NASA Testing Supersonic X-51A Jet Tomorrow 214
First time accepted submitter littlesparkvt writes "The NASA and the Pentagon's experimental aircraft could go from NY to London in about an hour. With a cost of 140 million dollars USD. During the test the X51-A will reach speeds of 1700 meters a second and climb to an altitude of 70,000 feet."
Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
Or you could compare it to something similar:
The original University of Queensland's HyShot hypersonic tests were done for less than $2 million. Even better well-funded followup flights were around $4.5 million.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1127540.htm [abc.net.au]
Re:Cost (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't a jet-plane. It's a fucking missile.
Okay. So it could blow up London in about an hour.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Funny)
But it will still take NBC 6 hours to report it.
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Okay. So it could blow up London in about an hour.
Not if our spiffy rapier missiles [standard.co.uk] have anything to do with it!
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*Golf Clap*
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Foam at the mouth like this much? Maybe some Xanex or something would help. I wouldn't call the F-22 a piece of shit but it looks like the cost of maintenance will be astronomical. I'd just call it overpriced and underwhelming.
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Foam at the mouth like this much? Maybe some Xanex or something would help. I wouldn't call the F-22 a piece of shit but it looks like the cost of maintenance will be astronomical. I'd just call it overpriced and underwhelming.
Cost of maintenance astronomical == piece of shit.
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Cost of maintenance astronomical == piece of shit.
Perhaps it's a POS, but it's a POS that can maintain air superiority even when significantly outnumbered (by an order of magnitude) by ANY other aircraft, full stop.
It's not like there's a huge fleet of these things. There are 187. All the everyday stuff (escorting stray aircraft from restricted airspace, air support, shooting down bombers, air patrols) are handled by the thousands of F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 aircraft which will be in service for quite a while longer.
So:
Cost per hour of operation: Astronomi
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Perhaps it's a POS, but it's a POS that can maintain air superiority even when significantly outnumbered (by an order of magnitude) by ANY other aircraft, full stop.
Isn't there a pretty strict limit on the number of missiles it can carry? If an F-22 goes up with 8 missiles, it can only take out 8 targets (assuming all hit). After that, it can only bug out.
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Isn't there a pretty strict limit on the number of missiles it can carry? If an F-22 goes up with 8 missiles, it can only take out 8 targets (assuming all hit). After that, it can only bug out.
Depends on how good they are with that 20mm cannon mounted in the right wing....
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It holds 8, but it also has 480 rounds in the cannon. Don't knock it - people thought missiles made guns obsolete (witness the F-4, originally designed with no guns), but cannon kills are still a notable minority.
The thing is you never really need to sustain a fight that long. It just takes a half dozen F-22s to go in and shoot the place up; then the 4th gen fighters move in, clean up anything that's left, and hold the territory while the F-22s fly off, reload, and go to capture more airspace. Of course,
Re:Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
The way the Russkis used to do things was, design and build a prototype with all the bells and whistles and kitchen sink. Get it working. Then re-engineer it back to something a goat herder in Kazikstan could use with 5 minutes' training. Case in point? The MiG-23. They could crank them out for a cost of about 3.3 mil per, when the nearest Western equivilent was the Kfir C2 coming in at 4.5 mil and the F16 at 14. They used aircraft grade aluminum and stainless steel where Western aircraft were using titanium. They couldn't engage as many targets, but you could have 90%+ of them available to fly at a moment's notice where maintanance cycles grounded up to 2/3rds of the F16s at a time.
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Yet, in actual combat Western planes have always prevailed.
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It seems that the USA has become the neonazi military regime. It barely worked in Korea, failed miserably in Vietnam and hasn't even got started yet in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Actually it worked brilliantly in Iraq. The Iraqi army, war-hardened and no slouch, was blitzed in a matter of days. Any regular army would fare badly against the US.
The problem the US keeps having is that its opponents aren't regular armies but guerilla fighters. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan are/were all insurgencies, and you can't win those if you're not prepared to kill everyone who opposes you, and even then your tactics will ensure that plenty of formerly neutral civilians will resent this enough that th
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It barely worked in Korea, failed miserably in Vietnam and hasn't even got started yet in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Since the Korean war was never officially ended (there's only a cease fire), that's hardly a win. But you are reading your history wrong about Vietnam. In that conflict, we won the battles but lost the war. It was a political defeat, not a military one. As to Iraq and Afghanistan, you're kidding, right? How long did the first Iraqui war last? The second Iraqui war (as well as the Afghan war) would h
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095956/quotes?qt=qt0342670
Modern weapons are amazing, but the cost is ridiculous.Afghanistans GDP is 18 billion USD - how much has the war cost? https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/af.html [cia.gov]
As long as there is enough support for the Guerillas or enough opposition against the "oppressors" but that is definitely not the way to go in thi
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Hard to believe the KISS principle wax born in the USA
yeah, you'd think they would stick to it...
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Not to mention the difference between a military/government contract and a private one. One has a lot more cost and design controls, the other has a lot more political input for spreading the work around.
