How Fast Is Mach 10

Has Mach 10 ever been reached

Could The Human Body Survive Mach 10? – Tom Cruise’s character’s feat of Mach 10 speed in Top Gun: Maverick is one scientifically improbable stunt out of many featured in the film. That being said, is it possible for the human body to be able to withstand such acceleration? The most likely answer is a resounding no.

• Mach 10 speed has never been achieved by a manned aircraft, though, so it has never been tested.
• Mach 10 has, however, been achieved by a spacecraft – on November 16, 2004, NASA launched the X-43A, an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle, and was able to reach real Mach 10 while being pushed into the atmosphere.

But that was an unmanned craft. The problem with humans withstanding such a speed has to do with the acceleration needed to reach it, and the resultant G-force. A normal human could withstand up to around 4-6Gs. Real fighter pilots, on the other hand, are able to take a whopping 9Gs for a second or two, but that only comes with extensive training.

Can you survive Mach 10?

It’s not the ejection part that’s the problem – Heritage Images/Getty Images If you simply ejected at Mach 10 using a regular jet’s ejection system, or even a pressure suit, you would not survive. But it’s not the ejection part that would cause an issue and, contrary to what Neil deGrasse Tyson said, you’re unlikely to “splatter like a chainmail glove swatting a worm.” As former NASA astronaut and U.S.

Navy Captain Scott Kelly explains in a tweet, the altitude you’d need to reach those speeds would actually work in your favor. The pressure at sea level would tear you to pieces at those speeds, but the extremely thin atmosphere at which a Mach 10 hypersonic jet is operating wouldn’t rip you and your suit to pieces or decelerate you so quickly that your organs would smash into your skeleton and basically turn your body into a bag of soup.

So you may survive the ejection, but getting back to earth is a different matter. To be completely clear. At the altitude at which a Mach 10 hypersonic aircraft would be flying, the ejection would be very survivable, the reentry into the atmosphere in just a pressure suit, not so much.

What is the highest Mach speed ever recorded?

Pegasus booster rocket ignites to send the X-43A on its record setting flight on Nov.16, 2004. NASA photo It’s Official. X-43A Raises the Bar to Mach 9.6 Guinness World Records recognized NASA’s X-43A scramjet with a new world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft – Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph.

• The X-43A set the new mark and broke its own world record on its third and final flight on Nov.16, 2004.
• In March 2004, the X-43A set the previous record of Mach 6.8 (nearly 5,000 mph).
• The fastest air-breathing, manned vehicle, the U.S.
• Air Force SR-71, achieved slightly more than Mach 3.2.
• The X-43A more than doubled, then tripled, the top speed of the jet-powered SR-71.

+ View Press Release View QuickTime Movies: X-43A/Pegasus Launch: 2.6 Mb | 5 Mb | 7.3 Mb | 12 Mb B-52B Takeoff: 1.6 Mb | 3.1 Mb | 4.6 Mb | 7.5 Mb Getting Ready for Mach 10: 3.2 Mb | 6 Mb | 8.9 Mb | 14.5 Mb

How fast is Mach 10 around the world?

If traveling at Mach 10, it would take approximately 3 hours and 20 minutes to circle around the world. That’s pretty fast! You’d be able to see some amazing sights in that amount of time – from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to the Great Wall of China.

Is Mach 10 possible top gun?

When Does Maverick Go Mach 10? – Maverick is shown flying past Mach 10 in his prototype jet called Darkstar. While Darkstar doesn’t actually exist in real life, it’s meant to be a codename for SR-72, which is a follow-up to SR-71, both being reconnaissance aircraft developed by Skunk Works, an aircraft manufacturer located in the middle of the Mojave desert, where most of the movie takes place.

The Darkstar in the movie is also developed by Skunkworks. While Darkstar might not be officially real, the aircraft might actually exist in a prototype version, although that’s just mere speculation. In terms of appearance, The SR-72, better known as Darkstar, has a sleek and stealthy design, bearing a strong resemblance to the concept SR-72 render released in 2017.

At the beginning of the movie, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell goes rogue by stealing the prototype jet DarkStar to prove to the navy that he’s faster than any robot jet, as they were planning to shut down his prototype jet to favor all the funding to drones.

