Schlagwort-Archiv: Supersonic

Hermeus Unveils Supersonic Aircraft

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Hermeus, a company operationalizing hypersonic aircraft, has unveiled its first aircraft — Quarterhorse Mk 1 — which will take flight later this year. Designed, built, and integrated in just seven months, this is the company’s second fully integrated vehicle in the past year, following Quarterhorse Mk 0 which completed its test campaign in November 2023. This rate of iteration represents a new standard of one aircraft per year, which the team has set for the pace of aircraft development.

Quarterhorse Mk 1 is an uncrewed, remotely piloted aircraft powered by a GE J85 engine. Its primary mission is to demonstrate high-speed takeoff and landing – a key enabling capability unique to future hypersonic aircraft on the company’s roadmap. Flight tests will take place at Edwards Air Force Base. This milestone marks the transition from the ‘design and build’ phase to the ‘integrated test’ phase for Mk 1. The coming months will see the vehicle endure a battery of tests across its subsystems, ground station, operations, and human factors to prepare it for flight test later this year. Each aircraft in the Quarterhorse program progressively increases in complexity, building on the learnings of prior builds. This approach manages program risk across multiple vehicles and accelerates the delivery of products and services to Hermeus customers.

Hermeus’ strategic decision to transition to the more capable F100 engine for Quarterhorse Mk 2 accelerates the company’s roadmap to Darkhorse, a multi-mission hypersonic aircraft for defense and national security missions, while simultaneously delivering a compelling intermediate product, the world’s only purpose-built high-Mach drone. Source: ‚Hermeus.com‚.

Nasa Unveils Quiet Supersonic Aircraft X-59

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In the launch event on January 12th, the agency shared plans to test over US cities to see if it’s quiet enough by engaging ‘the people below’. NASA has unveiled a one-of-a-kind quiet supersonic aircraft as part of the US space agency’s mission to make commercial supersonic flight possible. In a ceremony with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, on Friday, NASA revealed the X-59, an experimental aircraft that is expected to fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound – or 925 mph (1’488 km/h).

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The aircraft, which stands 99.7ft (30.4 meters) long and 29.5ft wide, has a thin, tapered nose that comprises nearly a third of the aircraft’s full length – a feature designed to disperse shock waves that would typically surround supersonic aircraft and result in sonic booms. In attempts to further enhance the aircraft’s supersonic capabilities, engineers positioned the cockpit almost halfway down the length and removed the forward-facing windows typically found in other aircraft.

The aircraft also features an engine mounted on top as well as a smooth underside to prevent shock waves from forming behind the aircraft and causing sonic booms. The X-59 is set to take its first flight later this year and then its first quiet supersonic flight, NASA said. The agency added that once test flights are completed, the X-59 will fly over several cities across the US that have yet to be selected and will collect public feedback on the sound it generates. For the last 50 years, commercial supersonic travel over land has been banned in the US because of public concerns over the explosive sonic booms that could be heard from miles away. Source: ‚NASA‚.