NASA Wants To Bring Back Supersonic X-Planes

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I think the program should be brought back merely because it sounds cool, but NASA has genuine reasons for reviving the division, which include developing technologies that may reduce fuel consumption and emissions.


In a budget request published this month, NASA—which, remember, has "aeronautics" in its name as well as "space"—announced plans to revive the experimental program that started after World War II and created some of history’s most remarkable aircraft. Its milestones include the X-1 (first aircraft to break the sound barrier), the X-5 (first plane with variable sweep wings), the X-13 (first use of jet power for vertical takeoffs and landings), the X-31A (could turn 180 degrees in the air), and many more.
 
This is an excuse to build a new type of plane completely. Fuel conservation sounds like a load of garbage to me. It reeks of black ops project. This is pure speculation but how it's written? No. I don't buy it.
 
viscountalpha said:
This is an excuse to build a new type of plane completely. Fuel conservation sounds like a load of garbage to me. It reeks of black ops project. This is pure speculation but how it's written? No. I don't buy it.
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Cynical much? This is NASA not Darpa or Lockeed they are talking about. These are the things that appeared in popular mechanics that sparked my imagination as a kid and drove me into a STEM career. This is absolutely the type of thing we should be supporting.
 
So, they don't have money to keep the Space Shuttle program going or make improvements to it for overall efficiency - boy did that light the imagination as a youth in the 1970s when it was being developed - but they can do something like this? Hrmmm... that just seems a bit odd to me personally.

Also, NASA didn't exist till 1958 or so (just watched a really nice documentary on aerospace from The Science Channel, it's on their website for viewing) so the X-1 wasn't developed by NASA - in fact most of those X-planes were developed by the predecessor of NASA, the NACA (and several other agencies including Bell Aircraft), but I get their intended meaning - just hate it when they make glaring mistakes in historical info.

Unfortunately in today's world and the near future the drive away from the four tenets of STEM careers is on the downward side of things. I have some friends that work in various education departments at state levels in California, Texas, and Washington and their outlook just isn't good, sadly. I'm all for new and exciting things, certainly, I'm just wondering if this is too little too late.

One good thing, apparently NASA was taking applications for new Astronauts recently and ended up getting over 18,000 of them besting the previous record set way back in 1978 when the Space Shuttle program really got going. So maybe, just maybe there's some potential for things to pick up, we'll see what happens:

Record Number of Americans Apply to #BeAnAstronaut at NASA
 
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Some of the most badass planes (and most beautifull too) came from the X-planes program.


X-29
I mean look at this, it doesn't even look like it should fly
x-29_1.jpg


XB-70
This is one of the coolest planes ever built, it looks like something right out of Macross
Sadly only 2 were ever built, and 1 of them was involved in a terrible accident that destroyed it.

2413.jpg


Look at dat azz!

34090d1409017235-interesting-aircraft-xb-70_rear.jpg


Now the reality though, is that the X-Plane program existed because of a physical limitation. There were a lot of ideas out there that proved well in theory, but the only way to verify them was to build an actual aircraft and try it. No company was going to shell out a ton of cash (and these are VERY expensive projects) to prove some small aspect of aerospace, especially when that aspect once proven would go on to benefit competing companies. So we needed a central, "neutral" party to prove these things. The government could approach an aerospace company and pay them to build a very low production run aircraft, thus eliminating the financial risk to that company. As a result we got some fantastic moments in aerospace history.

That problem has been addressed by computers, but there is a caveat. Most of the people controlling the purse strings believe that all aspects of an airplane can be proven out through simulation. And for the most part they are right. However, it assumes that ALL aspects of nature have been put into the simulation, and as we all know when it comes to Man Vs Nature, we have been on a long loosing streak. The F-35 was plagued with this, designers were forced to do most of the testing in computer simulation to keep budget down. They would then get really far into development and finally build a working part. Only to then discover that some un-realized force would be exerted on the part and it would fail. But because they had gone so far on the assumption that part was good, it would take major reworking. This then brought the budget up as well as design time. Things like shearing forces, heat fatigue, and even random cosmic radiation came into play. Things the simulations didn't take into account, because a human didn't put it into the simulation.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Cynical much? This is NASA not Darpa or Lockeed they are talking about. These are the things that appeared in popular mechanics that sparked my imagination as a kid and drove me into a STEM career. This is absolutely the type of thing we should be supporting.
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After the f35 boondoggle, yes. I am. Don't get me wrong it's a good thing. Government efficiency is still an oxymoron.
 
