>Why does the U.S. need 3 different hypersonic aircraft projects?
Because it's unironically super fricking hard and nobody knows for sure what will end up working. That's the nature of blue sky research. Simultaneously a decision has been made that it's important to have something too though. Which leads to
>This way we can pick which one is best rather than be trapped with one approach that turned out to be crap once you get into the nuts and bolts.
Looking back through history, many of the very best US aircraft have been the result of a multistage process starting with a bunch of competing designs before picking the final for mass production. Not all of them even make it to the finals either. Much cheaper to do all that early.
>Funding multipul companies to do R&D is about the most expensive thing you can do but it gets results.
lol wut? It's literally the fricking opposite. R&D is very cheap vs production anon, or trying to fix stuff later. This is true for any big capital project at all be it rockets, aircraft, ships, hell bridges or power plants or whatever.
F-22 was $3.2B in R&D, YF-23 was $2.3B in R&D this gives us $5.5B in R&D to pick the best of the two.
Unit cost was ~$125m for a total production cost of $23.3B meaning ~1.5th of total spending was on R&D.
I'm not complaining about that, just pointing out R&D is very expensive seeing you get no production line and no planes for that money,
Anon, the original goal of the ATF program was 750 aircraft, the 195 we ended up doing. Normally the point is that R&D is amortized across lots of planes, cutting aircraft counts that dramatically is not the rule in procurement programs and naturally means the cost per unit goes up. F-35, or Gerald Ford class for that matter are better examples.
But even there you're using really historical obsolete numbers. Total program cost to date when production ended in 2011 was more like $67 billion, with a little over half being procurement. But procurement is itself only a small part of lifetime costs. F-22 is $40k/flight hour. The ongoing necessary upgrade programs since end of production have been billions more. Just a few months ago the AF said it'd be another $9 billion to keep the F-22 "credible" through the rest of this decade.
The original YF-22/YF-23 portion of the program (1985-1991) was absolutely minuscule compared to going from YF-22 selection in 1991 to where we are now, even with massive unit cuts. And since the base airframe ultimately defines the envelope of what can be done even in that unusually bad scenario still well worth it.
dont these companies in the us fund the rnd themselves? with the hope that they get the contract for the big money? or are they usually funded by the miltary/government
Government funded normally in these situations because it's a government request and companies would be banned from selling it to anyone else. Government wants a specific military product with no civilian market and that might not even work at all, this sort of stuff pushes the absolute limits of material science, so they pay for it.
Conversely there is stuff that's COTS or privately funded with government as a simple customer. Government doesn't pay tech companies for their R&D costs, it buys their stuff and pays for any special contracts/customization it wants. Or for another example, isn't paying SpaceX for R&D on Starship either, they are paying regular rates for service, and paying for a specific custom version (the lunar Starship, which won't ever be able to come back) if it works. Same with CC, Boeing has to eat Starliner delays out of its own pocket because it's not a cost-plus contract.
There is lobbying and politics involved of course, but in general "cost-plus" is best for really speculative stuff that won't have any other customers and thus no company would ever bother to develop on its own, and fixed price for everything else.
The AIM-9 sidewinder, for example. It was actually a competitor to the AIM-7 Sparrow but the Sparrow was a piece of crap and took 2 more years before it could be deployed.
My favorite part is they kept making the requirements for the AIM-9 higher to try and kill it and it kept exceeding requirements.
It shits me that politics leads to people trying to kill good weapons systems but it's always nice when they fail.
My favorite part was the 2nd Taiwan Strait Crisis. F-86 Sabers outnumbered by over 3 to 1 by MiG-15s and -17s and they Still Exchange 15 to 1 in their favor. All thanks to some...Black Magic.
How else are we going to defend gay rights in Botswana? How else are we going to force Europe to take in infinite brown people? You need military power to impose your will on other countries. Our air force of trannies and hispanics are going to blow racist nationalists out of the sky.
do you really think mass producing advanced jet aircraft is in any way easier then making whats essentially cannons on tracks with good computers and an autoloader?
Because the design phase is the most profitable part of weapons procurement. Building production lines to churn out 1000 of these per day is gay though.
