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Destination Tomorrow - DT4 - Hyper-X

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Subido el 28 de mayo de 2007 por EducaMadrid

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NASA Destination Tomorrow Segment exploring NASA's Hyper-X program that is working on experimental engine designs that could propel commercial planes into space and make conventional rockets a thing of the past.

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Hello everyone, I'm Steele McGonigal. 00:00:00
And I'm Kara O'Brien, and welcome to Destination Tomorrow. 00:00:05
This program will uncover how past, present, and future research is creating today's knowledge 00:00:09
to answer the questions and solve the challenges of tomorrow. 00:00:13
Today, flights into space are usually reserved for trained astronauts, but a new technology 00:00:16
being developed by NASA may someday allow anyone the opportunity to travel into space. 00:00:21
NASA's HyperX program is working on experimental engine designs that could eventually propel 00:00:26
commercial planes into space. 00:00:30
This new technology may make conventional rockets a thing of the past. 00:00:32
Tonya St. Romain finds out more about this fascinating new program. 00:00:36
Have you ever dreamed of going to your local airport and getting on a cross-country flight 00:00:43
that would take you minutes instead of hours? 00:00:47
Or getting on a flight that would actually take you into space? 00:00:50
This may seem like an unrealistic idea now, but in the near future, these dreams may actually 00:00:54
become reality. 00:00:58
NASA researchers in the HyperX program office are working on a new vehicle. 00:01:00
It's called the X-43. 00:01:05
The vehicle will demonstrate technology that could someday allow aircraft to travel at 00:01:07
incredible speeds, even fly into space. 00:01:12
The X-43 has a revolutionary new type of air-breathing engine called a scramjet that may enable future 00:01:16
spacecraft to take off and land like an airplane instead of blasting off like a conventional 00:01:22
rocket. 00:01:27
The scramjet engine may also be used by commercial airlines, and that would significantly reduce 00:01:28
the amount of travel time between destinations. 00:01:34
I spoke with NASA Manager Vince Rausch to find out more about the X-43 and the scramjet 00:01:37
engine. 00:01:42
Tonya, the X-43 is a revolutionary new kind of airplane. 00:01:43
What we want to do with this is prove that hypersonic flight with an air-breathing engine 00:01:47
is possible. 00:01:51
Hypersonic flight means flying more than five times the speed of sound. 00:01:52
Today, most airplanes fly below the speed of sound or subsonically. 00:01:55
This airplane, the X-43, which you see here full scale, inverted in the wind tunnel, uses 00:02:00
a new kind of engine to do that called a scramjet or supersonic combustion ramjet. 00:02:05
Vince, what makes the scramjet so special compared to a typical engine? 00:02:09
Well, the scramjet is very much like a jet engine as far as how it operates. 00:02:13
However, if you look at a typical jet engine on today's airliners, what you see are fan 00:02:17
blades at the front that compress the air before it goes into the combustor section 00:02:21
where it's mixed with fuel and burned to produce thrust. 00:02:25
The scramjet engine, such as this one, uses the forward velocity of the vehicle as it 00:02:28
moves forward in the air to ram the air into the engine so it can do away with those fan 00:02:32
blades. 00:02:37
It then mixes the fuel, burns it, and produces a thrust. 00:02:38
That's much more efficient at the higher velocities that this engine operates at than using compressor 00:02:41
blades. 00:02:46
What's the technology that's going to make this plane fly into space? 00:02:47
The technology primarily is that this engine, because it doesn't have moving parts, it's 00:02:50
designed to operate over a wide speed range, can actually fly theoretically up to 25 times 00:02:55
the speed of sound, which is orbital velocity. 00:03:00
What we want to do with this vehicle is show that one of these engines actually works in 00:03:03
flight, something that's never been done before. 00:03:06
So we're really excited about taking this to flight, show that it works, and then from 00:03:08
there go to bigger vehicles to show that we can actually make space access vehicles that 00:03:12
fly like airplanes. 00:03:15
The scramjet engine is very different from conventional rocket engines. 00:03:17
In order to break free from the Earth's gravitational field, vehicles like the space shuttle use 00:03:21
