Huge Flying Launch System, Next Rutan/Allen Project

Where are Burt Rutan / Paul Allen going after their present project is up and running on it's own? Well how about this monster! A gigantic 385-foot wing span, 544-tonne plane powered by six 747 engines that will serve as a flying launch platform for 490,000 pound orbital rockets.

The reason it looks so familiar is Rutan built SpaceShipOne, the ship that made the first private suborbital flight, as well as its http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmothership, WhiteKnightOne and the follow on versions for Virgin Galactic: WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. Of course it will not be a sole effort either, SpaceX will be providing support in the way of boosters for the payload.

Here is a short animated film showing how the Stratolaunch System will work.





complete Gizmodo article here

Flying Airport Would Never Land

Pretty bizarre idea huh? But leave it to Dvice to find the weird stuff. This isn't some 50s pie in the sky speculation either, but a contemporary idea. Huge nuclear powered lifting bodies would be in effect massive people movers that would allow planes from local airports to ferry passengers up from the ground, then return to their base to await another load or to ferry passengers back down from the high flying platform. Since none of the planes or the flying airport are using copious amounts of jet grade kerosene, there would be huge fuel savings.

Of course the article points out that we need to solve some major technological barriers before something like this could be possible but what a sight to see one of these bad boyz fly over huh?

Complete Dvice article here

2 Hour Trans-Alantic Flight?

A two hour flight across the Atlantic may be possible within 10 years. Employing new hyper speed engine technology the HyperMach SonicStar will be able to fly twice as fast as the Concord or 3.6 mach. and do so at altitudes above 60 thousand feet (high enough to see the curve of Earth) while carrying a passenger load of 20 souls.

Plans for the SonicStar were unveiled at the 2011 Paris airshow. The engines are supposed to be 30% more efficient and the overall airframe will all but eliminate sonic overpressure. The plane's ultra high speed will put most of Europe in range of a 2 hour plus flight and complete circumnavigation a hair over five hours.

A Nuclear Aircraft?!

Hey, does anyone remember that at one point in the very early 60s, the US almost had a long range nuclear bomber?! Oh yeah we did! The XB-70 Valkyrie.

Why you sanely ask? Well in the early 60s, the USA's nuclear deterrent was based around the aging B-52 fleet.

The Pentagon was looking for the eventual replacement, to the B- 52. They wanted a bomber that could cruise at ultra-high altitude, carry nuclear bombs, and stay aloft for extended periods. It also needed to escape intercepting fighters, to it had to be fast as well. Jet engines of the day just couldn't produce the power that would be needed to fly high, fast and carry heavy payloads. As such early research turned to a nuclear reactor to power the plane. Crazy as it sounds, research in the 50s had already flown functioning reactors in test planes. Not to power the plane mind you, but the reactors were fueled and running during many test flights.

Design finally settled on the XB-70 Valkyrie (not a complete pipe dream if you look at it. The Valkyrie it seemed strongly influenced the SR-70 & B-1b planes)

The Valkyrie's days were numbered right from the start however. Cost over-runs and technical problems soon brought the XB-70 project to a grinding halt. Also, long range ICBMs were proving themselves very reliable at putting multiple warheads on target, plus other advancements in missile tech made it impossible to fly high enough or fast enough to avoid being shot down.

In the end only 2 XB-70s were ever built and neither was fitted with a reactor. One crashed during a test flight collision with a chase plane and the final Valkyrie resides at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Ohio.

Read the excellent article here on the IO9 blog Wikipedia on the xb-70

New supersonic airliner could fly 5 times the speed of sound

Flying at more than twice the speed of Concorde and five times the speed of sound, this hypersonic airliner is set to be the future of modern air travel. At these speeds the airliner's total flight time from Brussels to Australia could be as little as four hours and forty minutes. The ground-breaking aircraft - known as the A2 – is the work of British engineers at Reaction Engines Limited in Oxfordshire. The project, to develop the plane, is partly funded by the European Space Agency and the European Union. Of course, if built, the cost of a ticket on the A2 from Europe to Australia is estimated to be around £2,000 ($3907.00 USD)

Stephen Hawking goes Zero G

Wow, Courtney scooped me on this one! Thanks for the tip!

