As I write this, it's 3:45 pm Eastern. The X-43a is being ferried to altitude by the B-52 carrier vehicle. The cable news stations are running live footage from the chaser planes. I think She should be at altitude and ready to launch off the bomber within a half-hour or so. I need to go to bed in a couple of hours but I'll try to live-blog it for any of you who are stuck without a TV....
4:05 pm--Still in the air. I was confused at first since most of the pictures of the X-43A show it as black, but it looks like the vehicle is white on TV. But if you look carefully, the big white thing is just the booster rocket that gets the jet moving. The plane itself is rather small by comparison, and is indeed black....
4:10 pm--I finally found the live NASA feed on the web, so if you have RealPlayer, you can click here to view the live feed from NASA and to listen in, commercial free, to the NASA folks talking to each other by radio and see the live video from the chaser planes. No need for the news networks with that....
4:21 pm--I notice the news networks keep saying that no "vehicle' has ever flown as fast as the X-43A is expected to today. Correct me if I'm wrong, though, to qualify as a "vehicle' don't you ahve to be carrying someone? This is a robot plane so far as I can tell.
4:47 pm--They're still running tests, getting ready for showtime it looks like....
4:50 pm--They just announced t-minus nine minutes and change....
4:53 pm--Samuel Tai says this is a higher quality NASA feed. It does seem a little cleaner.
They just moved the vehicle onto its own internal power.
Man, one of those NASA guys, whenever he gets on the radio, he sounds like he's totally panicking. It's just his voice though, he's not saying anything bad and the other guys are calm talking to him, but it's weird. Every time he talks he sounds like he's totally freaked out. Kinda funny.
4:57 pm: 3 minutes to launch, everything go.
4:58 pm: They're showing us a camera right up the ass-end of the booster rocket. I wonder if we're going to get to watch it flame on?
Two minutes....
4:59 pm: This is cool, we're watching them test the fins on the rocket sweep back and forth... one minute, looks good....
5:00 pm: 5 4 3 2 1..... BOOOM there she falls...... candle's lit! WHOOH lookit that sucker go!!!!!
5:01 pm: Man that sucker cracked Mach 3 in less than one minute!
5:02 pm: Can't barely see the thing anymore, but they just separated... MAN that little plane just ZIPPED away from the booster! They were already well past Mach 3 but that little ramjet just took off from the booster and left it behind like a bat out of hell!
5:03 pm: NASA geeks on TV high fiving each other like mad!
5:04 pm: NASA reports the ramjet just cracked Mach 5 and is still going strong... OH CRAP, they're starting to lose data on the vehicle.
5:07 pm: Well that was cool. Looks like a major if qualified success. They know it cracked Mach 5 on its own power. They may recover some data from receivers over the horizon so it may have gone faster. Mach 5 would still be a heck of a good success for a first test flight. Definite proof that the technology works.
Hey that was fun. :-)
5:08 pm: They just re-established contact witht he vehicle. It's down to about 47,000 feet and running at about a mach and a half. So it's slowed down and coming down. It'll be cool if we can recover data from a couple minutes ago to see how fast it actually did go before it slowed down and they re-contacted it.
With luck we'll know within a few hours.
5:10 pm: Vehicle is subsonic and down to 3,000 feet.... slowed down some more... just entered the water of the ocean (which was planned).
5:20 pm: They'll be doing debriefing and recovery for a while now. I'll try to post some data in the morning. Time for me to go to bed, I have to work tonight. Sam Tai has been posting some great updates in the comments though....
Basically, to be defined as a vehicle, it just has to be designed to carry something; could be a person, could be a shoe, you get my point. I assume this X-43A was designed to transport something, wasn't it? Or is it just designed to go really, really fast for no apparent reason?
So far as I can see there's nothing on this airplane except the electronics and other bits that make it go.
It's really a proof-of-concept test of a hypersonic scramjet. No human on board yet.
But the news networks are completely correct: no vehicle has ever gone as fast as this robot plane is planning on going. No tree has ever gone that fast either, nor has a kleenex.
Good point!
Although, now that we're getting all geeky, I would have to point out that the space shuttle has, in fact, travelled a great deal faster than Mach 7. Heeh.
(Dowingba and I slick back our hair with greese, tighten the belts on our flood pants, and make dork noises as we try to high-five each other and miss....)
MAn this is wicked hearing their radio conversations..."1-2-0-0 feet, that's twelve hundred feet." "Copy, decend one thousand two hundred feet." Makes me want to be in NASA to see if I can come up with some other ways to say the number. "That's one hundred and twenty ten feet, over."
And that brings up another question, Dean: Do they bring any kleenex on the space shuttle?
And now that winter is ending, all the Norms™ will be sorry they don't have flood pants. And we'll laugh; we'll laugh and point, and snort as we clean our gigantic glasses.