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In the UK its been barely a quarter century since it was made illegal for a man to "rape"
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Still costs less than a F22 Raptor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor [wikipedia.org]
That's probably because the F-22 is an operational aircraft capable of take-off/landing under its own power and houses a human pilot (among many other things).
Re:Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
Which makes it sadly way less interesting
Re:Cost (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really just a test bed for scramjet research. It's a long way to an actual manned version.
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Yes but does an F22 go 6 million miles an hour like the X 51-A? That's what the article said, 1,700 miles /second * 60 seconds / minute * 60 = 6,120,000 miles / hour! Well perhaps the author, William, was metric impaired and mistook 1,700 meters / sec for miles / second; which works out to 1700 m/S / 1.609.34 m/mi = 1.05 mi/ S * 3600S/hr = 3,802.80 I did notice when you type mach 5 into a google search it replys "mach 5 = 1 701.45 m / s"
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no they aren't.
We've been at war for 10 years and they haven't seen combat. If they were usable they would have been involved (instead, they were restricted because of the oxygen system issue). Hell, we sent B-2s over Afghanistan. You think they were flown because of their sophisticated anti-aircraft system?
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no they aren't.
We've been at war for 10 years and they haven't seen combat. If they were usable they would have been involved (instead, they were restricted because of the oxygen system issue). Hell, we sent B-2s over Afghanistan. You think they were flown because of their sophisticated anti-aircraft system?
If there were working Stinger missiles left, then maybe they were.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. Turns out that the 'Raptor' problem is, in fact, related to incorrect inflation of the "Combat Edge" chest corset of G-suits. This incorrect inflation also occurred on F-15s and F-16s but no one noticed. Only on the F-22 was it noticed/significant.
Just in case you think I'm full of shit, here's a citation quoting USAF sources:
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/08/01/air-force-confident-f22-oxygen-riddle-solved.html [military.com]
With that (apparently 20-year old) problem solved, Raptor is back in the air and back to Top Dog.
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It's an awesome piece of machinery, it seriously is, but they need to figure out what's wrong with it rather than just some poorly designed valves in the pressure garment - 4 years to diagnose that? come on...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/04/1251246/air-force-claims-to-have-solved-fatal-f-22-oxygen-riddle
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huray for proofreading (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty sure it won't go 1700 miles per second
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actually 1,700 meters per second or 3,800 Mi/Hr, one mi/S is 3600 Mi/Hr or 1 088.9 m/S
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Sorry but that confuses me...
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The craft will be tested over the Pacific Ocean after being flown there on the wing of a B52 bombers wing.
Mod article redundant..
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Re:huray for proofreading (Score:5, Funny)
Dad: Max, why does the word "wing" appear twice in this sentence?
Max (6yrs old): Because the B-52 has two wings.
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Re:huray(sic) for proofreading (Score:3)
With a cost of 140 million dollars USD.
That's a nice complete sentence!
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1700 miles a second????? (Score:2, Informative)
That would be 6.12 MILLION miles per hour. Somehow, I doubt that.
Re:1700 miles a second????? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:1700 miles a second????? (Score:5, Funny)
Mach 5 = 1,701.45 m / s
Yup. m = miles, s = seconds. That's 1700 miles per second.
I mean, what else could m possibly stand for? There's only one unit of measurement that starts with the letter 'm'...
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Wow!
Re:1700 miles a second????? (Score:5, Funny)
m is metre moron
It's an American missile. Why would they be talking in weird foreign measurements? I mean, "metre"?! R before E? Who spells like that? Sounds like some kind of cheese-eatin' surrender-monkey socialist kind of measurement. Certainly not the kind of measurement that freedom lovin' people from the Good ol' USA would use.
So there you have it. 1700 miles per second. That'll put the fear of God into those godless commies.
(I was going to mark my original post as sarcasm but I thought, "Nah. People will get it.")
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Always indicate humor, sarcasm, or irony - this is the new Slashdot. While you are at it, if you are using Morrisetteian Irony instead of the real thing, you must add a link to a scholarly article about lamas, instead of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_(song) [wikipedia.org]
For a while, I was starting to think Slashdot was attracting the attention of a lot of Aspergers sufferers, but I finally realized that most of these people don't have the highly functioning part, or even the autism part. They just don't 'get
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I suspect some of them go through life irritating every single person they meet.
I prefer to call it a "target-rich environment".
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That would be everybody who speaks English except for Americans. Not just the French (I assume that's who you were referring too in your puerile comment)
For most of the English speaking world, a "meter" is a measurement device, not a unit of measure.
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Second is borrowed by the socialists, we americans invented it! Furlongs, fortnights, and stones aren't used in the USA.
1.21 Jigawatts? (Score:2)
The Libyans will never catch you
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1700 miles a *second* ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
> 1700 miles a second
This is obviously a mis-print, right?
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Yeah, the military would love it if we had something that could go 1/100th the speed of light in the atmosphere. *vroom*
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About 4 seconds difference if you maintained that speed for 24 hours.
