Next Monday, a small group of crazy Danish geniuses plan to launch their own homebuilt rocket into space, after towing it to the launch site via their homebuilt submarine. Who needs NASA?

The non-profit firm known as Copenhagen Suborbital left port with the Heat1X-TychoBrae rocket on Friday, towing the rocket and its launching pad to a [...]]]>

Next Monday, a small group of crazy Danish geniuses plan to launch their own homebuilt rocket into space, after towing it to the launch site via their homebuilt submarine. Who needs NASA?

The non-profit firm known as Copenhagen Suborbital left port with the Heat1X-TychoBrae rocket on Friday, towing the rocket and its launching pad to a spot in the Baltic Sea. If everything goes as planned, the rocket will rise to about 93 miles above the earth — about halfway to the International Space Station — where a capsule with a test dummy will float back to water.

(source with photos and video)

The plane with its 262.5-foot (80-meter) wingspan left Payerne airfield shortly before 7 a.m. after overcoming an equipment problem [...]]]>

An experimental solar-powered plane took off from western Switzerland on Wednesday for a 24-hour test flight – a key step in a historic effort to one day circle the globe using only energy collected from the sun.

The plane with its 262.5-foot (80-meter) wingspan left Payerne airfield shortly before 7 a.m. after overcoming an equipment problem that delayed a previous attempt, the Solar Impulse team said.

Clear blue skies on Wednesday allowed the prototype aircraft to soak up plenty of solar energy as it flew over the Jura mountains west of the Swiss Alps. The big question, however, was whether the plane’s 12,000 solar cells could fill up its batteries with enough energy so the plane could fly through the night.

(source)

The X-51A Waverider flew today, and it flew fast.

The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was [...]]]>

The X-51A Waverider flew today, and it flew fast.

The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials.

The 200 seconds of autonomous flight by the U.S. Air Force’s X-51A set a duration record for an aircraft powered by a scramjet (short for “supersonic combustion ramjet”) engine, though in part that can be chalked up to the rarity of any flights at all at this extreme level. The previous record was set by NASA’s X-43A, whose scramjet engine burned for only about 10 to 12 seconds in November 2004; that aircraft zoomed to Mach 9.8.

It had been expected that the X-51A would fly for as long as 300 seconds (that is, five minutes) and would hit Mach 6. During Wednesday morning’s flight, the Waverider suddenly lost acceleration shortly after the 200-second mark for an unexplained reason. “At that point,” Boeing’s press release says tersely, “the X-51A was terminated as planned.” (The Air Force had previously said it had no plans to recover the aircraft.)

Still, those involved in the flight were thrilled with the results.

“We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A’s very first hypersonic mission,” said Charlie Brink, an X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory, in a statement. “We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines.”

(source)