ESA develops hydrogen hypersonic aircraft with Mach 5
ESA develops hydrogen hypersonic aircraft with Mach 5
www.heise.de
ESA develops hydrogen hypersonic aircraft with Mach 5
8 comments
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The plan is for the hydrogen-powered aircraft to take off like an airplane and then reach an orbit around the earth like a rocket.
Just for reference, the escape speed is 11.186 km/s or approximately mach 33.
The hypersonic aircraft equipped with such a propulsion system could make ESA's vision of developing a horizontal take-off spacecraft a reality.
Interesting, but I see this as only as a step in that direction, not the final product that actually stays in orbit. If it can reach whatever altitude you call space, it certainly won’t stay there on its own. With speed like that, it’s just going to drop like a plane.
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The escape velocity is the velocity necessary to escape the gravitational field of the earth and reach a heliocentric orbit or another planet, e.g. Mars.
For any object remaining in an orbit around earth, the required velocity is significantly smaller, e.g. the orbial velocity of ISS (~ 400 km orbit) is about 7.9 km/s.
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It will need to switch the engines from using air from the atmosphere to using liquid oxygen carried onboard. This is what the SABRE engine mentioned in the article was supposed to do before they lost funding. Reaction systems was working on the SABRE engine to power a spaceplane called the Skylon which was very similar to this.
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8 comments
ESA wants to develop hydrogen hypersonic aircraft with Mach 5
Fixing the clickbait headline (not OP's fault, she faithfully copied the dumbass editor's work). There's a long way to go from "we want this" to actually making it happen.