Looked around but couldn't find anything about this earlier. Impressive work, I can't wait to see where it goes. http://news.uk.msn.com/odd-news/breakthrough-for-rocket-engine Congratulations to the team behind it and their 30 years of hard work.
It's an interesting idea, basically allows a conventional jet engine to work under otherwise totally hostile conditions, and the applications for rocketry are pretty staggering, too.
"cool air entering the engine from more than 1,000C to minus 150C in less than a hundredth of a second" 0.o I wanna see what they did to do that.
Man thats nothing my lil rocket can shoot farther up in space and fly faster lol but seriously though thats pretty impressive
5 times the speed of sound in our atmosphere or in space? The speed of sound in space is significantly higher isn't it?
I'm afraid I have to say you are wrong. Sound is basically vibrations over some material, either be it oxygen or helium or water. In vacuum, where there's no medium to transfer any kind of vibration, there can be no sound. Now, if you pick up electromagnetic waves and convert them to sound signals, that's something different, but they still aren't sound waves...
So what happens during an explosion in space? You're saying that no sound will travel through the debris/gas that sent flying through the universe?
You would hear that sound if you shared contact with the same material over which the sound is propagating enabling you to receive those vibrations. If you watched the explosion from a safe distance, you'd hear absolutely nothing. Contrary to popular belief, Star Wars battles in reality would be plain silent
The thing that will hold it up is the dynamics of travelling through atmosphere at that speed. The only manned aircraft to travel consistantly at high speeds is the SR-71 Blackbird and the design elements for this aircraft took in to consideration the high temp it would encounter at Mach +3, up to 300c in some instances. We have no doubt all heard how the aircraft frame would shrink so much on the ground when it was cool that the panels wouldn't fit right and the aircraft would leak fuel. That the airframe and panels would only fit correctly after it had reached operational temperature. Getting an engine to do Mach 5 is easy sticking it on an aircraft that is large enough and safe enough to move paying passengers in any form of comfort, that's gonna take another 30 years I think.
Ben Rich from Lockheed wrote a book about the Skunkworks and there was a blurb in one of the chapters about high speed travel. His basic comment about high speed travel was that building the engines would be the easy part, finding materials needed for commercial human travel would be a totally separate challenge.