Since Darkstar is a fast jet, Maverick undergoes intense training before pushing the jet to its limits. Maverick’s attempt to control the aircraft isn’t a solo effort, as he is assisted by the rest of his team who also attempt to keep the program alive. Maverick is shown to fly over Admiral Chester Cain, a senior in the Navy, and despite Chester’s attempts to stop him, Maverick ignores the order and acts as if comms were breaking up.

While Maverick is shown to fly at Mach 8 easily, the aircraft then struggles to gain more speed but does gradually. At high speeds like Mach 9 and above, the aircraft’s surface temperature also increases drastically due to high velocity. Despite this challenge, Maverick breaks the Mach 10 barrier, and the captain attempts to go even further, reaching a speed of Mach 10.3 before the aircraft’s engine is destroyed, forcing him to eject and essentially destroy the aircraft.

Did Tom Cruise fly at Mach 10?

Paramount Pictures It’s easy to get caught up in the events of an exciting movie and want to become part of the action. Just ask the U.S. Navy. In the days following the release of 1986’s “Top Gun,” they saw an 8% increase in recruitment. People wanted to be like the guys on the big screen, take part in oily volleyball matches, and talk too close to each other’s faces.

• So it stands to reason that, following 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” viewers would be out there trying to relive the sequel.
• The easiest way to do this, at a guess, would be by hopping into the cockpit of an experimental Darkstar aircraft and getting it on the redline overload, flying a hair over Mach 10 in order to teach Ed Harris a thing or two about,

something. Planes going fast. The reason that you don’t hear much about this sort of behavior on the local news? It’s not just the embarrassingly low number of Darkstar jet planes, currently estimated to be in the low-zeroes. It’s the fact that nobody — not one solitary person — has ever moved anywhere close to Mach 10.

What Mach is the speed of light

Answer and Explanation: The speed of light is Mach 874,030. This is because the speed of light in air is 874,030 times faster than the speed of sound in air. Sound travels are a speed of 1234 km/hr while light travels at 1,078,553,020 km/hr.

What speed is hyper sonic?

As an aircraft moves through the air, the air molecules near the aircraft are disturbed and move around the aircraft. Exactly how the air re-acts to the aircraft depends upon the ratio of the speed of the aircraft to the speed of sound through the air. Because of the importance of this speed ratio, aerodynamicists have designated it with a special parameter called the Mach number in honor of Ernst Mach, a late 19th century physicist who studied gas dynamics. For aircraft speeds which are much greater than the speed of sound, the aircraft is said to be hypersonic, Typical speeds for hypersonic aircraft are greater than 3000 mph and Mach number M greater than five, M > 5, We are going to define a high hypersonic regime at M > 10 to account for re-entry aerodynamics. The chief characteristic of hypersonic aerodynamics is that the temperature of the flow is so great that the chemistry of the diatomic molecules of the air must be considered. At low hypersonic speeds, the molecular bonds vibrate, which changes the magnitude of the forces generated by the air on the aircraft. At high hypersonic speeds, the molecules break apart producing an electrically charged plasma around the aircraft. Large variations in air density and pressure occur because of shock waves, and expansions, The only manned aircraft to fly in the low hypersonic regime were the X-15 and the Space Shuttle during re-entry. The X-15 is shown on the figure. The X-15 used a rocket propulsion system to achieve sustained Mach 6 flight. Recently, an un-manned X-43A used a scramjet, or supersonic combustion ramjet, to make two hypersonic flights; one at Mach 7, the other at Mach 10. Because of the pressure losses associated with the terminal shock of the inlet, a ramjet has very limited performance beyond Mach 5. Because lift and drag depend on the square of the velocity, hypersonic aircraft do not require a large wing area, For Mach numbers greater than 5, the frictional heating of the airframe by the air becomes so high that very special nickel alloys are required for the structure. For some proposed hypersonic aircraft, the skin is actively cooled by circulating fuel through the skin to absorb the heat.

Can anything go Mach 20?

The results are in from last summer’s attempt to test new technology that would provide the Pentagon with a lightning-fast vehicle, capable of delivering a military strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour. In August the Pentagon’s research arm, known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, carried out a test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of traveling at 20 times the speed of sound.

• The arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket made by Orbital Sciences Corp.
• After reaching an undisclosed altitude, the aircraft jettisoned from its protective cover atop the rocket, then nose-dived back toward Earth, leveled out and glided above the Pacific at 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20.

The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for about 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg. But it was ended about nine minutes into flight for unknown reasons. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but officials didn’t provide much information on why the launch failed.