Long range artillery shells can be fired up into the stratosphere and come down a long distance away after a very rapid flight. The German army late in World War I, with their 'pariskanone' (incorrectly labeled "Big Bertha" by the allies) fired shells accurately into the city of Paris from the then-incredible distance of 75 miles. Late In World War II, the German V2 rockets carried even larger payloads greater distances through the stratosphere and back down to earth, at such speeds that victims on the ground in London never even heard them coming.
None of these had crew aboard, and they could be described solely as projectiles, not as vehicles. Because the latter, in all circumstances, have the capability of maneuvering while in flight. For this, either crew is needed or some means of remotely changing the flight path of the device in question.
But not to quibble. The X43-A is a mighty achievement and yet again, a step forward for all mankind in our efforts to conquer distance and space.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Higher quality video at http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ramgen/encoder/live.rm. Roughly L-12:00 now.
I believe the X-15 has flown as fast on rocket propulsion. I think the correct appellation is that no air-breathing vehicle has ever flown this fast before.
T-10:00 mark
I can't get that link to work, Samuel....
LV (launch vehicle) just went to internal power.
Try opening the link from inside Real Player, Dean.
Yeah never mind, I got it. What's the difference on this feed?
RV (research vehicle) now switching to internal power.
All stations go for launch.
T-3:00 mark
LV now on internal guidance.
Launch system armed, green lights on the B-52, go for launch. T-0:30
Go baby go!
That looked like a success. Maybe 2+ seconds of supersonic combustion in the SCRAMJET engine, which seems right for the amount of fuel onboard.
NASA just called it a vehicle...
Downlink to RV lost. Mach 5+ at loss of signal.
They'll have to get the final velocity numbers from the range telemetry.
I think they were expecting the loss of signal...but the RV is recording it itself too, right?
Yeah it's recording itself and also there's some over-the-horizon receivers that may have got stuff, so we'll probably know within a few hours if it went faster. Mach 5+ is still quite impressive. That would be one hell of a ride.
Signal back, RV slowing to Mach 1.4. Yes, dowingba, I think the onboard electronics are capturing flight data to solid-state recorders for later playback and analysis.
RV splashdown.
Looks like the pilot of the B-52 can't get radio transmittions and they're having to relay directions through the copilot?
Thanks for the pointer, Dean. This has been way cool. My kids got to see a little real-life "Right Stuff".
BTW, trivia question: Wasn't Chuck Yeager's Mach 1 jet (Glamorous Glennis?) dropped from a B-52 as well? Them birds have been around awhile...
Think Chuck was watching this? He's still around, no?
Yeah, I believe Chuck was dropped from a B-52. We've been using that basic plane for about 50 years if I'm not mistaken. Of course the engines and internals have been updated and refined many times in that period, but the basic airframe is the same from what I know.
I hope Yeager was watching. :-)
X-1 was dropped from a B-29, Matthew.
Thanks Dean and Samuel,
Just got off my digital butt and looked up the debut of the B-52. 1955, so Dean's correct that it's been in service almost 50 years.
Yeager's Mach 1 flight, dropped from the B-29, was October of 1947.
Just tuned in and have been catching the replay. Very, very cool.
THEY GOT ALL THE DATA!
They thought they lost it but they got all telemetry thru splash!
Few realize this but today was probably in the top 5 historic days in aviation.
Mach 7 breathing air!
BTW that B-52 they used today has dropped over 50 LV's in it's history.
Hot damn! (BTW, here's the press release from Dryden after the flight.)
I wanted to thank you for posting this for all of us. I have such an infinity for this and watched in awe.
God Bless NASA! I am of the belief NASA is a guiding light to those of us that have that pioneering spirit.
We've developed a new way to test engines. Cool. Though you shouldn't expect the engine on the X43a to ever reach commercial development. It's a test bed after all.
Commercial craft will likely take off using turbine jets, at about 60,000 feet switch to ram jets, then at 120,000 feet go to scram jets. Unless they can develop turbine and scram jets with overlapping upper and lower ceilings.
For orbital insertion, add small rockets for the final boost.
Just remembered this.
According to the tale, the X20 was supposed to be the first model to take off and land on its own power. And act as a test bed for a family of space planes. But NASA decided to put all their space exploration money into the Moon Mission, and the Xplane series was scrapped with the last flight of the X15.
If only Kennedy hadn't been so damn short-sighted.
Then again, if only Kennedy had lived long enough to dump Johnson as VP.
If only NASA hadn't destroyed the Delta Clipper right after they got control of it...
Why, oh, why, do I have this terrible feeling that NASA will, for the umpteenth time, go for a hideously expensive, designed-by-committee, "solve every problem before you start," national space plane, just like they've always done ever since they came up with Shuttle?
I hate to break the mood, guys, but this is not your father's NASA... :(