Hypersonic Science: The First Darkstar: How Fast Can An Air-breathing Engine Go?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 18 ноя 2024
- What came before Darkstar? And are space planes still a viable concept?
The Terran Space Academy reviews advanced air breathing and rocket powered space planes.
Covering current SCRamjet operations as well as the supersonic first stage carrier planes
XB-70 and MR-3, and discussing the Blackstar Experimental Orbital Vehicle, as well as reviewing
The Lynx horizontal launch to orbit space plane and the National Aerospace Plane.
Thank you so much for watching!
Ad Astra Pro Terra.
Shop the Academy store at...
shop.spreadshi...
Please help support our channel at...
/ terranspaceacademy
Credits
Artists
/ hazegrayart
/ c_bass3d
/ alexsvanart
/ _fragomatik_
/ neopork85
/ rgvaerialphotos
Companies
/ nasa
/ spacex
/ blueorigin
/ space_ryde
/ virgingalactic
/ relativityspace
/ neutronstarsys
Music Credits
Light Awash by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommon...
Source: incompetech.com...
Artist: incompetech.com/
I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommon...
Source: chriszabriskie....
Artist: chriszabriskie....
Extra Credit
patents.google...
www.mywesttexas...
www.nationalmu...
www.grc.nasa.g...
www.astronautix...
www.russianspac...
Notes:
Turbofans are the most efficient engines in the range of speeds from about 500 to 1,000 km/h (270 to 540 kn; 310 to 620 mph), the speed at which most commercial aircraft operate. The closer the exhaust velocity is to the aircraft velocity, the higher the propulsive efficiency (but the lower the thrust). You need to strike a balance.
Another great thought provoker. Thank you!!
Glad you liked it!
Another well done video. The XB 70 has been retired to the USAF museum at Wright Patterson AFB since 1969. It most certainly did not take part in a test program in the 90’s.
No it did not. If anything like that was flying it would’ve been the MR three. I was privileged to serve a tour at Wright-Patterson and loved staring at it.
A great quality episode of the first spaceplanes. European SpaceX enthusiast.
Thank you very much Roberto!
I think one of the X-15 flights had a scramjet attached. When I read " Dark Star", I thought of the movie...
Well done episode! Even though I listen to most of your episodes on my bike on my way home after work, the narration is clear enough to picture what's going on...
Thank you Scott! And be careful out there! I ride too and it can be a challenge sometimes dodging inattentive car drivers. :-)
I like your , no BS and shoot-from-the-hip straight talk attitude. And all about aerospace too! 👍
Thank you 12! I appreciate that!
Thank you for this in-depth explainer on space planes. I'm convinced that one day it will be possible to reach orbit with a craft that doesn't have to shed pieces along the way.
I know about the "Tyranny of the rocket equation" - but engineers are better than that, they fight tyrannical equations with opposing powerful equations!
Regards,
Anthony
If we can get enough power we could ionize air molecules and use magnetic fields to throw them out the back to get to about 30km... Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters, then use magnetic fields to shield the ship from shockwave plasma as we reach 9km/s horizontal... then start using on board propellant to go on into orbit. :-)
I'm 36, and I'm confident that in my lifetime this technology will be developed
@@dannybell926 I’m 30 and I’m not at all convinced. Hope you are right:)
At scale at least…
I loved the beautiful XB-70. One of the most graceful aircraft in existence
My favorite too!
I like that of the 3 designs studied, 1 actually made it to orbit. That's an amazing success rate for a bleeding edge program.
It is indeed! We would love to see which one it was.
Nice additions to your growing catalogue. 👍
Thank yo Michel!
Great job. Keep up the quality content
Thanks, will do!
Another fine program to be sure!! An aviation engineer I worked closely with putting the original 01 aggressor A-4 used in the first Top Gun movie - too high angle of attack during one of the high bank maneuvers ripped the leading edge flap loose almost hitting the F-14 Tom Cruise was flying in that was just behind the A-4 - that engineer's father actually designed the engines and the housing for the on the XB-70 Valkyrie. You did a fine job with the stats. Can't wait to see the Skylon video. P.S. I'd love a diploma!!
No way! That is crazy! He must have been incredibly talented to work on the Valkyrie. It is amazing that Tom Cruise actually flew those planes in any fashion. That is true dedication to your art. A diploma is a great idea! We'll start thinking on that!