On Friday, DARPA said in a statement that the searing high speeds caused portions of the Falcon’s skin to peel from the aerostructure. The resulting gaps created strong shock waves around the vehicle as it traveled nearly 13,000 mph, causing it to roll abruptly. The Falcon, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp., is made of durable carbon composite material, which was expected to keep the aircraft’s crucial internal electronics and avionics – only a few inches away from the surface – safe from the fiery hypersonic flight.

Surface temperatures on the Falcon were expected to reach more than 3,500 degrees, hot enough to melt steel. “The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J.

1. Gabriel said in a statement.
2. That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.” The flight successfully demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to Mach 20 for nearly three minutes.
3. Sustaining hypersonic flight has been an extremely difficult task for aeronautical engineers over the years.

While supersonic means that an object is traveling faster than the speed of sound, or Mach 1, “hypersonic” refers to an aircraft going five times that speed or more. The Falcon hit Mach 20. At that speed, an aircraft could zoom from Los Angeles to New York in less than 12 minutes – 22 times faster than a commercial airliner.

1. Take a look at what that looks like from the ground in the video below.
2. The August launch was the second flight of the Falcon technology.
3. The first flight, which took place in April 2010, also ended prematurely with only nine minutes of flight time.
4. There aren’t any more flights scheduled for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million.

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What Mach speed is lethal

A person can survive any speed. It is the acceleration to and from that speed that can kill them. Mach 20 is fast.23000 km/h.

How fast is 20 Mach speed

By James Manning – Updated July 17, 2012 — 1.41pm The US military aims to fly a hypersonic plane at 20 times the speed of sound by 2016. The X-plane will travel at Mach 20 (roughly 20,900 km/h), which means it could fly to any place on earth in less than an hour.

• The project, titled Integrated Hypersonics, is being carried out by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has developed stealth aircraft for the US government for over 30 years.
• We have the opportunity to usher in a new area of flight more rapidly,” said US Air Force Major Christopher Schulz, who is also the program manager at DARPA.

“And in doing so, develop a new national security capability far beyond previous initiatives.” The Falcon hypersonic HTV-2 aircraft. According to the government agency, the project comes in response to the US’s military advantage being threatened by other nations’ increasing abilities in stealth and counter-stealth warfare. DARPA has conducted two test flights of prototype hypersonic aircraft in the past two years.

• In August last year, the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) reached Mach 20, but only remained airborne for nine minutes,
• The HTV-2 was developed in conjunction with the advanced Conventional Prompt Global Strike weapons program with the goal of creating a bomber able to reach any target on the globe in under an hour.

The program’s research will focus on five key areas: thermal protection system and hot structures; aerodynamics; guidance, navigation and control (GNC); range/instrumentation; and propulsion. The X-plane will travel at roughly 20,921 km/h. Thermal protection is a crucial issue for hypersonic flight, which is defined as anything over Mach 5. A vehicle flying inside the atmosphere at Mach 20 would experience temperatures in excess of 1920 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt steel.

• The project will also aim to improve design and manufacturing processes, in order to able faster production.
• We do not yet have a complete hypersonic system solution,” said Gregory Hulcher, director of strategic warfare at the Office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

“Programs like Integrated Hypersonics will leverage previous investments in this field and continue to reduce risk, inform development, and advance capabilities,” he said. A new launch vehicle will be designed for the hypersonic aircraft, rather than adapting an existing rocket booster that was designed for space missions, DARPA said.

Rocket propulsion technology will also be integrated into the vehicles to give a mid-flight rocket boost that would extend the range of the flight. Proposed advancements in aerodynamics and GNC technologies will allow the X-plane to make in-flight adjustments to deal with changing external conditions, increasing the safety of the vehicles.

Loading Moving forward, the program will conduct further ground tests and test flights of prototype vehicles, as well as modelling and simulation that will culminate in a full-scale flight of the X-plane in 2016. DARPA will host an event on August 14 in Arlington, Virginia, to detail the areas for which technical and research proposals are being sought.

Can Maverick eject at Mach 10?

Maverick Probably Couldn’t Survive Ejecting At Mach 10 – Ejecting at Mach 10 would likely obliterate Maverick instead of leaving Top Gun: Maverick ‘s hero with some superficial cuts and a bruised ego. Since, few viewers were shocked when the actor’s character didn’t die in the opening sequence. However, in reality, no known aircraft has ever traveled above Mach 3 and no manned aircraft has had a pilot eject at a speed higher than Mach 2.5 and live to tell the tale.