a fuel mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to propel the vehicle forward. 00:03:26
Unfortunately, the oxygen and hydrogen must be carried in the vehicle, which significantly 00:03:30
increases the weight, making it very expensive and inefficient to fly to space. 00:03:35
Since the scramjet engine actually scoops oxygen into the engine from the atmosphere, 00:03:41
it doesn't need the extra tanks to carry the heavy oxygen propellant. 00:03:45
The scooped air, which is traveling above the speed of sound relative to the vehicle, 00:03:49
is heated up as it reaches the combustion section of the engine. 00:03:54
It's then mixed with hydrogen and burned quickly to provide thrust. 00:03:57
This process allows the vehicle to move faster and faster, reaching orbital velocity, enabling 00:04:01
the vehicle to break the gravitational fields and fly into space. 00:04:06
We have a long history here at NASA Langley of doing scramjet research. 00:04:10
In fact, over the last 40 years, we've built and tested over 20 engines. 00:04:14
We've run 5,000 tests. 00:04:19
If you ran these tests end-to-end, we would actually have enough test time to fly five 00:04:20
times around the globe. 00:04:24
Unfortunately, there are some things that we can't duplicate on the ground in a facility 00:04:25
such as this that we have to take to flight. 00:04:29
So now, what we're ready to do is take engines such as this scramjet engine to flight. 00:04:31
All right, and let me get this straight. 00:04:34
The X-43 uses an air-breathing engine. 00:04:36
What makes it different from other vehicles that fly into space, like the space shuttle? 00:04:39
The space shuttle uses rocket engines, obviously, instead of an air-breathing engine. 00:04:43
What we want to do is take the cost of the space shuttle, which is about $10,000 a pound 00:04:47
today, and by using an air-breathing vehicle such as a follow-on to the X-43, drop that 00:04:51
price down to a couple of hundred dollars a pound. 00:04:57
That would mean that you and I could take a space trip, something that I'd very much 00:05:00
like to do in the future. 00:05:03
It would also, by operating like an airplane, take off and land on a runway. 00:05:04
It would be much more flexible, much more reliable, and obviously much safer. 00:05:09
So we want to really take airplane technology and apply it to space launch technology. 00:05:13
And the scramjet is kind of a mix of both. 00:05:18
And we're very excited about the potential for the future and what we're about in this 00:05:21
program starting to prove that that potential is really there. 00:05:23
Vince, I know the X-43 is still in the initial test phase, but when might you and I expect 00:05:27
that we could actually hop on one of these planes and fly into space? 00:05:32
Tony, we have a lot of work to do before we get to that point. 00:05:37
The X-43 is the first step. 00:05:40
Beyond the X-43, we hope to have an X-43C, which would be slightly larger. 00:05:42
And then going from there into fully reusable systems, where we test them many, many times. 00:05:47
I would say that realistically, we're talking about being able to make a decision on building 00:05:52
a real airplane using the scramjet technology in the 2025 timeframe. 00:05:56
Currently, the world's fastest air-breathing aircraft, the SR-71, cruises slightly above Mach 3. 00:06:02
The HyperX research vehicle will have the ability to fly at Mach 10, or 10 times the 00:06:08
speed of sound, which is roughly 2 miles per second. 00:06:12
Up next, testing shuttle tires at 250 miles an hour on the ground. 00:06:16
But first, did you know that the X-15 was the first winged aircraft to investigate piloted hypersonic flight? 00:06:20
From June 1959 to October 1968, the X-15 set the world speed record at Mach 6.7, or 4,520 miles per hour. 00:06:27
It also set the altitude record of 354,200 feet and earned astronaut wings for five of its pilots. 00:06:36
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Idioma/s:
en
Niveles educativos:
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Autor/es:
NASA LaRC Office of Education
Subido por:
EducaMadrid
Licencia:
Reconocimiento - No comercial - Sin obra derivada
Visualizaciones:
466
Fecha:
28 de mayo de 2007 - 17:04
Visibilidad:
Público
Enlace Relacionado:
NASAs center for distance learning
Duración:
06′ 46″
Relación de aspecto:
4:3 Hasta 2009 fue el estándar utilizado en la televisión PAL; muchas pantallas de ordenador y televisores usan este estándar, erróneamente llamado cuadrado, cuando en la realidad es rectangular o wide.
Resolución:
480x360 píxeles
Tamaño:
39.36 MBytes

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