>Such technology exists
Not really. Skylon frankly looks like yet another iteration of the same old scam. The math just doesn't work, remember it's not just about doing it but doing it in a USEFUL way. Starship when optimized a bit should be capable of "SSTO" too on paper, but only while carrying like, 250kg of cargo instead of 100000-150000 kg, and then it wouldn't be able to come back down without refueling. Maybe they'll even do it someday just for the feather in Guiness "look we did the first SSTO spacecraft!!" but then never again.
Air breathing engines and wings represent enormous amounts of dry mass fraction that are then completely useless for most of the trip and don't yield much delta-v either. I won't say it's perfectly impossible there could ever be military applications that'd make it worth it but it's genuinely hard to imagine vs other approaches.
SSTO is not feasibly useful with chemical power sources so no, and anyway it doesn't really make any sense in this application at all, we already have satellites. The point of an aircraft is to have an external working fluid which allows avoiding the rocket equation and conducting maneuvers that are impossibly expensive for sats.
Yeah, I think the only application of a space plane could be to rapidly deploy backup satellites in the event that some get taken out. For civilian use maybe it could be feasible to get a couple people up to a space station and take a couple back down.
>Yeah, I think the only application of a space plane could be to rapidly deploy backup satellites in the event that some get taken out.
You can do that more rapidly with plain old normal rockets though. Falcon 9 already does that, Starship will do so even more, and way way way cheaper.
>For civilian use maybe it could be feasible to get a couple people up to a space station and take a couple back down.
But again, why not just use rockets? Space plane doesn't do anything special there except carry far fewer people for far more money if it can even make it at all.
About the best hybrid I can imagine is actually the 100% opposite: stick a plane on a booster with reentry capsule. Have a SR-72 in disposable stealth faring that can go on the end of Super Heavy, use SH to launch on a ballistic path that brings it back into the atmosphere over intended target such that it ends up at speed at 100k feet with 100% full fuel load, that way it can fly around doing surveillance and leave for far long and encounter no air defense on way in. Never gets to orbital velocity at all, SH is recovered. Might even be cheaper/safer then refueling in some cases.
I only think a SSTO space plane would be cool, and maybe the instant-reusability would be a plus. For falcon 9 and similar they must get refurbished and recertified before each flight.
>I only think a SSTO space plane would be cool
I mean, people have thought it would be cool forever of course. It just doesn't work though. >and maybe the instant-reusability would be a plus.
Anon, planes require massive maintenance work, high performance ones even more so. There's a reason F-35 for example is like $30k/flight hour. A space plane doesn't help at all, rocket engines are simpler then jet engines, and some wild hybrid jet/ram/scramjet is going to be even harder on materials. >For falcon 9 and similar they must get refurbished and recertified before each flight.
Well there is nothing similar to F9, it's the only reusable in existence. But Starship is the path forward there: designed for reuse from the start. Methalox eliminates the coking issues of kerolox, steel is much better in terms of modes then carbon, electric ignition means eliminating the TEA/TEB refreshment, min TWR <1 allows more controlled landings, and thousands more. That's the path to high cadence at <$200/kg prices.
End of the day staging is basically required in Earth's gravity well+atmosphere. SSTO could be a thing on other planets though.
No, because precisely as you say it's not an advantage at all 100% reusability is perfectly doable with rockets. The real space plane (or even plane launcher) advantage in theory is ability to use conventional airports and take off nearer to population centers, and without having to worry about down range trajectory for 1000 miles or how close to the equator. Also being potentially much more weather condition resistant, take off in bad weather since the real speed won't be until well above any clouds. So in theory can hit tighter temporal/trajectory windows, and do so from way more places that could never, ever host space port.
But the energy/mass/cost penalties are so fricking gigantic enormous that the small advantages just don't matter.
>in 2030 we'll be shitposting about how darkhorse should've won the bid over sr72 >"it had more sovl" >darkhorse with "kekekekeke" captions >arguments over technical specs that have no bearing on actual use or doctrine "see it's better in this way!!!"
war never changes
You're really ignorant anon. Transsonic, super sonic, and hypersonic have different physics characteristics. You don't need to worry about molecular dissociation and ionization at Mach 2.
Yes, the word has been turned into something of a meme by media shoving lots of concepts together, and to some extent by active propaganda too. When the US fails to do the incredibly stupendously difficult task of a full airbreathing scramjet hypersonic cruise missile, opposing powers have great incentive to try to pretend that ballistic rockets are also "hypersonic missiles" and thus that they're somehow doing something the US can't. But it has a specific physics definition that represents a totally different flight regime.
