How awesome would it be to travel across the globe in less than three hours?
The Concord was a plane (now discontinued) which flew at speeds up to Mach 2 (that’s twice the speed of sound, which is about 700 miles per hour), and the SR-71 Blackbird flies at approximately Mach 3.
According to Fast Company, NASA is looking to research hypersonic propulsion, pushing planes and spacecraft from around Mach 5 to Mach 20. The United States Air Force is also researching hypersonic transport for use with aircraft and troop delivery.
The first test of the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 (HTV-2) by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) was Nov. 1. The vehicle was built by Lockheed Martin Corp. The Santa Maria Times reported that the HTV-2 was launched in a Minotaur 4 rocket, and designed to fly (or glide technically) at around Mach 20. Unfortunately, the ship crashed into the Pacific Ocean after only a few tests were done.
So far, this technology is still in its infant stages, but I see a lot of benefits. On the commercial side, we get superfast travel anywhere in the world and eventually into space. For the military, they can respond within hours to anything, anywhere on the planet as well as numerous other benefits which the military has been rather tight-lipped about, according to Popular Science.
On an even longer termed plan, NASA hopes to use hypersonic spacecraft to travel out of Eart’sh atmosphere, to Mars (or somewhere else) and reenter the atmosphere to land, Fast Company noted. This would be an incredible opportunity to be able to travel out of the atmosphere to space stations, planets, moons, etc. And it should be happening within our lifetimes!
Sure, a lot of other things didn’t pan out (such as flying cars, robots and so on), but the theory is there. Hell, we can hope can’t we? After all, wouldn’t it be a pretty cool opportunity to get flown out to Mars to work on a project for a few months? I know I would volunteer.
Would you?
David Dynes is a computer engineering freshman and the Mustang Daily technology columnist.