I was just about to chide you for not mentioning the SABRE/Skylon concept, but alas, you took the wind out of my sails!
I anticipated the attack :-) Sun Tzu would be proud!
As a junior high school student in the mid '70s, I found an age-appropriate book in the library touting the B-70 as America's replacement of the 1940s designed B-52. I was very disappointed to learn of its cancellation. The Valkyrie is my favorite aircraft design.
It is one of the most innovative and beautiful aircraft out there... Rivaling the SR-71. I have had the luck of seeing both up close. Amazing machines.
Incredibly informative, thank you! I wonder if air launches will ever be able to achieve high mass to orbit. On the other hand, they would make outstanding passenger vehicles to/from LEO imo, especially if they can scale up to 100 passengers a flight. 13:00 Neat that they did get one prototype to LEO this way.
There are several ways to make it not just practical but very competitive.
@@terranspaceacademy I'll go if you go.
Good amount of research again, you've exceeded yourself, so glad your doing SKYLON next, that English guy who designed the engine has been pushing the concept to realization for decades upon decades now. A truer unsung hero for the cause has been seldom seen. (that cause being SSTO as you described it at the end)
Thank you! We will try to reach out and do him justice.
Great video, thanks.
Glad you liked it Michael! Thank you for watching.
Excellent stuff bro
Thank you so much Clarence!
Well done. Learned much. Thank you.
May I suggest that after the Skylon/Rapier episode you look at the Blackhorse project, it's history, where it is now and what a Rapier or turbo-scramjet would mean to such a flight envelope.
Again, thank you.
You are most welcome and thank you. We'll dive into that.
I remember getting a book from the library where a writer on rocket development talking about a proposal called the Black Colt, being a smaller version of a Black Horse, to the military but was rejected so he went to develop something else. Unfortunately I don’t remember the book’s title itself now. Sorry.
yet another great lesson
We appreciate that Duke!
Great video - thank you very much :)
Thank you Johnny!
There was a Darkstar but not the one you would be thinking of. It was the RQ-3/RQ3A DarkStar which was a drone ( UAV ).
Thank you Don! It is not unusual for classified projects to borrow the same or a similar name from a more public project for security reasons. But in this case the Blackstar we were discussing was designed and tested long before the drone of the same name. One of them made it to orbit :-)
Thank You...
You are very welcome Tekish!
I will forever die on the hill that multi-staged, horizontal-takeoff spaceplanes make a lot of sense and are the only achievable way to bring the cost of launches down even more than fully reusable rockets like Starship.
We are very fond of the concept also... And believe there are inherent safety factors that are very hard to match in any other type of ship.
Interesting topic(s) Thanks :)
You are most welcome Ken.
With the Black star some things don't add up. The purpose of an aerospike engine is to provide good specific impulse in and out of atmosphere. The down side is they are heavier and less efficient than an optimal bell nozzle engine. If using a 2 stage system as suggested and launching from low atmospheric pressure, you would want an aerospike, you could just have a vacuum optimised bell nozzle.
Actually they are not heavier and less efficient than a bell nozzle except at a very narrow altitude. Overall their performance will exceed anything else in atmosphere. As for vacuum. The reduced mass of the aerospike improves the performance of the overall system as a vacuum optimized nozzle is huge.