Why? It's beyond supersonic as a totally different thing. Term is from decades and decades ago. What would you prefer, "megasonic"? That sounds even worse plus confusing since it's an SI prefix. "Ultrasonic" is already taken and refers to something else.
because its propaganda intended to confuse adversaries and make them invest in useless technology, and to make boomers believe that the US is lightyears ahead of China, Russia etc (they are, but in fields that are to esoteric for the average boomer to appreciate, like stealth, drones, radar, material technology etc)
Competition is how you create the best of the best. I can't understand why third worlders don't get this basic concept. I guess if you pay for 3 competing projects you can find your super yachts.
Well, the SR-72/Mayhem isn't really different programs. The one labeled "SR-72" is actually the TM Blackswift concept before refinement to the HTV-3x with 3-D intakes and Turbine Based Combined Cycle (TBCC) propulsion. They got the contract from the Air Force to build it ~2007, and shortly after info was scrubbed about it. Mayhem seems to be similar to it, and may just be an updated version. Darkhorse is going to be a cheap hypersonic test-bed for the DoD powered by a cheap US surplus F100 with a precooler in front of the compressor, and a ramjet where the afterburner is. It's not going to be a speed demon, and will probably cruise at Mach5.5-6 on standard jet fuel. Honestly, we need more. Give some of those smaller firms work to gain experience, and sharpen their skills in hypersonic flight. Would you rather it go to Black folk like the other 65% of the US budget?
Because they can
This way we can pick which one is best rather than be trapped with one approach that turned out to be crap once you get into the nuts and bolts.
>Why does the U.S. need 3 different hypersonic aircraft projects?
Because it's unironically super fricking hard and nobody knows for sure what will end up working. That's the nature of blue sky research. Simultaneously a decision has been made that it's important to have something too though. Which leads to
>This way we can pick which one is best rather than be trapped with one approach that turned out to be crap once you get into the nuts and bolts.
Looking back through history, many of the very best US aircraft have been the result of a multistage process starting with a bunch of competing designs before picking the final for mass production. Not all of them even make it to the finals either. Much cheaper to do all that early.
>Much cheaper to do all that early
Funding multipul companies to do R&D is about the most expensive thing you can do but it gets results.
>Funding multipul companies to do R&D is about the most expensive thing you can do but it gets results.
lol wut? It's literally the fricking opposite. R&D is very cheap vs production anon, or trying to fix stuff later. This is true for any big capital project at all be it rockets, aircraft, ships, hell bridges or power plants or whatever.
F-22 was $3.2B in R&D, YF-23 was $2.3B in R&D this gives us $5.5B in R&D to pick the best of the two.
Unit cost was ~$125m for a total production cost of $23.3B meaning ~1.5th of total spending was on R&D.
I'm not complaining about that, just pointing out R&D is very expensive seeing you get no production line and no planes for that money,
Anon, the original goal of the ATF program was 750 aircraft, the 195 we ended up doing. Normally the point is that R&D is amortized across lots of planes, cutting aircraft counts that dramatically is not the rule in procurement programs and naturally means the cost per unit goes up. F-35, or Gerald Ford class for that matter are better examples.
But even there you're using really historical obsolete numbers. Total program cost to date when production ended in 2011 was more like $67 billion, with a little over half being procurement. But procurement is itself only a small part of lifetime costs. F-22 is $40k/flight hour. The ongoing necessary upgrade programs since end of production have been billions more. Just a few months ago the AF said it'd be another $9 billion to keep the F-22 "credible" through the rest of this decade.
The original YF-22/YF-23 portion of the program (1985-1991) was absolutely minuscule compared to going from YF-22 selection in 1991 to where we are now, even with massive unit cuts. And since the base airframe ultimately defines the envelope of what can be done even in that unusually bad scenario still well worth it.
>no planes for that money
You are missing the point. You get better planes for less money. In the end the R&D pays for itself.
dont these companies in the us fund the rnd themselves? with the hope that they get the contract for the big money? or are they usually funded by the miltary/government
Government funded normally in these situations because it's a government request and companies would be banned from selling it to anyone else. Government wants a specific military product with no civilian market and that might not even work at all, this sort of stuff pushes the absolute limits of material science, so they pay for it.
