DARPA/Boeing X-51A WaveRider

Feel like we're a bunch of Pakleds. Someone please, "make it go".
 
I think its bad news for hypersonic we can't pass this frontier without rocket engine, scramjet don't work and the last option is programm like DARPA HX or X-37B with rocket engine. Very bad news for scramjet technology may be another tech like pulse detonation or air rocket like Reaction engine will revolutionize the aeronautic.
 
Considering hypersonics is supposed to be at the core of manned "black" programs since at least the 1990s, there are only three possibilities:

1°) The military HAS the technology but WON'T transfer it to the civilian market on non-military agencies, hence the successive failures.
2°) The whole X-43/X-51 failure thing is a government scheme to make us (and enemy nations) THINK hypersonics have no future.
3°) No-one has ever mastered the hypersonic technology and the conspirationists are NUTS.

As time goes by I'm leaning more and more towards #3... although I'm convinced some unmanned hypersonic technology MUST have been tested by the military at some point. Otherwise they wouldn't take the risk of letting a governmental agency succeed before them!

Also, think of PDE (pulse-detonation engines) which were only validated in the public eye with the Long-EZ PDE called the Borealis, while numerous eye witnesses described pulse detonation trails a decade earlier.
 
dark sidius said:
I think its bad news for hypersonic we can't pass this frontier without rocket engine, scramjet don't work and the last option is programm like DARPA HX or X-37B with rocket engine. Very bad news for scramjet technology may be another tech like pulse detonation or air rocket like Reaction engine will revolutionize the aeronautic.
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Did you even read what happened? Has nothing to do with the scramjet.
 
Yes but with this failure there is no money to flight the fourth X-51 and there is no other demonstrator reday in the near futur to validate the scramjets engine in flight. May be the USAF watching more on rocket engine than scramjet for near futur and instead watching for far long term téchnology with scramjets, theres is a lot of projects with rocket like RBS or X-37 with rocket téchnology and may be a sort of HTV-2 with rocket engine , more easy to do than scramjets. But I hope to see in a futur a demonstrator plane, with the scramjet tech it would be like the jet revolution engine instead piston plane I cross my finger to see that before I die.
 
Yes thank you for this news, may be there is another tech mature enough for hypersonic weapon or plane like pulse detonation or hybrid rocket we must wait and see what kind of programm will be the first to produce hypersonic weapon. But I think they will stop fliyng X-51 and look for another testbed less expensive to mature scramjets technology. With a reusable testbed it will be less a problem a disfonction because you can pick up the airframe modify the problem and reflight for another test.
 
Stargazer2006 said:
Considering hypersonics is supposed to be at the core of manned "black" programs since at least the 1990s, there are only three possibilities:

1°) The military HAS the technology but WON'T transfer it to the civilian market on non-military agencies, hence the successive failures.
2°) The whole X-43/X-51 failure thing is a government scheme to make us (and enemy nations) THINK hypersonics have no future.
3°) No-one has ever mastered the hypersonic technology and the conspirationists are NUTS.

As time goes by I'm leaning more and more towards #3... although I'm convinced some unmanned hypersonic technology MUST have been tested by the military at some point. Otherwise they wouldn't take the risk of letting a governmental agency succeed before them!

Also, think of PDE (pulse-detonation engines) which were only validated in the public eye with the Long-EZ PDE called the Borealis, while numerous eye witnesses described pulse detonation trails a decade earlier.
Click to expand...
"Hypersonics" doesn't require the scramjet, a "normal" ramjet engine should be good to around Mach-8. Scramjets come into their "own" at speeds between Mach-8/9 to Mach-10/15, however "I" am still not convinced they are worth the "trouble" outside a very narrow range of uses, but that might just be me :)

I'm behind you, pretty much, on choice #3 but I base that on the fact I'm pretty positive that the "conspirationists are NUTS" from life long experiance :)
My own suspicion is that the DoD HAD experimental manned hypersonic program/vehicle in testing but with the end of the Cold War projecting "viable-need" failed to be enough to materialize an actual operational vehicle.
(What "pulse-detonation-trails" are we talking about here btw? :) )

Darth:
While the scramjet engine would be 'nice' to have in some ways, in a lot of ways it would NOT be a "revolutionary" aircraft engine in that its operational requirements don't really open up or extend aircraft operations all that much. As I noted above "standard" ramjet engines are workable to speeds at or above Mach-8 according to engineers who design them and those speeds would require some extensive work on the aircraft to survive such speeds. Going past that requires even MORE work and so far nothing I've seen has proven a "need" for scramjet engines beyond a possible use as an accellerator for in-atmosphere weapons delivery. A role that is actually better suited to rocket power than air-breathing.

IF Congress doesn't cut the money from the program I suspect they will fly the next flight and continue to slowly develop the scramjet engine over time, I just don't see a pressing "need" for it that will lead to an operational engine any time soon.

Randy
 
In my opinion we will see rocketing platform like HTV-2 become the next step in hypersonic, may be more easy to built than a scramjet plane.
 
dark sidius said:
In my opinion we will see rocketing platform like HTV-2 become the next step in hypersonic, may be more easy to built than a scramjet plane.
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Not to pick nits like a father/son Spider Monkey team but but I would not classify HTV-2 as a 'next step' as it is basically a MaRV boosted to hypersonic speeds by an ICBM and those have been around awhile.

