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http://www.space.com/businesstechnology … amjet.html
*University of Queensland at Brisbane, part of HyShot Program. JAXA involvement. First launch was March 25; may have achieved Mach 8. Another scramjet launch is scheduled for March 29.
Was this previously posted? I've not seen it. Am posting it in this thread because of possible domestic/passenger uses mentioned in article.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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I'm not really a fan of these experimental jets - remember we tried to beat the Ruskies with with these super-sonic planes. Then all of a sudden the Russians were using rockets to launch space capsules...and America was screaming - No fair !! You Russians cheated !!
Maybe the Russians didn't cheat in 1957 with Sputnik-1 and Sputnik-2 maybe they were smarter, the Muttniks, SpaceChimps and Belka are laughing at our futile human attempts to play fly the birdie into space.
Muttnik laughs at yeager's stunts
Small payload X-planes or Spaceshipone that might fly out of the atmosphere is about all we'll see out of these, you can forget flying to Mars.
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These engines are an advance, but they are a long, long way from being big enough to power anything... except of course hypersonic cruise missiles.
Their shape is all wrong, they are a cylinder shape, which you can't build into an airplane. The Scramjet engine needs to inhale air directly from the shock front of the vehicle, which dictates your entire vehicle either be a cylinder with the engine in the nose, or more like the X-43 and under it on one side. If you put a Scramjet engine in, say, an SR-71 Blackbird shaped plane, the air hitting the nose would be deflected around the vehicle and not smoothly getting drawn into the engine.
In the X-43 shape, or something vaugely like it, the air deflected by the nose enters directly into the engine intake.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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