New Supersonic airliner

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Testaburger

3,674 posts

197 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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Supersonic air travel will return, but I will wager a lot of money that it will be in the corporate sector, and in minuscule numbers.

Remember, the vast, vast majority of business jets are to move teams around from a time and place of the team'a choosing. Only a tiny fraction of them are like Lakshmi Mittal's personal machine, with a king bed and oak desk.

The simple fact is that even a decent business class seat offers as much comfort as most 'company travel' business jets, not to mention first class. I used to fly them, and their interior fit is, in most cases, underwhelming.

As a consequence, business jets have been favourable due to their flexibility with schedules, and the fact that if you put a few people in them, it isn't necessarily more expensive than sending a team in first class on a decent carrier.

This leaves a tiny market - those whose time is that critical, supersonic travel is beneficial. Advances in connectivity and communications erode that benefit further, and these people already have far more comfortable, better equipped aircraft that travel at M0.9 - so it's hard to find a compelling argument for 99.999% of the private jet market.

PBDirector

1,049 posts

129 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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Evanivitch said:
Take the shuttle for example, a remarkable feat of engineering, but a financial pit.
But Am I right in saying that a big contributing factor to the cost was the need to support various black ops roles?

Mave

8,208 posts

214 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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PBDirector said:
Evanivitch said:
Take the shuttle for example, a remarkable feat of engineering, but a financial pit.
But Am I right in saying that a big contributing factor to the cost was the need to support various black ops roles?
Not just black ops, but fairly normal USAF ops (which at the time could have been achieved using existing or modified (Titan IIRC) launchers - it was the combination of polar orbit and desire to return to either Vandenberg (?) or Edwards that drove a lot of the design features. Without the USAF ops, there was no real requirement for it as NASA had no real near term "mission statement" beyond Apollo.

Nevertheless, the fundamental cost drivers were reusable, and manned. The USAF and CIA requirements were just a delta to an already expensive concept.

Edited by Mave on Wednesday 21st June 18:49

Simpo Two

85,147 posts

264 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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I haven't read all the thread but what happened to HOTOL?

Getting to NZ in 4 hours etc would be worth paying ectra for...

Mave

8,208 posts

214 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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Simpo Two said:
I haven't read all the thread but what happened to HOTOL?

Getting to NZ in 4 hours etc would be worth paying ectra for...
Some of the underlying technologies are still being developed by reaction engines - Google reaction engines, sabre and skylon.

Edited by Mave on Wednesday 21st June 23:32

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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PBDirector said:
But Am I right in saying that a big contributing factor to the cost was the need to support various black ops roles?
Back in 1971/72, NASA needed Department of Defense (DoD) support to persuade Congress to vote funds for the Shuttle. The DoD were not that enthusiastic at first as they were happy enough to continue using expendable rockets for their purposes. However, once NASA more or less told them that they could adjust the design to suit their needs, they saw its potential and began to lobby on behalf of the programme.

Although the Shuttle was used to launch a number of military satellites and carry out some DoD experiments, after the Challenger accident, the DoD decided to wind down their involvement in the Shuttle and go back to their original preferance, expendable boosters.

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Wednesday 21st June 2017
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Mave said:
Simpo Two said:
I haven't read all the thread but what happened to HOTOL?

Getting to NZ in 4 hours etc would be worth paying ectra for...
Some of the underlying technologies are still being developed by reaction engines - Google reaction engines, sabre and skylon.

Edited by Mave on Wednesday 21st June 23:32
Yes, HOTOL lives on in the Skylon project.

Condi

17,085 posts

170 months

Friday 23rd June 2017
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Eric Mc said:
Although the Shuttle was used to launch a number of military satellites and carry out some DoD experiments, after the Challenger accident, the DoD decided to wind down their involvement in the Shuttle and go back to their original preferance, expendable boosters.
They do now have the X1 or whatever its called - the baby shuttle - which spends weeks, months and years in space doing classified stuff. The idea and science is as much alive today as it ever was.

Mave

8,208 posts

214 months

Saturday 24th June 2017
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Condi said:
They do now have the X1 or whatever its called - the baby shuttle - which spends weeks, months and years in space doing classified stuff. The idea and science is as much alive today as it ever was.
Do you men the XS1? They don't really yet have it do they? And is it / will it be capable of a polar orbit?

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Saturday 24th June 2017
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I presume Condi is referring to the X-37 - which is operational but as a test vehicle. It may lead to a larger craft at some time.

I never said that a space shuttle type vehicle was something we'd never see again. However, we won't be seeing anything that operates in the same way the actual Space Shuttle did.

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Saturday 24th June 2017
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Mave said:
Do you men the XS1? They don't really yet have it do they? And is it / will it be capable of a polar orbit?
The XS-1 itself is incapable of any orbit. It is, in effect, only the first stage of a booster. The big difference is that is has wings which means it will be fully recoverable. . In order to achieve orbit, the payload will have its own non-recoverable stage which is carried on the back of the XS-1 launcher.