• The relative weight and density of air outside the craft would kill the pilot instantly.
• However, some viewers online have noted that the Darkstar, a fictional aircraft, could have an ejection capsule.
• This safeguard would allow Top Gun: Maveric k a lot of leeway when it comes to depicting Maverick’s unlikely survival.

An ejection pod that can decelerate at a relative speed to the Darkstar would decrease the likelihood of an immediate death, although it is worth noting that Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t explicitly state that an ejection capsule is present. One in the opening scene, and the remainder of the movie is his dying dream. Ultimately, while the ejection capsule theory gives Top Gun: Maverick ‘s Mach 10 scene a solid justification for its existence, the sequence never really needed an excuse to begin with. It is a killer action sequence that opens an endlessly entertaining blockbuster, and realism isn’t a major concern when it comes to fun, entertaining blockbuster spectacle.

It is worth noting that Top Gun: Maverick also never names the enemy nation where the movie’s central mission takes place, which is at least as unrealistic as the Mach 10 scene. In both instances, the Top Gun: Maverick creators opted to follow the lead of Top Gun and prioritize entertainment value over realism.

Next: : Could Maverick Really Survive Ejecting At Mach 10? Top Gun Fact Check

What happens at Mach 10

Understanding Turbulence in the Fast Lane – Mach 10 and Beyond Ed Stiles March 10, 2005 Although NASA’s X-43A and other hypersonic airplanes use air-breathing engines and fly much like 747s, there’s a big difference between ripping air at Mach 10 (around 7,000 mph) and cruising through it at 350 mph.These differences are even more pronounced when hypersonic aircraft sip rarified air at 100,000 feet, while commercial airliners gulp the much thicker stuff at 30,000.Aero-thermodynamic heating is a very big deal at Mach 10.

1. The critical point comes where air changes from flowing smoothly across a surface — laminar flow — to when it becomes chaotic — turbulent flow.Aero-thermodynamic heating largely determines the engine size, weight, choice of materials and overall size in hypersonic airplanes.
2. So engineers would like to have a much better understanding of what triggers turbulence and how they can control it at hypersonic speeds.Air goes from laminar to turbulent at what engineers call the “boundary layer.” They understand how this happens at slower speeds, but they’re still grappling with which factors influence it at hypersonic speeds.Associate Professor Anatoli Tumin, of UA Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME), is among those studying the problem and has developed a model that predicts the surface roughness effects on the transition from laminar to turbulent flow at hypersonic speeds.

His theory has a lot to do with partial differential equations, Navier-Stokes equations and other brain-taxing mathematics that Tumin and Applied Math Ph.D. student Eric Forgoston have grappled with during the past couple of years.”In principle, the theory tells us what the optimal perturbations are that will lead to turbulent flow,” Tumin said.

1. Now we can explore different geometries for roughness elements to see which are best.
2. We can explore how to space them and where we should position them.”The researchers will soon run a supercomputer simulation to compare their theory with what actually happens when air flows across a roughened surface at hypersonic speeds.Currently, these simulations guzzle tens of hours of supercomputing time.

But if Tumin’s theory is correct, engineers will soon get the same results from their office laptops.Tumin is working with Research Assistant Professor Simone Zuccher, of UA AME, to develop a software package that will allow designers to do this laptop-style analysis.

1. The software will help them predict when and where the transitions from laminar to turbulent flow occur in engines and on surfaces operating at hypersonic speeds.”We developed our theory and arrived at what is called the ‘transient growth mechanism,'” Tumin said.
2. The airflow is stable, but there are some tiny disturbances within it that can grow downstream.

We can generate these downstream, streamwise vortices (spiraling flows) by using the correct amount of roughness in the right places. We can do this at an engine inlet, for instance, in order to trip the boundary layer and to have stable engine performance.””If we can understand the laminar-turbulent transition mechanism, we can predict the transition point accurately,” Tumin said.

• This is important for heat protection, where you want laminar flow.
• Otherwise, you need to add a lot of weight for thermal insulation because you have to assume turbulent flow at the surface when you do your design calculations.
• Similarly, engine designers would like to have a quick transition to turbulence to have a turbulent flow at an engine inlet.”Ultimately, better understanding the transition to turbulence at hypersonic speeds will allow designers to build lighter, faster, more efficient airplanes capable of traveling at even higher speeds of Mach 15 or more.