the sonic boom is the drag on the air behind the airframe... above say about twenty thousand feet you can't hear it on the ground... which means that take off is the issue... but a heavy air frame full of jp-8 similar to disel oil is going to be like a school flying through the air... thus the old cartoon about the magic school bus to hana lee... if a say four hour or two hour flight is worth using say a thorium reactor or bank of caps linked to a lfrn or low frequency radiant nuclear reactor or a pebble bed reactor, give the ability to make the shape of the plane a needle instead of bed post... then you get less turbulence... thus less unstable air... hummm that would be funny if the rain that went like clock work over Orlando for decades that stopped around the time they stopped flying the concord... so it might make the rain showers start to work like clock work because of planes literately seeding the clouds but the funny thing is no one in Florida minded the weather like clockwork... just going to be really funny if we have been stuck in air ports because the flight take eight hours across the country when they could have taken a couple hours or less. funny I'm going to laugh if someone tries to say they invented it first since the DOD has a copy of a blueprint from a couple years ago and paper blue print from over twenty years ago... wow that was years ago. Though back then cap were the thickness of a dime and contained about 12 watts of power. Now look inside a psu and there are say the same dozen that contain 1500 watts... at least now I know what that guy was worried about me recreating before the aerospace industry was ready. lol. torq of an electric motor is limited only by the amount of current that can get to the motor and the physical limitation of the metal parts and the bearings... there are bearing less cpu fans right? so a turbine with a dozen different power plants to drive the motors gives you turbo props or turbine propeller engines like the ones on the leer jets. my guess is that they will try as many combinations of Wankle, Piston and Cam, and gear driven chain, like in the wright brothers airplane, powered by as many different power plants as they can get past the epa. should be interesting. some one must have died that was blocking it.
 
drakken said:
the sonic boom is the drag on the air behind the airframe... above say about twenty thousand feet you can't hear it on the ground... which means that take off is the issue
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I'll see your chemtrails and raise you a sonic boom at 90,000 feet that shattered glass and blew down doors :D

 
westrock2000 said:
I'll see your chemtrails and raise you a sonic boom at 90,000 feet that shattered glass and blew down doors :D
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Was some pretty powerful stuff there to have had that kind of effect from that kind of height, one might think the sheer amount of air at that kind of height wouldn't be capable of propagating a sonic boom to such lower altitudes but I suppose the video is evidence enough.
 
viscountalpha said:
After the f35 boondoggle, yes. I am. Don't get me wrong it's a good thing. Government efficiency is still an oxymoron.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa... if gov't is at fault it's not for the building per se. Blame private corporations. The only thing gov't is guilty of, is for not letting those defense contractors eat the cost for said cost overruns. Once said corporations agree to a contract, they should keep the terms of the contract.
Going way over budget should, IMO blackmark them as non viable contractors and should be barred from any future bids.
Unfortunately, there are many legislators - especially on the right - who whitewash those fraudulent defense contractors suggesting that any attempts to sanction them would kill jobs and threaten the security of the US. Of course, nobody wants to stand up to crooks when the patriotism card is played.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
F-35 = Lockheed Martin https://www.f35.com/ Not NASA. That is like boycotting buying apples at your grocery store because you hate the company Apple.
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Not so simple. I have a friend who works for the airforce. He says he works on landing gears but part of me knows he isn't being fully honest with me. When i hear how it's worked internally, I think to myself "this is the most fucked up way of doing things" Or what about that it's cheaper and more efficient to transfer a helicopter & parts from one military branch to another through contractors then directly?

I hear things, first hand things. Lockheed martin was forced by the government to pull off that boondoggle. it will be a great jet, if it ever really gets finished properly.

When you say NASA, who is subcontracting those parts? There's only so many manufacturers able to do that and pull it off. You can't go to any machine shop and start cranking out X-plane parts. Custom stuff for testing supersonic designs. My claim is that it will be used to test an entirely different propulsion system but you didn't hear this from me. Nor did I hear it from anywhere else. And again this is purely hypothetical.
 