I can't see any reason why polar orbits using the XS-1 launcher should not be possible.

Talksteer

4,843 posts

232 months

Saturday 24th June 2017
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brickwall said:
Eric Mc said:
However, as I keep saying, I don't think that we will see a supersonic airliner again for at least a generation. What we WILL see are supersonic business jets.
I agree with you on this point - the most likely place to see a new supersonic aircraft would be as a business jet. Not least because half of the touted business case behind these jets is that they save valuable executive time.
I don't think time comes into it!

There is probably enough of a market within executive jets where high net worth individuals are simply not cost sensitive when it comes to flying. They will fly fast because it's there and the proles can't fly on it.

As far as regular flying goes I don't see people being prepared to pay anymore than a small amount more to fly faster.

By and large any flight over three hours effectively takes one day in that you end up doing nothing other than flying on that day.

Where I think the big increase in flying is automation and VTOL. If we can fly from places closer to where people live, in bus size aircraft it would effectively be a replacement for intercity trains and long distance driving.



Talksteer

4,843 posts

232 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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PBDirector said:
Evanivitch said:
Take the shuttle for example, a remarkable feat of engineering, but a financial pit.
But Am I right in saying that a big contributing factor to the cost was the need to support various black ops roles?
Not really black ops the shuttle is rather obvious :-)

To make the shuttle business case add up NASA had to claim that all US launches would be on the shuttle. Which meant that the airforce requirement to orbit a spy satellite (which are basically a Hubble with different optics) which consequently made the shuttle large, infact it is the third largest rocket by launch mass after the N1 and Saturn V.

Secondly the airforce wanted to be able to deorbit rapidly and land at a range of airfields, this cross range requirement added structural weight and also added the wings.


Condi

17,085 posts

170 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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Eric Mc said:
I presume Condi is referring to the X-37 - which is operational but as a test vehicle. It may lead to a larger craft at some time.

I never said that a space shuttle type vehicle was something we'd never see again. However, we won't be seeing anything that operates in the same way the actual Space Shuttle did.
Yes, sorry the X-37. I knew it was X something.

Is it a test vehicle? Or is the vehicle itself not what is being tested? Probably a bit of both, but it seems like the time in space is more for the payload, whatever that might be, than the architecture of getting a small shuttle into space and back again.

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

260 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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Talksteer said:
As far as regular flying goes I don't see people being prepared to pay anymore than a small amount more to fly faster.

By and large any flight over three hours effectively takes one day in that you end up doing nothing other than flying on that day.
That's an important point. Getting there in 5 hours instead of 7 or 1 1/2 instead of 2 1/2 isn't worth paying much extra for. But bringing the flight time below 3 hours and allowing you to get something else done, is significant. One reason people were prepared to pay 20% more than first class fare for Concorde between LHR and JFK was that it did bring the flight time just below the 3 hours and allowed them to do business in New York then fly back the same day.

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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Condi said:
Yes, sorry the X-37. I knew it was X something.

Is it a test vehicle? Or is the vehicle itself not what is being tested? Probably a bit of both, but it seems like the time in space is more for the payload, whatever that might be, than the architecture of getting a small shuttle into space and back again.
It has become a vehicle for testing various technologies. Once the bugs have been ironed out of a test vehicle, the vehicle itself often becomes a "transport" device for carrying other test equipment.

The X-37 is part of a family of "X" designated research aircraft that date right back to the Bell X-1 of 1945. The X-1 was originally designated the XS-1 (S stood for "Supersonic).

As the 40s and 50s progressed, the X-1 family became high speed "hacks" for testing materials and other technologies in the Mach 1 to Mach 2.5 range.

The X-15 was also developed for such purposes and carried all sorts of scientific and engineering experiments as part of its programme. It tested these items at high speed (over Mach 6) and at high altitude (over 300,000 feet i.e. 60 miles).

Evangelion

7,638 posts

177 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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300,000 feet is less than 57 miles

[/pedant]

Eric Mc

121,774 posts

264 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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I was being imprecise. The highest altitude achieved ever on an X-15 flight was 354,200 feet or 67.08 miles . The pilot was Joe Walker.

The highest speed ever achieved was Mach 6.7 or 4,520 mph in 1967 the pilot. On that occasion as William "Pete" White.

The point I was making was that the X-15 was not just built to go faster and higher than other aircraft and to break records - although it did all that. It was chiefly a "carrier" aircraft which could carry test equipment or experiments to extreme speeds and altitudes. A lot of the information gained from these tests were incorporated into the Apollo and Space Shuttle programmes as well as being available even today for incorporation into future spaceplane projects. It was a very effective research tool.

anonymous-user

53 months

Sunday 25th June 2017
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Isn't the issue with supersonic flight these days one of actually finding somewhere you're allowed to go that fast?

As Concorde found back in the later 1970's, being able to fly supersonically, and being allowed to fly supersonically were two very different things entirely!

And i can't think it will have got any easier in the last 40 years, as our planet gets more crowded and wrapped up in yet more red tape / Nimbys.........