Skip to content

Surprising Science — August 13, 2012

Update: Hypersonic Aircraft Crashes During Test Flight

There very well may come a day when the norm of air travel for the general public is to fly at mach 6, making us truly citizens of the world.

We were working the phones yesterday to try to find out the status of the U.S. Navy’s test flight of the X-51A Waverider, an aircraft that engineers designed to travel at 4,500 miles per hour. As we noted, that’s five times the speed of sound, and about 117 times the speed of Usain Bolt in full sprint! Moving this fast, one could go from New York City to London in about one hour.

Spokespeople at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base were suspiciously mum, and now it turns out that was for a good reason: the unmanned craft broke apart and crashed into the Pacific mere seconds after its rocket booster started. A “faulty control fin,” was the cause of the failure, according to a statement recently released.

It’s disappointing, as this hypersonic jet is a promising innovation.

How does it work? The aircraft is equipped with a revolutionary scramjet engine. The engine rapidly pulls in the oxygen needed to burn the fuel it uses from the atmosphere. This animation, courtesy of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, shows everything:

Read more at Pratt & Whitney

Related

a computer generated image of a human brain.

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

jwst Abell 2744 450 million

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Should We Flog Criminals?

The Philosopher’s Beard (hereafter, PB) certainly thinks we should consider it: “Many people would automatically say that such punishments are inhumane. But the very reason for this reaction – that […]