Hypersonics using an air breathing engines is the next generation but as they say 'no bucks no Buck Rogers.' IMHO I can't see scramjet weapons being better than rockets for a long time or worth the cost. That's not to say stop testing of course we always have to push the envelope as it were.

If there was a time critical target the answer today and 20 years from now will be a conventionally armed ballistic missile not to get into a debate about the issues around a conventional weapon on an ICBM or SLBM.

And my personal prompt global strike weapon of choice would be a modified Ares booster with a new upper stage carrying about a 50,000 lbs payload ;D
 
yes or a falcon 9 booster with a biggest HTV-2 weapon platform in the class of 20000 lbs and reusable, or a new concept like the DARPA HX project.
 
Doesn't using a booster like that fail to address the primary motivation of PGS, i.e. that the launch doesn't appear to be an ICBM to Cpl Petrov in his Moscow bunker?
 
DARPA Aims To Award Integrated Hypersonics Contracts This Year

The Pentagon's advanced research arm estimates that it will award contracts by year's end in its new program designed to develop, mature and test technologies that travel faster than 20 times the speed of sound
 
I think Lockheed have a great chance to built the DARPA HX they have a great experience about supersonic and hypersonic. Any news about the Darpa proposers days for HX?
 
I'll call it right now. *If* it even makes it to flight test they'll have one or two partial successes, a complete failure, and then cancel. Rinse and repeat every ten years or so. Until they say, "we're going to test every four months for five years until it's working" they'll never succeed.
 
We don't know if they will success and we don't know if the HTV-2 was realy a failure maybe there is little disinformation, and we don't know where are the tech in black program. So I think and I hope they can succeed if the budget are here there is nothing new in aéro tech since twenty years, hypersonic is the same than the piston engine to jets engine the work is hard. The X-37b work very well and a mix of HTV-2 and X-37b may be solution for futur hypersonic system. I m confident on the success of these program without scramjet engine and instead rocket engine there is more chance to succeed. And Lockheed make a lot of work with the Falcon program they don't start at zero point.
 
sferrin said:
I'll call it right now. *If* it even makes it to flight test they'll have one or two partial successes, a complete failure, and then cancel. Rinse and repeat every ten years or so. Until they say, "we're going to test every four months for five years until it's working" they'll never succeed.
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I agree. If that spirit of discouragement had prevailed in early pioneers, there never would have been today's technology. The notion of "trial and error" is essential to make progress.
 
DSE said:
One issue that this program may have to deal with is ramifications of the sale of PWR to Gencorp (Aerojet parent company) and how that affects personnel for any of many reasons.
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They can't give it to ATK because they fired pretty much all their rocket guys.
 
Stargazer2006 said:
I agree. If that spirit of discouragement had prevailed in early pioneers, there never would have been today's technology. The notion of "trial and error" is essential to make progress.
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The methods being used now are very expensive per test, which is a big part of the problem. Failures need to be cheap to make progress.
 
A reusable testbed is the way to develop the hypersonic technology, its more cheap to reuse the same airframe than an expendable system. To examin the TPS or test rocket motor its must be cheaper than a system like the X-51 who crash when there is a little problem in the flight and all of the money for the airframe go in the Pacific. To build the reusable airframe there is an important budget but after for testing it must be cheaper to use.
 
dark sidius said:
A reusable testbed is the way to develop the hypersonic technology, its more cheap to reuse the same airframe than an expendable system.
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How did that work out for the STS?
 
quellish said:
dark sidius said:
A reusable testbed is the way to develop the hypersonic technology, its more cheap to reuse the same airframe than an expendable system.
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How did that work out for the STS?
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I think he's talking something more like an X-10 or X-15. We certainly got our money's worth out of the X-15.
 
The size of the HX is in the 5000 lbs class twice of the HTV-2 and on option for launching is ground or air launched, this program look like the Falcon HTV-3. Recovery of the HX is for examin and reuse it for another test.
 
Should the HX stuff be broken out to a new topic? Seems somewhat OT for the X-51A thread.
 
The current aerospace industry doesn't have the balls or the money to put out something as great as the X-15 was.
 
From AvWeek:

AFRL, meanwhile, plans to award a contract in 2013 for the 78-month HSSW demo program to mature propulsion, airframe, guidance, navigation and control, and warhead technologies for a hypersonic air-launched cruise missile.
The program is planned to include ground and flight tests of a demonstrator weapon to achieve technology readiness level 6, ready to enter engineering and manufacturing development of an operational weapon around 2020.
 
XP67_Moonbat said:
The current aerospace industry doesn't have the balls or the money to put out something as great as the X-15 was.
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Or, more importantly, the expertise. Sorry, but they can't even avoid the dumbass mistakes that lead to failures in HyFly and X-51. No way in hell would you want a man in any high speed US vehicle these days.
 
sublight is back said:
Word is there was a successful X-51 flight today....
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Given how they've defined "successful" in the past I wouldn't get your hopes up.
 
Don't worry sferrin! I've got my bar set nice and low already and have kept it in this position for a long time. I should be well pleased if they get a few more minutes of hypersonic flight than the first test.
 
If they did it was a failure. If they'd succeeded it'd already be plastered over the news.
 

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