: Understanding Turbulence in the Fast Lane – Mach 10 and Beyond

How long would it take to loop the world at Mach 10?

At Mach 10, around the world in 5 hrs.

How fast is a Darkstar?

At the very start of the Top Gun: Maverick movie, that was released in theatres after much delay last month, Tom Cruise visits a secret test facility to fly a stealth plane, resembling the famed Lockheed Martin SR-71 “Blackbird”. Called the Darkstar, the plane touched 10 Mach, which makes it the fastest aircraft in the world, even though fictional.

1. But is it really a fictional plane or Lockheed Martin is actually working on a Mach 10 plane? The U.S.
2. Based aerospace and defence major revealed some details of the concept plane recently.
3. Lockheed Martin CEO, James Taiclet, recently disclosed the involvement of its legendary Skunk Works division following the world premiere of the film and has now created a dedicated webpage for mysterious Darkstar.

“Lockheed Martin Skunk Works thrives on tackling seemingly impossible work, developing technologies for tomorrow’s challenges before the need is even identified,” the website says. “When the Top Gun: Maverick team was looking to push the envelope and stand true to Maverick’s Need for Speed, Skunk Works was their first call.

How fast is 10gs in a jet

How fast is 10gs of force? – 10G is ten times the acceleration due to gravity, which would be 320 ft/sec/sec. In simple words, this would mean, starting from zero, you would increase your speed to 320 ft/sec by the end of the first second.

Can drones go Mach 10?

Mystery: Did Iranian Pilots Encounter a Mach 10 Drone or Some Sort of UFO? Key point: America probably doesn’t have a super powerful, super fast drone (although you never know). If the Pentagon doesn’t have a secret weapon up its sleeve, then who knows those Iranians saw.

1. Iran is the only other country besides the United States to operate arguably history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft, the F-14 Tomcat.
2. And the Islamic republic has worked the twin-engine, swing-wing fighters hard,
3. The F-14s played a major role in Iran’s war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988.
4. Iranian Tomcat pilots were the only ones to successfully employ the F-14’s long-range, heavyweight AIM-54 Phoenix missile to,

In the decades after the war, Tehran repaired and upgraded the surviving F-14s, scouring the globe for parts in defiance of a U.S. government embargo. The Americans retired their F-14s in 2006, but around 40 of Iran’s Tomcats remain active. Their main role is defending Iran’s nuclear sites.

• It’s a mission that has brought the interceptors in close contact with some very mysterious aircraft, according to a bizarre and fascinating 2013 story in by reporter Babak Taghvaee.
• The Iranians believed the objects were spy drones belonging to the U.S.
• Central Intelligence Agency, sent to sniff out Tehran’s suspected atomic weapons program.

But they attribute to these alleged unmanned aerial vehicles flight characteristics and capabilities far beyond what any known drone can achieve. And in 2012 one of the alleged flying robots reportedly also shot down an F-14 attempting to intercept it.

Or at least some Iranians seem genuinely to believe so. Over the decades Tehran has built three major nuclear facilities that could, in theory, be used to assemble atomic weapons: reactors at Bushehr and Arak and an enrichment plant at Natanz. This infrastructure became public knowledge in 2002. No doubt the CIA took a strong interest, potentially long before that date.

“A number of reconnaissance UAVs were sent to collect intelligence to prepare for a possible attack” by Western forces, Taghvaee wrote. To protect the nuke facilities, in 2004 Iran deployed a task force composed of eight F-4E fighters and eight F-14s plus a former 707 airliner and a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with sensors and radios for command and control.

• The task force encountered what it believed were CIA drones with “astonishing flight characteristics.” The UAVs could jam radars and disrupt interceptors’ navigation systems.
• They flew “outside the atmosphere” at speeds of up to Mach 10.
• They could hover.
• Flying at night, they emitted a telltale blue light that led to their nickname: “luminous objects.” “In several cases F-14s faced them but were unable to operate their armament systems properly,” Taghvaee wrote.

One Tomcat taking off to intercept a luminous object on Jan.26, 2012 mysteriously exploded, killing both crewmen. Taghvaee implies the alleged UAV was somehow responsible, as the F-14 in question was “one of the fittest” of the 40 or so Tomcats then in service.

• It should go without saying that the CIA and the Pentagon most likely fly reconnaissance aircraft near—and even over—Iranian nuclear sites.
• In 2012 and 2013, Iranian fighters tried to intercept American Predator drones outside Tehran’s airspace.
• In the 2013 incident, a U.S.
• Air Force F-22 stealth fighter blocked the intercept with some Top Gun -style theatrics.

