Transportation Beyond 2000: Technologies Needed for Engineering Design

[Triton]

I was browsing through the NASA Technical Reports Server and found documentation for a conference titled "Transportation Beyond 2000: Technologies Needed for Engineering Design" that was held September 26-28, 1995 for the NASA Langley Research Center.

Topics at the conference included:

• Smart Highway Project
• Hypercars
• Flying cars
• Magnetic levitation trains
• Projection on rotary wing aircraft
• Nonplanar lifting systems
• Very large air transport vehicles
• Blended Wing Body (BWB) subsonic transports
• Large capacity oblique all-wing transport aircraft
• Corporate Supersonic Transport (CST)
• Advanced composite airframes
• Fuel cells
• Hypersonic airbreathing vehicles
• Pulse detonation propulsion
• Energy beam highways
• High energy density matter for rocket propulsion
• Fusion power and propulsion for future flight

534 pages of high technology future transportation goodness! Get your copy today. ;D

Abstract from NASA Technical Reports Server:

The purpose of the workshop was to acquaint the staff of the NASA Langley Research Center with the broad spectrum of transportation challenges and concepts foreseen within the next 20 years. The hope is that material presented at the workshop and contained in this document will stimulate innovative high-payoff research directed towards the efficiency of future transportation systems. The workshop included five sessions designed to stress the factors that will lead to a revolution in the way we will travel in the 21st century. The first session provides the historical background and a general perspective for future transportation, including emerging transportation alternatives such as working at a distance. Personal travel is the subject of Session Two. The third session looks at mass transportation, including advanced rail vehicles, advanced commuter aircraft, and advanced transport aircraft. The fourth session addresses some of the technologies required for the above revolutionary transportation systems to evolve. The workshop concluded with a wrap-up panel discussion, Session Five. The topics presented herein all have viable technical components and are at a stage in their development that, with sufficient engineering research, one or more of these could make a significant impact on transportation and our social structure.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19960023610_1996039313.pdf

 

[Antonio]

Thank you very for sharing all that research

Antonio

 

[Orionblamblam]

534 pages of high technology future transportation goodness! Get your copy today. ;D

What's annoying is that Part 2 is also available, and is 222 pages long... but all that's *actually* available is the table of contents. It's been like that since 2005. Grrrrr.

 

[riggerrob]

Corporate Supersonic Transport will be among the first built. Many CST studies have been commissioned by manufacturers of sub-sonic business jets: Gulfstream, Boeing, etc.
They are just waiting for oil barons rick enough and supersonic cruise quiet enough. NASA has already test-flown a T-38 with an experimental spike protruding from the nose. The spike produces a more gradual sonic boom. First generation CST May sport spikes protruding from their noses, but second generation will spray compressed air from their noses to smooth out sonic booms. A secondary function of the compressed air spike will be to reduce aerodynamic drag, similar to very fast Russian torpedoes.