SR-72: US secret hypersonic jet to allegedly break sound barrier in 2025
SR-72: US secret hypersonic jet to allegedly break sound barrier in 2025
Widely reported as the fastest plane ever developed, Lockheed Martin's SR-72 "Son of Blackbird" will test the claim sometime in 2025.
Speed records with this kind of plane are sort of meaningless. The higher you go, the faster you go. Also, at higher altitudes the speed of sound is slower.
Arguably the Boeing space plane flies faster, as did the space shuttle.
These speeds have an actual use for the military. Since they are faster and fly higher than anything else in the sky, it is really hard to get a missile to intercept these birds. Hence, they can fly over interesting locations, take pictures, and scedattle.
Maybe even drop a payload. Which effectively turns them into reusable ICBMs.
Oh I know, but the point I'm making is that things higher up go faster. The space station orbits the Earth in 92.9 minutes. Also, using mach numbers doesn't really tell you anything without an altitude or pressure. Mach 1 at ground level is faster than mach 1 at 60,000 feet.
The military is accutely aware of this, just look at the U-2 spy plane. That thing flies so high that the speed of sound is so low and the stall speed so high that they're nearly the same - this is referred to as "coffin corner" of the flight envelope. Pilots have to be exceptionally careful banking at this altitude, as the inner wing will go slower than the outer wing in a turn, so you can have the tip of one wing stalling and the tip of the other wing breaking the speed of sound.
Doesn't that kind of imply this vehicle would be capable of achieving orbit? I figured speed would at least be limited by dry weight ratio.
Orbit, no, but these craft should surely be able to achieve a suborbital trajectory into space.
They don't have engines that work in space though, so they would not be able to circularise their orbit and remain up there. It would just be a parabolic arc that comes back down into the atmosphere somewhere else.
This probably wouldn't be a good thing to do, though, as the craft would have little way to orient itself for re-entry, and there could be issues re-lighting the engines.