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking on Thursday fulfilled a dream of floating weightless in zero-gravity. A modified jet carrying Hawking, a handful of his physicians and nurses, and dozens of others flew up to 32,000 feet and made a parabolic dive back to 24,000 feet, allowing Hawking and the other passengers to experience weightlessness for about 25 seconds. Hawking, a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge who has done groundbreaking work on black holes and the origins of the universe, has the paralyzing disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. "As you can imagine, I'm very excited," Hawking told reporters before the flight. "I have been wheelchair bound for almost four decades. The chance to float free in zero-g will be wonderful." The 65-year-old was the first person with a disability to experience the flight by Zero Gravity Corp. "I want to demonstrate to the public that anybody can participate in this type of weightless experience," Hawking said Thursday.

The Ultimate Glide: PlanetSpace's Suborbital Travel Plan

The Silver Dart space plane, designed by private space contractor PlanetSpace, Inc. currently targeted at providing NASA crew and cargo services to the International Space Station (ISS), could be equipped with a suborbital rocket engine for point-to-point flights on the Earth.

PlanetSpace’s Silver Dart spacecraft will consist of a lifting body based on the NASA’s X-24B test aircraft. The spacecraft is designed to fly at hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 22, launch atop either an orbital NOVA booster [image] or suborbital rocket, and make a runaway landing [image].

The Silver Dart’s has a potential glide range of more than 25,000 miles (40,233 kilometers) at hypersonic speeds, which lend it to point-to-point flights around Earth making a flight from New York to Paris in 20 minutes not out of the question.

Jericho for 11-22-06

This episode of Jericho was something akin to waiting in the dentist's office and hearing the drill do it's worst in the next room. I knew something was going to happen, the wait was killing me and in the end what finally happened was well, confusing. This week Russian Migs and bombers fly over Jericho and drop...ummm food and fliers from China!? What's the first thing that happens? Well yeah after the almost riots and fights the mayor puts all the food off limits because it might be contaminated. The rational used? Well you remember the indians and how they were wiped out with infected blankets?...oh no wait, I have just started with this...so we get the prerequisite amounts or arguments and fights ending with the food being off limits for fear of poison or worse. Then they discover that the parachutes have RFID chips and are American in design. Am I the only one to see Rube Goldberg in this? There were fighters and bombers people! Why do through all the trouble of poison when you had a f...in bomber right there to do the job for you! No the food appears to be some part of an elaborate misdirection. So that was the high points. The rest of the show was 90210 mixed with Days of our lives. The pregnant wife that is jilted for a barmaid but won't tell she is pregnant because she doesn't want him back just for the baby. The son who won't be coming home for the holidays because he is keeping time with another woman. The bickering couple brought together by life's harshness find themselves inexplicably in bed....do I have to go on? I know CBS is trying to cater to a wide audience but this schizophrenic plot is going to alienate more people than it attracts.

'Silent jet' could ease airport noise

A radically redesigned passenger jet could alleviate a major complaint of people who live near major airports--the deafening sound of planes taking off and landing.

The "silent jet," which from outside an airport would sound about as noisy as a washing machine or other household appliance, would carry 215 passengers and could be in the air by 2030.

Instead of the tube-and-wing model common today, the Silent Jet is a flying wing, evoking current "stealth" military aircraft. It lacks the central vertical stabilizer common at the tail of current passenger jets, instead using a pair of stabilisers at the wingtips.

The design allows the plane to remain in the air at slower speeds, which would allow it to cruise in for a landing more quietly. The plane does not use wing flaps, which are common on today's passenger jets and create much of the landing noise.