Conversely there is stuff that's COTS or privately funded with government as a simple customer. Government doesn't pay tech companies for their R&D costs, it buys their stuff and pays for any special contracts/customization it wants. Or for another example, isn't paying SpaceX for R&D on Starship either, they are paying regular rates for service, and paying for a specific custom version (the lunar Starship, which won't ever be able to come back) if it works. Same with CC, Boeing has to eat Starliner delays out of its own pocket because it's not a cost-plus contract.
There is lobbying and politics involved of course, but in general "cost-plus" is best for really speculative stuff that won't have any other customers and thus no company would ever bother to develop on its own, and fixed price for everything else.
The AIM-9 sidewinder, for example. It was actually a competitor to the AIM-7 Sparrow but the Sparrow was a piece of crap and took 2 more years before it could be deployed.
My favorite part is they kept making the requirements for the AIM-9 higher to try and kill it and it kept exceeding requirements.
It shits me that politics leads to people trying to kill good weapons systems but it's always nice when they fail.
My favorite part was the 2nd Taiwan Strait Crisis. F-86 Sabers outnumbered by over 3 to 1 by MiG-15s and -17s and they Still Exchange 15 to 1 in their favor. All thanks to some...Black Magic.
How else are we going to defend gay rights in Botswana? How else are we going to force Europe to take in infinite brown people? You need military power to impose your will on other countries. Our air force of trannies and hispanics are going to blow racist nationalists out of the sky.
Your shilling would be more convincing if you weren't also bleating about ebil nazis, rajesh.
Gay marriage is non-negotiable.
botswana is actually stable and fairly prosperous tho
obvious pentagon false flag shill to get liberals to approve more budget increases
based
It's cope for not being able to mass produce artillery.
do you really think mass producing advanced jet aircraft is in any way easier then making whats essentially cannons on tracks with good computers and an autoloader?
I think actually I know you don't know what mass producing means
To flex on subhuman foreigners.
Because the design phase is the most profitable part of weapons procurement. Building production lines to churn out 1000 of these per day is gay though.
Wouldn't that be cool if the SR-72 was a true space plane requiring no booster stages? Doubt that's really possible though.
Such technology exists, but it's not publicly proven yet. See Skylon.
>Such technology exists
Not really. Skylon frankly looks like yet another iteration of the same old scam. The math just doesn't work, remember it's not just about doing it but doing it in a USEFUL way. Starship when optimized a bit should be capable of "SSTO" too on paper, but only while carrying like, 250kg of cargo instead of 100000-150000 kg, and then it wouldn't be able to come back down without refueling. Maybe they'll even do it someday just for the feather in Guiness "look we did the first SSTO spacecraft!!" but then never again.
Air breathing engines and wings represent enormous amounts of dry mass fraction that are then completely useless for most of the trip and don't yield much delta-v either. I won't say it's perfectly impossible there could ever be military applications that'd make it worth it but it's genuinely hard to imagine vs other approaches.
SSTO is not feasibly useful with chemical power sources so no, and anyway it doesn't really make any sense in this application at all, we already have satellites. The point of an aircraft is to have an external working fluid which allows avoiding the rocket equation and conducting maneuvers that are impossibly expensive for sats.
Yeah, I think the only application of a space plane could be to rapidly deploy backup satellites in the event that some get taken out. For civilian use maybe it could be feasible to get a couple people up to a space station and take a couple back down.
>Yeah, I think the only application of a space plane could be to rapidly deploy backup satellites in the event that some get taken out.
You can do that more rapidly with plain old normal rockets though. Falcon 9 already does that, Starship will do so even more, and way way way cheaper.
>For civilian use maybe it could be feasible to get a couple people up to a space station and take a couple back down.
But again, why not just use rockets? Space plane doesn't do anything special there except carry far fewer people for far more money if it can even make it at all.
About the best hybrid I can imagine is actually the 100% opposite: stick a plane on a booster with reentry capsule. Have a SR-72 in disposable stealth faring that can go on the end of Super Heavy, use SH to launch on a ballistic path that brings it back into the atmosphere over intended target such that it ends up at speed at 100k feet with 100% full fuel load, that way it can fly around doing surveillance and leave for far long and encounter no air defense on way in. Never gets to orbital velocity at all, SH is recovered. Might even be cheaper/safer then refueling in some cases.
