http://cellar.org/pictures/mach10plane.jpg

Poor NASA has blown it again. This is an artist's rendering of the experimental X-43A craft, which would have flown at Mach 7, but had to be destroyed after one of its rockets failed.

The actual plane is smaller than you'd think. Just looking at some of the other images, I'm guessing it's about ten feet long.

I was surprised when I read how small it was... only two feet high, five feet high, twelve feel long!

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...ed_010602.html

Will they eventually put a person in this thing, once all the quirks and gremlins are ironed out?

Can the human body be trained to take that kind of G-force?

~Mike

What is it for space launches?
Put it this way, i'd say they'd have ot have some kind of med check b4 u could get on this thing, military only me thinks.

http://cellar.org/pictures/x43a-crash.jpg

Bonus: a really cool image of the crash.

Wow, cool, where was the pic taken from??? (second one)

I think I heard somewhere that it was 4 gees to liftoff.

Still, if you think about it, that force is only pulling on you from one direction. In this plane, you would have standard gravity pulling on the ventral side of the plane, plus accumulated force pushing you towards the aft. Or so I would think.

~Mike

Where it was taken from: they had "chase planes" shooting images of the whole thing.

That picture was on the wires, but there is an awesome set of shots (including that one) and an explanation of the whole thing, at:

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0106/04x43/

read the full explanation.. some third-party gear failed, not the experimental craft. in fact, it didn't even get a chance to fly -- a rocket was supposed to propel it a bit further out of the atmosphere and then it was going to detach.

the reason it is so small is because it is made for testing a scram jet... some sort of air combustion engine that doesn't need onboard fuel [hence it can be a helluva lot smaller and might go faster]... but hey i could be wrong, this is just what i've assimilated from reading on the topic.

some people were quick to point out that NASA is pushed to take risks but condemned when experimental technology fails. they have a few more of these scramjets built i believe and they'll be taking test data from the crash, figure out what was wrong [if they haven't already] and will be modifying the other crafts so that the test will yield better results. that's how invention goes i suppose.

If memory serves, a scramjet does require fuel. The main improvement is that the jet does not require a turbine to compress the air; it uses the narrowing shape of the intake and the airflow itself to compress the air. This is why it requires to be moving at fast speed before it can even be started -- it needs the airflow to run.

But these are supposed to be a lot lighter and more efficent than conventional jet engines.

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To help answer the G-Force questions, I'm pretty sure that there is some sort of pressurized suit that helps limit the effects of g-forces, mostly blood rushing to various points of the body. Don't know what that would do as far as straight up crushing was is concerned, but hey.

Were you paying attention to Mr. Bingo in Driver's Ed, Steve?

~Mike

Driver's ed....pay attention...what the hell? I barely stay awake long enough to ABACADABA the tests and hit myself in the head with the occasional 2x4.

I also want to note that in my history this title shows up has "NASA plane is destroy", and all I can think is "All your spacecraft are destroy by us"

Steve

_________
"Somebody set up us the Cellar"

[Edited by alphageek31337 on 06-20-2001 at 12:04 AM]