Goings-On Over Our Heads

The big news this week is the Air Force's unmanned scramjet that broke the record for hypersonic flight. This is not to say that this broke the airspeed record, as NASA's space shuttle has pretty much had that record under wraps for quite some time (during atmospheric reentry). However, it did reach a speed of Mach 6, and was able to maintain hypersonic speeds for an extended period of time. The Boeing X-51A Waverider scramjet is a wingless unmanned aircraft that was designed for sustained hypersonic flight testing by the Air Force. Wednesday's hypersonic trip was the Waverider's first free flight, wherein it was launched from under the wing of a B-52 and sustained hypersonic flight for several minutes. The vehicle essentially looks like an over-sized ballistic missile and so while I think the X-51A's flight is pretty cool, it seems to be missing the grandeur of the record setting flights of, say, the X-1A by Chuck Yeager and other manned flights in winged, supersonic death machines.

Despite my so-so interest in this story, I wandered over to the Popular Science website to read more about it, where I found that they had posted a PopSci photo gallery looking back at a century of aviation in honor of the scramjet's test flight, which I thought was pretty interesting. And then I noticed that they were featuring a video titled 'World's biggest airship inflated for the first time.' I had to see it, and sure enough, it was an awesome spectacle indeed. The video is high-res so I recommend watching it on as big a screen as you can possibly get your hands on to enhance the whole 'biggest airship being inflated' experience. The ship that is being inflated in the video is E-Green Technologies' Bullet 580 airship. Once inflated, the ship is 235 feet long and 60 feet wide and is capable of carrying small loads of cargo to an altitude of 20,000 feet, or larger loads of cargo (up to 15,000 lbs) to a lower altitude of around 2,000 feet. What's really astounding about this vehicle is its design. The outer hull is made from thin-layer Kevlar, making it both extremely light weight as well as very strong. In fact, the CEO of E-Green told Discovery News that if there was some sort of accident and the airship had to make a hard landing, it would just "kind of bounce," which makes sense considering there's no rigid frame to speak of to damage. The thing really is a gigantic balloon. Along with the design of the hull, the layout of the ship is also worth noting. For instance, the cargo bay is actually inside the structure, and is filled with air. Helium-filled ballasts surround the cargo area and these ballasts provide the lift required for flight.

In summation, there's some pretty exciting stuff going on up in the sky these days; what with scramjets flying around at Mach 6 and giant airships on the loose. But the X-51A is a far cry from the dangerous manned supersonic craft of the late 40s and 50s, and the Bullet 580 is certainly a much different creature than the zeppelin airships of the pre-Hindenburg disaster days.