@@terranspaceacademy Love your content, nice to have a reply. I'm certainly no expert and perhaps you can make a video on these near future propulsion techs. NASA doesn't say much about it, my weight comment is from Elon but he didn't elaborate much. However there is an excellent free paper available from a team investigating thrust vectoring in altitude compensating rockets titled "Evaluation of the performance potential of aerodynamically thrust vectored aerospike nozzles". The Primary advantage from an aerospike comes from the low altitude efficiency, and that's why it seems like an odd choice for a upper stage vehicle like the Black Star. Aerospike engines don't actually do so well at altitude, they end up offering a limited expansion ratio. "Expansion ratio is limited by the ratio of the chamber area at the throat to the throat area... Ensuring a constant throat of some millimeters on rocket engines with diameters of some meters still re-mains difficult today. The culmination of the toroidal aerospike engine development has been done by Rocketdyne in the late 1960s with the J-2T-250k. This 1.1MN aerospike is touching the geometrical and manufacturing limits with an annular combustion chamber. This engine has partial internal expansion in order to reduce the turning angle, a moderate expansion area ratio of 74.1." for comparison the RL-10, the most efficient vacuum engine I am aware of has an expansion ratio of 280:1 (Depends of the nozzle really). If we consider an ISP comparison of HydroLox engines that have flown or at least made it to the test stand we can observe the following. The RL-10B can achieve 465s ISP though has the advantage of the expander cycle. The J2-S which was contemporary with the XRS-2200 and formed the design base for its powerhead (Combustion tap off cycle) achieved 463s ISP on the stand. The XRS-2200 (Linear aerospike) achieved a maximum ISP of 436 in vacuum according to the NASA report. Now I get conflicting information saying the XRS-2200 was actually a Gas generator cycle, which is obviously an inferior cycle, the J2 GG cycle ran 421s ISP and the J2-X GG cycle 448. So it's not simple and I would be interested to know more, but it does not seem Aerospike engines, at least in the flesh not on paper, can out perform vacuum optimised Bell rockets or that it is at least not a the most important factor.
@@terranspaceacademy haha, having gone through the channel a bit more I can see you have made videos about these things that I shall now watch. So you talked about a modern 3D printed aerospike engine. So as a first stage the advantages are obvious to me, but what is the advantage as a vacuum engine? Are you saying an RL10 like engine configured as an aerospike would have a higher ISP or is it the lower weight where the advantage is? And why is it that historical aerospikes have not had exceptional vacuum ISP?
@@greybuckleton An RL 10 aerospike would be the ultimate engine. :-)
I stopped the video at 30 seconds.
I'm hard of hearing and can't follow movies in theaters so I have to wait for the home release so I can wear headphones and turn on subtitles. Even then I miss some things and have to rewind occasionally.
So when you started talking about a movie I'm waiting on and revealed a detail that I didn't know about I 'noped' right out. I'll finish watching this in a few months after I've seen the movie.
Enjoy the movie and humble apologies! The scene was from one of the trailers.
All hail the algorithm
Its wonders to behold!
Topic suggestion: can you do a video that includes Undefined Technologies in air ion drive?
We did this one...
ruclips.net/video/pBrP-tMnruk/видео.html
I am confused! Are you saying the XB-70 was flying in 1998? That seems unlikely? You referred to an article in Aviation Week. Can provide the issue and date for this article?
No... If anything was flying it would have been the MR-3 but most likely the witness was mistaken. Still... That's a pretty distinctive plane. Hard to confuse with anything else.
Only two XB-70s were built and one crashed. The other one has been at the AF Museum at Dayton, Oh for decades. It was not flightworthy in 1998.
MR-3 variant.
wasn't even up in 1978...I dunno what's that about
Do you think the Xcor Lync Spaceplane concept can be picked up/licensed to a new company now there is much more funding flowing in to commercial space?
Absolutely.
Your turbofan is rotating backwards.
I was backing into the hanger :-)
@@terranspaceacademy HAH!
I, as one, also think it provokes a lot of new thinking. We have to get out of the rut of old ways of thinking about combustion and how to heat the gas We are using to propell our ship, and I'm not thinking of nuclear either!! There are other ways of heating a gas and using it to propell a ship threw space. Come on people get your minds to working on this problem!!! Michael said that, bye for now my friends. (PS - lazers for heating, and magnetic fields for compression and direction of the plasma) think people!!!!
Thank you Michael! Those are great ideas but we need the power :-) Lasers are only 20% efficient so we need a megawatt of power to get 200kW of laser. We still need fusion ;-)
I thought the Xb70 never flew again since it crashed in the 1960s
One did, but there were two prototypes. The other is still in _The National Museum of the US Air Force_ in Dayton Ohio, housed inoperable in a hanger full of other aircraft. This video is nonsense from that perspective. No XB70 has flown since 1969, and the remaining one on display would take years of restoration to make it flight worthy. On top of that, it really wouldn't make sense to use it for this particular purpose. Strapping a parasite aircraft underneath it like that would almost certainly render it incapable of reaching supersonic speeds, considering the antiquated General Electric J93-GE-3 engines with which it was fitted and the very specific aerodynamics of its airframe. Remember we have nearly 60 years of engine development since that thing was designed.
