Centerfield

Scramjet Major Advance

This is big. Around when everybody was paying attention to Obama's inauguration, an interesting notice happened to filter out of another big achievement that happened last fall in the aerospace world.

Scramjets, drooled at by SF writers and aerospace engineers for decades, are finally looking practical. They're potentially useful because of the hope that, unlike conventional jets, they can speed you up enough to be a useful contribution toward the very high speed needed to get to orbit, but save on fuel compared to rockets by getting oxygen from the air instead of carrying extra oxidant as part of your fuel load.

This is being embodied in an X-plane, the X-51, designed to test a waverider/scramjet combo; it's a prototype missile that also hopes to take advantage of shock waves as a way of damaging targets. If the technologies can scale up, we could be looking at much more practical spaceplanes than our current shuttle.

The Space Shuttle burns $$$ by the ton between flight because it has to survive alot of battering and heating, and thus needs the replaceable heat shield. Waveriding is an elegant aerodynamic effect that offers a way around much of that trouble. Both shock and heating should be lessened using waveriders, though heating may still be trouble and can't be taken for granted as being down enough to avoid ultra-expensive heatshields - though at least we should be able to move away from tiles and the labor-and-thus-$$$-intensive tile inspection/replacement program.

Here's a quote from the Journal-Inquirer: that suggests to me that the waverider effect's working for it:

Dubbed the X-51A Scramjet Engine Demonstrator-WaveRider, the engine last fall passed key flight clearance objectives in ground tests simulating speeds of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, according to a September statement from Curtis Berger, hypersonics programs director for Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne

Another proposed waverider program, Blackswift, has been cancelled, incidentally. It looks to me to be one of many victims of Air Force arrogance. It looks to me like it might be useful to NASA as a possible small-scale aircraft-shaped waverider prototype, but USAF's grown so arrogant it only thinks of itself. It's been sold to Congress purely in military terms, and of course, us Dems are, with reason, skeptical about spending alot of money on ultra-high-tech weapons without good reason, and in a world with X-51 way ahead in its dev curve, and offering a deeply similar featureset, and Blackswift being expensive, behind, and only offering extra scouting ability in an unlikely set of circumstances, I'm sympathetic with the Congress.

P.S. - you can trust those Wikipedia links - wikipedia'a actually gotten good for most things. A sense of competition with the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica was created in the project several years back, by some articles comparing the two. That led Wikipedia to make vital reforms making it much stronger, including creating an office of page editor who will quicly undo selfish edits. Now Wikipedia content is mostly good stuff; there are still some weak points, but there are far fewer corrupted pages and many good and thorough ones.