Just a couple of decades ago, aviation had certain rules. If you wanted to fly fast through the atmosphere, you used a jet engine. The champion was the SR-71 Blackbird, developed by Lockheed Martin, but it achieved the highest result at Mach 3. If you wanted to go faster, you needed a rocket. But it also meant carrying its own oxygen and acting like a spacecraft rather than an airplane. This was before NASA’s X-43A came along.
The X-43A was an unmanned aircraft with a fuselage just 12 feet long that was launched in 2004. able to fly ten times faster than sound. It was Hyper-X, about 230 million. Before that, scientists only counted numbers in computer simulations and wind tunnels.
The X-43A could not take off on its own. A massive B-52B bomber would give it that initial boost, carrying the X-43A up to about 40,000 feet. From there, it would launch the ship, which was strapped to the nose of a modified Pegasus rocket. The rocket then fired and blasted the X-43A to its test altitude.
The attempt was not successful. First attempt in 2001. in June was actually southbound after the amp failed. This forced the team to spend two years changing their approach. in 2004 they came back in droves. In March, the machine reached a speed of Mach 6.8. Then, in 2004 on November 16, the second vehicle screamed through the sky at an incredible speed of Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 miles per hour, at an altitude of about 110,000 feet. The engine only burned for about ten seconds, but in that small window it appeared that air-breathing hypersonic flight was possible.
Read more: 11 of the most iconic ground attack military aircraft in history
Why scramjets are a big deal
NASA transports the first X-43A hypersonic research aircraft and a modified Pegasus rocket
This impossible speed is achieved by a technology called scramjet, which basically means “ramjet of supersonic combustion”. Unlike a conventional jet engine, which uses fan blades to push air out, the scramjet’s principle of operation is that it has no moving parts. Instead, it uses the tremendous speed of the aircraft to compress the incoming air. The mind-boggling part is that the air remains supersonic throughout the engine during fuel injection and combustion. It’s a big engineering challenge because you have to support a flame in an air stream that moves faster than sound. This is also the reason why gliders cannot operate at low speeds and need a rocket to engage quickly enough.
But all this trouble is not in vain, because the great advantage is that the shuttles breathe oxygen from the atmosphere – unlike rockets, which have to carry their own heavy oxidizer. This means they can be smaller, lighter or carry more payload. All this is certainly fascinating, but the Hyper-X program was never intended to produce a production aircraft or even be a permanent mission. Rather, it was a three-flight research project from the start. After these two successful flights in 2004 NASA had all the important data it needed and completed it.
How X-43A lives on
a Boeing X-51A burst through the sky – Boeing
But the Hyper-X program never quite went away. The baton was passed to the US Air Force, which was tasked with figuring out what happened next. The next step turned out to be the record-breaking Boeing X-51 WaveRider, a direct successor that took what the X-43A started and ran with it. in 2013 The X-51 showed just how far the technology had come, achieving a powered flight that lasted as long as 210 seconds.
But the real story is the ripple effect of small craft. The data obtained from her flights seemed to become the blueprint for all subsequent American hypersonic programs. The engineers learned some huge lessons, such as that the entire vehicle must be designed as a single engine, and they gained a treasure trove of information on how to beat the heat of hypersonic flight.
Even today, that 20-year-old flight data remains the “answer key” that engineers use to double-check their modern computer models when designing new vehicles. It also keeps the dream of flying a plane directly into orbit from becoming just a fantasy.
Want the latest tech and automotive trends? Subscribe to our free newsletter to receive the latest headlines, expert guides and how-to tips, one email at a time. a letter.
Read the original article on SlashGear.