In 2009, the Air Force copped to the existence of a new, previously secret drone operated in conjunction with the intelligence agency. The RQ-170 Sentinel was based in southern Afghanistan within short flying distance of Iran. In December 2011, a Sentinel crashed on the Afghanistan-Iran border and was captured by Iranian troops.

• Neither the Predator nor the Sentinel is particularly high-flying nor can hover or glow blue.
• And neither has the electrical power to scramble radars and navigation gear.
• Rumors abound that the Air Force and CIA operate a stealthy new drone that has not been disclosed to the public.
• Even if they do, it’s unlikely that the new UAV is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic flight—the Pentagon is still struggling to reach Mach five.

So if Iranian F-14s truly are chasing around super-fast, super-high-flying and lethal UFOs, what exactly are they? Who knows. David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels, and, This first appeared in August 2019 and is being republished due to reader’s interest.

Can a human survive Mach 20

Question:-‘Can a human survive Mach 20?’ No problem ; Mach Number is a speed, not an acceleration. Speed doesn’t injure a person or a thing. An induced or applied load is the linked to the acceleration.

Can a human survive Mach 1

If human manoeuvre that speed Mach 1(1225 Kph), the air friction will increase the body temperature enormously. It will almost boil the body. The strange symptoms including temporary vision loss, loss of consciousness and weightlessness. The turbulence causes parts of the body swell out.

Has any pilot gone Mach 9?

Going really fast – Quite a lot, probably. And I had come to Venus Aerospace’s facilities in southeastern Houston to see if there was any chance the company could meet this ambitious goal. Certainly, I had some doubts. One problem is that Mach 9 is really, really freaking fast.

No airplane has ever gone this fast. The speediest airplane ever built is Lockheed’s SR-71 “Blackbird,” which traveled at Mach 3.2. Anything above Mach 9 and you lose communications with the ground, as plasma starts enveloping the vehicle, as if it were a spacecraft returning to Earth through the upper atmosphere.

Advertisement In terms of passenger travel comparisons, the Concorde supersonic airliner traveled at Mach 2, or about 2,100 km/hour. Most of the newer generation of supersonic aircraft under development today are in about the same range, such as Boom Supersonic’s cruising speed of Mach 1.7 The Dugglebys are proposing a radically different flight profile.

1. They intend for their aircraft to take off and then perform a 10-minute boost with its rocket engine.
2. This will send the aircraft to an altitude of approximately 50 km, or half the way to space.
3. Oh, and they’re aiming for an airport-like operational cadence of four flights a day.
4. To that end, the company recently decided on a fuel mix for its engine: room-temperature hydrogen peroxide and Jet-A, the fuel used by a majority of jet aircraft already flying at airports.

The company’s engineers also recently achieved liquid peroxide and Jet A detonation, which is important for using a stable fuel composition.

Can anything go mach 20

The results are in from last summer’s attempt to test new technology that would provide the Pentagon with a lightning-fast vehicle, capable of delivering a military strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour. In August the Pentagon’s research arm, known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, carried out a test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of traveling at 20 times the speed of sound.

The arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket made by Orbital Sciences Corp. After reaching an undisclosed altitude, the aircraft jettisoned from its protective cover atop the rocket, then nose-dived back toward Earth, leveled out and glided above the Pacific at 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20.

The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for about 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg. But it was ended about nine minutes into flight for unknown reasons. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but officials didn’t provide much information on why the launch failed.

On Friday, DARPA said in a statement that the searing high speeds caused portions of the Falcon’s skin to peel from the aerostructure. The resulting gaps created strong shock waves around the vehicle as it traveled nearly 13,000 mph, causing it to roll abruptly. The Falcon, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp., is made of durable carbon composite material, which was expected to keep the aircraft’s crucial internal electronics and avionics – only a few inches away from the surface – safe from the fiery hypersonic flight.

Surface temperatures on the Falcon were expected to reach more than 3,500 degrees, hot enough to melt steel. “The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J.

Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.” The flight successfully demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to Mach 20 for nearly three minutes. Sustaining hypersonic flight has been an extremely difficult task for aeronautical engineers over the years.

