How Close Are We To Hypersonic Travel?

[Music] imagine traveling from New York to London in just a couple of hours or waking up in California and flying to China in time for lunch hypersonic flight could advance travel in ways we haven't seen since the invention of flight itself but flying at hypersonic speed isn't easy it presents incredible engineering and logistical challenges so how close are we hypersonic travel before we get the hypersonic speed we should probably really talk about supersonic speed basically supersonic speed is when you're traveling faster than the speed of sound which is something we can and frequently do certain military airplanes will fly above Mach 1 and the concorde commercial plane famously flew at supersonic speeds from 1976 to 2003 supersonic speed is really really fast but hypersonic speed is in a league of its own so hypersonic means typically velocities above Mach 5 or equivalently velocities above 3,800 miles per hour now going at least five times faster than the speed of sound may seem crazy but it's actually a milestone we've reached multiple times in the past from the general public's perspective probably the most visible example of hypersonic flight is watching a space shuttle reenter the atmosphere now okay sure the space shuttle reaches hypersonic speed just by falling back to earth but in the 1960s NASA did achieve manned hypersonic travel through actual propulsion with an x-15 jet setting a speed record that Wow unofficial has yet to be broken and there's pretty good reason for that the effects of flying hypersonically in the atmosphere are catastrophic for the airplanes now we know parts of the fuselage they would actually chart right you were met because the studio of the aircraft was getting consumed this is where the problem with long-duration hypersonic travel starts when you're traveling below the speed of sound the temperature around the aircraft stay as close to the ambient temperature but once you break the sound barrier a shock wave is created and the gas molecules behind the shock wave become compressed this makes the air around the plane hot like really really hot near hypersonic speeds it's so hot that it can damage the materials that make up the body of the airplane now traditional airplanes are made of aluminum alloys that have a melting temperature of about 600 degrees Celsius an advanced aircraft will have titanium bodies with even higher melting points but the air around an aircraft flying at Mach 10 can reach 3,000 degrees Celsius so how did vehicles like the Space Shuttle not burn up completely when they reenter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds historically what we've done is we just put on the heat shield that's five six eight ten times heavier than it needs to be and thicker than it needs to be because you can never be too careful you want your your people or your payload to get back in one piece but those heat shields typically burn off completely during reentry and reapplying a heat shield for every single flight wouldn't exactly be practical or possible for hypersonic commercial travel different materials are needed to withstand these extreme temperatures and researchers are exploring all kinds of options from tantalum carbide to boron nitride nanotubes if hypersonic speed does this kind of damage to planes what about the people inside fortunately traveling at hypersonic speeds isn't harmful as long as it's constant rapid acceleration or a sudden change in direction is another story so some simple money overs that can be done with our liners if you were to do the same turn and Mach 10 the accelerations that we'll be generating with the cabin for the passengers will be about 40 G's right 40 times the gravitational acceleration which will basically kill everybody on board another potential concern could be increased radiation from flying at higher altitudes which a hypersonic jet would need to do there's also the issue of losing cabin pressure while traveling that high up in the stratosphere but flying commercially already comes with similar risks that airlines prepare for of course none of these problems really matter if we aren't able to reach speeds of Mach 5 and above in the first place just because we've done it before doesn't mean it's easy to replicate historically we have just strapped people to a rocket and fired him into space but if you wanted to fly from New York to Los Angeles on a hypothetical hypersonic airliner a rocket is not a very efficient way to do things one idea is to use something called a supersonic combustion ramjet or scramjet a rocket has to carry the liquid oxygen it needs for combustion making it incredibly heavy and not efficient for commercial travel a scramjet on the other hand is able to use oxygen from the atmosphere to create combustion even at hypersonic speeds but the scramjet is still a work in progress in 2015 Boeing's scramjet equipped x51 flew at Mach 5.1 but only for about three and a half minutes it was also unmanned and was launched from an aircraft already in flight which isn't exactly what we have in mind for a long duration hypersonic flight despite this there is real progress being made in hypersonic engineering just in a different kind of setting so if you think about like a cruise missile flying at five times the speed of sound that's incredibly hard to stop and so that's what's driving a lot of the interest in the topic right now both China and Russia have claimed to have tested hypersonic weapon systems and the u.s. is currently trying to catch up and this wouldn't be the first time hypersonic research started in military applications it was after the war - during the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles during the Eisenhower administration that there was a lot of research done in hypersonics most of the fundamental concepts that we know today are derived from those things Boeing is one company that's hoping to make the jump from military applications to commercial flight its concept for a hypersonic airliner comes after working with DARPA on a hypersonic space plane and working on the scramjet powered x51 with the airforce Boeing plans for this potential airliner to be able to travel at Mach 5 reducing your transpacific commute to a measly two hours I mean we doesn't want to travel from New York to Los Angeles in 15 minutes right you know every time the airlines make my seat narrower and make me have lesser legroom I wish even harder that we were flying at Mach 5 and I could get to where I'm going in 15 minutes and only have to be stuck in the cattle car for that long and that's the potential of hypersonic speed the ability to connect to anywhere in the world in that amount of time would be an incredible achievement it's also critical to study as we plan to explore places like Mars because entering that planet's atmosphere would be done at hypersonic speed the public imagination or perspective and the desire to have successful space missions we need to do a good job of and working through these technologies and these research problems it's their dynamics its material science its computer science for controls and electrical engineering it's all of these things that it's all a group that plays into this bigger hole I see hypersonic travel similar to what prehistoric fish did 300 million years ago when they left water and they began the life on land so the conquest of air and space is also fundamental step in the evolution of humankind similar to LACMA the next step in connecting our little blue planet and eventually exploring planets outside of it might be conquering hypersonic speed so how close are we to hypersonic travel I think sustained hypersonic flight in military since you know in the form of say an unmanned missile or something you might see that in the next three four or five years I mean I think that would be a pretty quick turnaround on that as long as the funding keeps up so I believe that with the correct level of funding and with the enthusiasm of a population it will not be difficult to put two-person group for instance in an aircraft and fly beyond the mark six point seven I was active in next 15 within the next ten years that dream of commuting around the world in a few hours though for now you'll still have to deal with a long red-eye intercontinental flight thanks for watching how close are we and let us know in the comments what topics you want us to cover in future episodes if you want more help those are we click here to watch our playlist and don't forget to Like share and subscribe

Channel: Seeker

Views: 906,185

Rating: 4.8419113 out of 5

Keywords: hypersonic, boeing, speed, record, mach, supersonic, concorde, x-51, Nasa, discoveries, Mars, Earth, how close are we, technology, interview, documentary, short doc, host, explainer, science news, current events, sci-fi, innovators, experts, seeker, science, curiosity, education, explain, learn, teach, airplane, jet, f-18, scramjet, ramjet, propulsion, x-43

Id: NOMeK2jb8Xs

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019