Space Agency Building Mach Plane for 21st Century : NASA Takes Wing With Revolutionary Craft

And we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours.

--Ronald Reagan State of the Union address Feb. 4, 1986 The idea has a nice ring to it: Tokyo in two hours. Zooming over the Earth at 25 times the speed of sound. Crossing the Pacific in an airplane so revolutionary that the space shuttle and the Concorde become old hat.

Third millennium, here we come.

That airplane, or something like it, is taking shape at this and other NASA centers in bits and pieces: a model is assaulted in a wind tunnel by 4,800 m.p.h. blasts in temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero; an electron beam illuminates air flow around a scaled-down plane; a sleek cylinder zips through a water trough 3,000-feet long, sensitive to every nuance of resistance; a photograph captures shock wave and heat patterns in ghostly hues of green, orange, yellow, blue and magenta; the most powerful computer ever built ingests world-class problems and spits out answers; a standard airplane circles over Chesapeake Bay, piloted not from the standard cockpit in front, but from a second, all-electronic one, in its passenger section.

Not as Flashy

The “Little A” in NASA--the aeronautics part of National Aeronautics and Space Administration--is not as flashy as the “Big S” and gets only 7% of the agency’s budget, but its accomplishments brush our lives in thousands of ways.

A poultry plant in Marietta, Ga., is quieter because of NASA aeronautics; water quality in many places is improved because of aeronautics technology; firemen wear better protective clothing.

“We are called the space agency by many, probably including yourself,” Jeremiah F. Creedon, the director for flight systems at the Langley Research Center, tells a visitor, a bit of resignation in his voice. “Many of us here think the A is a large one.”

Langley’s work is divided roughly 60% aeronautics, 40% space, with a hefty dose of military work in both. With other NASA research centers--Ames and Dryden in California and Lewis in Ohio--its business is to develop technology and pass it on, without cost, to aircraft companies. The federal government has played that role from the start of its involvement 70 years ago.

The agency has never built an airplane, but few planes fly today without engines, designs, materials and structures conceived at NASA. “We are doing research that benefits the country,” says Creedon. “It is available to Boeing, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, whoever wants to build transport or high performance aircraft.” No single company alone could afford NASA’s $2-billion investment in wind tunnels.

Call It the X-30

Here at Langley, they don’t talk about the “Orient Express.” It’s either the NASP, the National Aerospace Plane, or better yet the X-30, next in a string of experimental planes that began with Chuck Yeager’s X-1, breaker of the sound barrier.

When President Reagan made his rosy prediction about the Orient Express, a week after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, engineers had already taken years to decide that the X-30 was possible. Reagan’s one-paragraph announcement signaled the start of Phase 2, perfecting the technology, which will last until the summer of 1990, when engineers will take a hard look at where they stand and decide whether to build the X-30. Phase 3, in the mid-’90s, would see the aerospace plane begin flight tests that would finish as the 21st century begins.

That’s the timetable for the largest experimental aircraft project ever undertaken by the United States. It will cost $3.3 billion. Clearly NASA and the Air Force, which is sharing the cost, have something more practical in mind than building one or two prototype planes, merely to prove it can be done.

The military and package-delivery firms such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service are the only ones likely to have use for a plane flying 25 times the speed of sound--fast enough to get into orbit. But the aerospace plane will provide the technology for the somewhat slower but far more useful aircraft of the future.

“There is tremendous potential for all kinds of vehicles operating at high Mach numbers,” says Douglas Dwoyer, manager of hypersonic technology at Langley. “The National Aerospace program is aimed at an experimental aircraft to demonstrate technologies for this family of hypersonic aircraft.”

Orbit Speed Is Mach 25

The speed of sound, which varies with temperature and density of air, is represented by a Mach number. Airplanes that fly below Mach 1 are subsonic; those that fly faster are supersonic. Those that fly more than five times the speed of sound, above Mach 5, are designated hypersonic. To escape the atmosphere into orbit, a plane must achieve Mach 25.

So far the big airplane manufacturers have little interest in building passenger aircraft that fly at Mach 25, no matter what the President said. They do want, for the years 2000 to 2010, a supersonic airplane capable of flying at Mach 2 to Mach 3.5. At Mach 2.7, a trip from Los Angeles to Tokyo would take just under four hours, compared to 12 to 14 hours subsonic. The ideal Mach number is one of the big questions facing the engineers.

The United States researched a supersonic transport, the SST, in the 1960s, but dropped the program in 1970 because of costs. The space shuttle had been designed, the Apollo moon program was winding down and there seemed no need for space missions requiring re-entry with the accompanying hypersonic speeds.

In addition, the price of jet fuel, which had been 10 cents a gallon when research started, jumped to $1.30.

While American interest dropped, the British and French produced the Concorde, a plane capable of twice the speed of sound. But its birth coincided with heightened environmental concerns, and the sonic boom scared people; many governments, including the United States, barred it from flying over land.

‘60s Technology

Moreover, the Concorde was designed with ‘60s technology and carries barely enough fuel to make it across the Atlantic.

“Concorde is restricted to over-water flights under 2,200-miles long, and there aren’t many oceans that small,” says Roy Harris Jr., director of aeronautics at Langley. “I think Concorde is designed too small, it can carry only 100 people and it’s cramped. All our studies say you really want 200 to 250 passengers for an economically viable SST.”

Harris sees a real need for an SST. “If you look at the demographics of air travel, the Pacific Rim is the fastest growing international market,” he says. “It’s growing at a rate twice that of the market between the U.S. and Europe.”