most people in the US think about the rest of the world though.. just a big blob of non-American-ness that they don't really need to know about (which is fair enough as long as they aren't wanting to go to war against countries they know nothing about).
Not meaning this to be a troll or anything, it's just how I see it. I've met some dumb Americans, and I've also met some highly intelligent ones (mostly over here to study). I also dated a Canadian, I'm not sure what that says about me. I used to regard Canadians as generally smarter than Americans, but now I just think of them as weird selfish bitches *cough*
Mach 10/Hypersonic Skyhook = Cheap Access to Space (Score:3, Interesting)
If we have the technology to build a plane that can fly at Mach 10, then we can build Zubrin's Hyersonic Skyhook [harvard.edu] without nanotube cables or any kind of unobtanium. This would give us Space Elevator priced access to space!
Basically, you build a beanstalk that doesn't go all the way to geosynch, and doesn't go all the way to the ground. It's a lot less massive and doesn't require the same stupendous tensile strength as a Space Elevator. A Mach 10 hypersonic plane could deliver cargoes to the bottom end, perhaps with the help of a small booster rocket on the cargo pod. After the cargo is attached, you winch it up and use ion engines or interaction with the earth's magnetic field to accelerate the skyhook. (Which would be cheaper, since ion engines have huge delta-V, and magnetic interaction requires power and no fuel.)
Another Paper [64.233.167.104]