Skripka said:
It isn't unique to government. All organizations have the same flaw re inefficiency. Corporations just do a better job hiding it.
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I would argue some are better and keeping their yield rate up then others. *cough* intel Cough**
 
NASA has other things to worry about and to fund like getting America back into space. Here is NASA worrying about some X plane stuff when they can't even get a American into space/orbit. Oh wait we will use Russia to do that and pay what now 30+ million per seat/person. Hell can NASA even do a cargo run to the ISS at this point without having to rely on SpaceX or Russia. NASA put up or get off the pot....
 
Wizard220 said:
NASA has other things to worry about and to fund like getting America back into space. Here is NASA worrying about some X plane stuff when they can't even get a American into space/orbit. Oh wait we will use Russia to do that and pay what now 30+ million per seat/person. Hell can NASA even do a cargo run to the ISS at this point without having to rely on SpaceX or Russia. NASA put up or get off the pot....
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Congress keeps NASA on a sub-1%-of-the-federal-budget and you're surprised that they have issues running launches? Of course they have to rely on SpaceX or the Russians, lift costs are in the $10,000USD/KG range. Put it in perspective, Apollo was accomplished with 2-4%. For milk runs to the ISS putting humans in space is absurdly expensive. The Space Shuttle was a massive project that fundamentally failed at every single one of its design goals...and aside from saying we did it, what is the point?

We "Get America" back in space...and then what? There's a whole lot of nothing there. The Moon is a whole bunch of dead rock, as is Mars. Our Earth is in a very dead neighborhood.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
These are the things that appeared in Popular Mechanics that sparked my imagination as a kid and drove me into a STEM career. This is absolutely the type of thing we should be supporting.
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My sentiment, exactly. I was so inspired by the stories in those types of publications that I took a bunch of electives in junior high and high school that set me on the STEM path:

Auto shop
Small engines
Technology and lasers
Physics
Electronics and scientific studies
Wood shop
Metal shop (I was welding with ARC and Oxy/Act by the time I was 13 years old)

I continued following that path into college:
Programmable Logic Controllers
AC and DC Circuitry
Boolean Algebra
Microprocessors
Power Generation (studied nuclear reactors and whatnot)
Advanced Physics
Human Communications
Electronics Communications (more cool stuff with lasers)

...shit, I knew how to run a Tektronix 2200 series o'scope before I could drive. :p
 
Skripka said:
Congress keeps NASA on a sub-1%-of-the-federal-budget and you're surprised that they have issues running launches? Of course they have to rely on SpaceX or the Russians, lift costs are in the $10,000USD/KG range. Put it in perspective, Apollo was accomplished with 2-4%. For milk runs to the ISS putting humans in space is absurdly expensive. The Space Shuttle was a massive project that fundamentally failed at every single one of its design goals...and aside from saying we did it, what is the point?

We "Get America" back in space...and then what? There's a whole lot of nothing there. The Moon is a whole bunch of dead rock, as is Mars. Our Earth is in a very dead neighborhood.
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That's misleading we seem to have an ever expanding budget. So its piece of the pie should come out of the crap we've added in the last 30 years if it needs to get bigger.

When people eventually stop lending to the US government because we can't handle our spending, NASA evaporates the next day. Why speed up the process?
 
jpm100 said:
That's misleading we seem to have an ever expanding budget. So its piece of the pie should come out of the crap we've added in the last 30 years if it needs to get bigger.

When people eventually stop lending to the US government because we can't handle our spending, NASA evaporates the next day. Why speed up the process?
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We do have an ever expanding budget. But NASA is doing more, and far more complex things, than ever before. And their budget has simply not kept pace with $ inflation or the increased cost of doing increasingly complex things. Hell, scrapping the Space Shuttle was a sound fiscal move. By 2011 the cost of ever Shuttle launch was $500million USD. Each.

You want NASA to do more science and fling people to space, be prepared to pay for it. Given the NASA allocation as it is, we can either have some great science-or we can fling humans beings into space. Not both. I vote science. Penis measuring nationalism needs to go away.
 
They will only be building a few prototypes. Not like there will be an order for 400 X-15 types.
 
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