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And this...
With a cost of 140 million dollars USD.
...is a sentence fragment.
It's all just one big.
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It also doesn't make sense. 140 million dollars USD brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
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And this...
With a cost of 140 million dollars USD.
...is a sentence fragment.
It's all just one big.
That's how I talk you insensitive.
Re:1700 miles a *second* ??? (Score:5, Funny)
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Warp .01 sound way cooler.
I believe that's impulse.
Re:1700 miles a *second* ??? (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. It's correct. They are launching over the Pacific ocean. They expect it to disappear off the left side of the map and reappear on the right side of the map about 14 seconds later. 24,000 miles divided by 14 seconds gives you 1700 miles/sec.
Maybe they should use a globe.
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Hear that whooshing sound? That's not the X-51. That's a joke going over your head.
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Somebody saw m/s and figured miles starts with an m....
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The whole article is a misprint.
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The unit mix-up was for the Mars Climate Orbiter, not a lander. The Mars Polar Lander failed, but that was probably due to an early engine cutoff due to a false sensor reading.
Another article with more background... (Score:5, Informative)
...is here [wired.com]
Um, wait, what? (Score:2)
Surely that's more likely 1700 m/s (meters per second), not miles per second. Though if the latter, sign me up for a test ride!
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Surely that's more likely 1700 m/s (meters per second), not miles per second. Though if the latter, sign me up for a test ride!
Well, what if it were 10,221,904.1 furlongs per fortnight? Would you sign up then?
This is why NASA can't have nice things... (Score:3)
The Pentagon is using them to develop military projects like this. This is what the frigging Military Industrial Complex and DARPA are for. Leave NASA and they're limited and continuously dwindling funds for space research, or we're going to be left in the dust by China, India and the other space faring nations.
Note: If this and projects like it are funded separately and outside of NASAs budget, then, never mind. Carry on...
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Why do you think they dumped billions into NASA rocketry? Or the USSR did for that matter?
Military -- The civilian stuff is just memetic misdirection to get you go go along with it.
See also cars and highways.
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Is NASA not the military?
Let me know... (Score:3)
When they add three more zeros to that speed. I wanna go to Alpha Centauri.
It's just a test vehicle (Score:2)
This is just a small test vehicle. It's to answer the question "How do we make a scramjet that actually works"? There have been scramjet projects since the 1950s, but only in the last 10 years has there been much success. The problems are huge.
There's some hope that this might eventually lead to launch vehicles that are air-breathing up to Mach 15 or so, allowing a bigger payload fraction for the vehicle size. At one time, it was hoped this might bring down launch costs, but probably not.
As a weapon sy
Has a big fuel tank (Score:2)
It can go from NY to London in an hour? Wow, it must have a big fuel tank and be really efficient.
NY to London in 1 hour? What about TSA checks? (Score:2)
Maybe the flight only takes one hour, but with the long, slow security check lines, the entire trip still takes a day.
NASA should invent something that makes the TSA work faster.
Or, even better, with Stealth technology, maybe they could make it disappear altogether?
It's not supersonic, it's hypersonic (Score:5, Informative)
Above Mach 5 or so you have to start considering different physics about the air flow.
Quantum Fighter? (Score:2)
Whereby flying it you are both dead and alive at the same time?
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You have to account for jet lag.
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1700miles / second or almost .1C ... ...
You might want to check your math.
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Yeah, it can get to Iran fast enough to beat them into submission so that we... have enough gas to get back.
I'm pretty sure there are more cost effective ways to achieve military... umm... Oh crap. Yeah. You're right. It's a weapon.
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Yeah, but you don't get as many dead brown people with the NASA Curiosity. That's how Congress measures these things. Dead foreigners per million dollars.
Guess which type of project is going to disappear first with our new austerity-minded overlords?
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You mean like every rocket that has ever launched a human into space? Or the SR-71 which wasn't as fast, but operated at a higher ceiling than this test?
Putting a human in a Mach 5 aircraft is not going to be that difficult. Getting the damn thing to be anywhere near economical running at Mach 5 will be the problem.
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For supersonic speeds it makes a bit of sense, given that the obvious point of reference for objects moving that fast is the speed of sound. Military fighters often have their speed reported in mach. Most people know the speed of sound in m/s, few know it in km/h.
I agree though, km/h probably makes more sense for a passenger aircraft, but m/s is still a fairly sane unit, IMO.
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I can't help noticing that these "New York to London" metrics spouted by the Pentagon are carefully constructed "spin" to frame the X-51 in a "civilian transport" context.
And every time a distance or area is expressed in terms of football fields, the statistic was sponsored by the NFL? Or maybe New York to London is a common metric for describing how fast something flies (especially from when you could compare that flight time to the Concorde).
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You don't even need to get that complicated. The projectile will provide a hole, with that hole you will be able to tell which direction the projectile came from.
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...
Glad you got the capitalisation of c correct (unlike a lot of other posts here) but you should really look up what a mile is in metric.