It would not have been an XB-70 that was seen. It is more likely that the airplane observed was the MR-3. The MR-3 was a modified XB-70. Something flew with that size and capability according to the government's own records. I suppose it is possible that all of the declassified documents regarding the aircraft and spacecraft and the flight itself, including one test article making it to orbit, are all made up... but we don't think so. Anything with that general shape would have been confused with an XB-70 as it was quite unique. And finding footage of a still classified airplane is tough so we used the XB-70 footage to illustrate the MR-3.
Indeed... that would have been better.
@@terranspaceacademy I'm super dubious about that particular aircraft. Could it exist? Sure. Does it exist? I see no real evidence for it.
That said, _Boom Supersonic_ has a technology demonstrator that has the same basic form factor as the XB-70. (Their XB-1) It may be flying, but it isn't carrying anything externally. It's only 68 feet long with a 17 foot wingspan, so about the size of an Air Force F-104 Starfighter.
Isn’t the given density of air to low? I remember it as 1,2-1,3 kg/m3. Just a minor detail in the video.
We have about the same number you do. 1.225kg/m^3 is what I recall but I'll double check. At 30km it's much less.
@@terranspaceacademy in the video you give it as 1,125 kg/m3 at sea level. 12:01
Only HOTOL would fit the bill for any reusable space flight
Why David? I'll look into it more but how is it better than Skylon? Or even Star Raker?
@@terranspaceacademy unfortunately the Americans tried to bankrupt BAE systems and when the UK government bought it they had to drop it.
HOTOL was automated and cooled it's own oxygen to liquid from horizontal take off.
Oh and it was going to be rather large.
The other copies of HOTOL are smaller I think.
It's been a while as I was a kid at school at the time..
What bankrupted BAE was project greenglow and that's where the tic tacs come from which is why the British government bought BAE systems to keep it secret-ish .
Uh...the turbine in your animation is spinning in the wrong direction.
Airbreaking from a high speed run :-) Had I noticed it in time I could have reversed the video...
@@terranspaceacademy Airbreaking! Right. ;-)
Your rotor in the animation is rotating backward
That's an optical illusion from delayed oculomotor tracking...
or the illustrator got it wrong. I'm going with illusion :-)
In other words, SSTO is an economic non-starter. And if it doesn't make economic sense, it doesn't make any sense.
Not necessarily. It just has to be very big.
Yeah, sadly SSTO's can't really compete with multi-staged designs. Horizontal-takeoff spaceplanes (perhaps with the first stage being a carrier aircraft and the second stage a rocket-propelled spaceplane with reusable sideboosters) do make a lot of sense though.
@@terranspaceacademy Perhaps, but is 'very big' also 'very economic?' There are numerous examples suggesting a size limit in the cruel calculus of spaceflight.
@@g.f.martianshipyards9328 Up to a certain size limit, GF, this configuration could be technically and economically viable.
@@averystablegenius Yes indeed, the carrier aircraft is the biggest constraint. Stratolaunchs Roc can manage to lift 249 tons, which is enough for a decently sized spaceplane with boosters. I'm not saying that this would get rid of rockets (especially when you're talking about very small or very large payloads) but it would be a sensible addition to currently existing launch options.
The movie Maverick sucked.
It was the same kind of movie and soundtrack as Top Gun, just from a different perspective.
This movie should go down as the worst movie in 2022.
The White Knight from Mojave, CA is a joke and so are Burt and Dick Rutan. I know these two pretty well.
We had a hanger at Mojave Airport.
I spent the 80's and the early 90's in Mojave because my biological father worked at Edwards Air Force Base and Groom Lake within Area 51.
My whole life has been under the watchful eye of the government.
Most of the aircraft coming out today were top secret programs in the 80's and 90's.
The things I could about the things I've seen.
When he reached Mach 3.8. He said he looked down to notice his speed and had to slow down before he damaged the engine's.
Also remember, the A-12 flew faster than the SR-71.
Also remember the fast aircraft to fly, the X-15. There's a lot of technology that was learned from this aircraft.
I'm afraid the theater receipts do not agree Krystal :-) but in all fairness... we are COVID starved for movies!
@@terranspaceacademy
You can be afraid all you want. Just goes to show how stupid the education system has made these kids.
They wouldn't know a good movie if it hit them in the head.
Stupidity is the new smart.