While supersonic means that an object is traveling faster than the speed of sound, or Mach 1, “hypersonic” refers to an aircraft going five times that speed or more. The Falcon hit Mach 20. At that speed, an aircraft could zoom from Los Angeles to New York in less than 12 minutes – 22 times faster than a commercial airliner.

• Take a look at what that looks like from the ground in the video below.
• The August launch was the second flight of the Falcon technology.
• The first flight, which took place in April 2010, also ended prematurely with only nine minutes of flight time.
• There aren’t any more flights scheduled for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million.

RELATED: Flying car aims to take wing in the commercial market F-35 fighter jet’s escalating costs are on Washington’s radar With so much at stake, companies turn to hired hackers Follow Hennigan on Twitter @wjhenn

Can our jets go Mach 10?

Not really. They can go really darn fast, but Mach 10 is hard to get to. That being said, humans have been airborne at far over Mach 10, just not in a plane. Currently, no planes have been built that can reach Mach 10 or above.

How far can you travel at Mach 10?

Comparing Mach 10 to other speeds – To truly grasp the mind-boggling velocity of Mach 10, let us compare it to more normal speeds. The speed of sound, known as Mach 1, is approximately 767 miles per hour or 1,235 kilometres per hour. In contrast, Mach 10 reaches an astonishing 7,670 miles or 12,350 kilometres per hour.

What happens at Mach 10?

Understanding Turbulence in the Fast Lane – Mach 10 and Beyond Ed Stiles March 10, 2005 Although NASA’s X-43A and other hypersonic airplanes use air-breathing engines and fly much like 747s, there’s a big difference between ripping air at Mach 10 (around 7,000 mph) and cruising through it at 350 mph.These differences are even more pronounced when hypersonic aircraft sip rarified air at 100,000 feet, while commercial airliners gulp the much thicker stuff at 30,000.Aero-thermodynamic heating is a very big deal at Mach 10.

• The critical point comes where air changes from flowing smoothly across a surface — laminar flow — to when it becomes chaotic — turbulent flow.Aero-thermodynamic heating largely determines the engine size, weight, choice of materials and overall size in hypersonic airplanes.
• So engineers would like to have a much better understanding of what triggers turbulence and how they can control it at hypersonic speeds.Air goes from laminar to turbulent at what engineers call the “boundary layer.” They understand how this happens at slower speeds, but they’re still grappling with which factors influence it at hypersonic speeds.Associate Professor Anatoli Tumin, of UA Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME), is among those studying the problem and has developed a model that predicts the surface roughness effects on the transition from laminar to turbulent flow at hypersonic speeds.

His theory has a lot to do with partial differential equations, Navier-Stokes equations and other brain-taxing mathematics that Tumin and Applied Math Ph.D. student Eric Forgoston have grappled with during the past couple of years.”In principle, the theory tells us what the optimal perturbations are that will lead to turbulent flow,” Tumin said.

“Now we can explore different geometries for roughness elements to see which are best. We can explore how to space them and where we should position them.”The researchers will soon run a supercomputer simulation to compare their theory with what actually happens when air flows across a roughened surface at hypersonic speeds.Currently, these simulations guzzle tens of hours of supercomputing time.

But if Tumin’s theory is correct, engineers will soon get the same results from their office laptops.Tumin is working with Research Assistant Professor Simone Zuccher, of UA AME, to develop a software package that will allow designers to do this laptop-style analysis.

The software will help them predict when and where the transitions from laminar to turbulent flow occur in engines and on surfaces operating at hypersonic speeds.”We developed our theory and arrived at what is called the ‘transient growth mechanism,'” Tumin said. “The airflow is stable, but there are some tiny disturbances within it that can grow downstream.

We can generate these downstream, streamwise vortices (spiraling flows) by using the correct amount of roughness in the right places. We can do this at an engine inlet, for instance, in order to trip the boundary layer and to have stable engine performance.””If we can understand the laminar-turbulent transition mechanism, we can predict the transition point accurately,” Tumin said.

This is important for heat protection, where you want laminar flow. Otherwise, you need to add a lot of weight for thermal insulation because you have to assume turbulent flow at the surface when you do your design calculations. Similarly, engine designers would like to have a quick transition to turbulence to have a turbulent flow at an engine inlet.”Ultimately, better understanding the transition to turbulence at hypersonic speeds will allow designers to build lighter, faster, more efficient airplanes capable of traveling at even higher speeds of Mach 15 or more.

: Understanding Turbulence in the Fast Lane – Mach 10 and Beyond