I only think a SSTO space plane would be cool, and maybe the instant-reusability would be a plus. For falcon 9 and similar they must get refurbished and recertified before each flight.
>I only think a SSTO space plane would be cool
I mean, people have thought it would be cool forever of course. It just doesn't work though.
>and maybe the instant-reusability would be a plus.
Anon, planes require massive maintenance work, high performance ones even more so. There's a reason F-35 for example is like $30k/flight hour. A space plane doesn't help at all, rocket engines are simpler then jet engines, and some wild hybrid jet/ram/scramjet is going to be even harder on materials.
>For falcon 9 and similar they must get refurbished and recertified before each flight.
Well there is nothing similar to F9, it's the only reusable in existence. But Starship is the path forward there: designed for reuse from the start. Methalox eliminates the coking issues of kerolox, steel is much better in terms of modes then carbon, electric ignition means eliminating the TEA/TEB refreshment, min TWR <1 allows more controlled landings, and thousands more. That's the path to high cadence at <$200/kg prices.
End of the day staging is basically required in Earth's gravity well+atmosphere. SSTO could be a thing on other planets though.
A spaceplane's only advantage over rockets would be it's 100% reusabiliy. But starship is doing just that with a ridiculous cargo capacity.
No, because precisely as you say it's not an advantage at all 100% reusability is perfectly doable with rockets. The real space plane (or even plane launcher) advantage in theory is ability to use conventional airports and take off nearer to population centers, and without having to worry about down range trajectory for 1000 miles or how close to the equator. Also being potentially much more weather condition resistant, take off in bad weather since the real speed won't be until well above any clouds. So in theory can hit tighter temporal/trajectory windows, and do so from way more places that could never, ever host space port.
But the energy/mass/cost penalties are so fricking gigantic enormous that the small advantages just don't matter.
Same reason there were multiple bids for the f22 project moron
>in 2030 we'll be shitposting about how darkhorse should've won the bid over sr72
>"it had more sovl"
>darkhorse with "kekekekeke" captions
>arguments over technical specs that have no bearing on actual use or doctrine "see it's better in this way!!!"
war never changes
Hypersonic is such a dumb word, i hate it. Super-sonic means above sound, in other words faster than sound. Hypersonic doesn't mean shit
moron
You're really ignorant anon. Transsonic, super sonic, and hypersonic have different physics characteristics. You don't need to worry about molecular dissociation and ionization at Mach 2.
Yes, the word has been turned into something of a meme by media shoving lots of concepts together, and to some extent by active propaganda too. When the US fails to do the incredibly stupendously difficult task of a full airbreathing scramjet hypersonic cruise missile, opposing powers have great incentive to try to pretend that ballistic rockets are also "hypersonic missiles" and thus that they're somehow doing something the US can't. But it has a specific physics definition that represents a totally different flight regime.
I appreciate that there's a definite difference, I'm saying the TERM is stupid. It's a bad name for it. Simple as
Why? It's beyond supersonic as a totally different thing. Term is from decades and decades ago. What would you prefer, "megasonic"? That sounds even worse plus confusing since it's an SI prefix. "Ultrasonic" is already taken and refers to something else.
Ace combat 3: Electrosphere won
because its propaganda intended to confuse adversaries and make them invest in useless technology, and to make boomers believe that the US is lightyears ahead of China, Russia etc (they are, but in fields that are to esoteric for the average boomer to appreciate, like stealth, drones, radar, material technology etc)
Competition is how you create the best of the best. I can't understand why third worlders don't get this basic concept. I guess if you pay for 3 competing projects you can find your super yachts.
to rob the US taxpayer at triple the pace
Well, the SR-72/Mayhem isn't really different programs. The one labeled "SR-72" is actually the TM Blackswift concept before refinement to the HTV-3x with 3-D intakes and Turbine Based Combined Cycle (TBCC) propulsion. They got the contract from the Air Force to build it ~2007, and shortly after info was scrubbed about it. Mayhem seems to be similar to it, and may just be an updated version. Darkhorse is going to be a cheap hypersonic test-bed for the DoD powered by a cheap US surplus F100 with a precooler in front of the compressor, and a ramjet where the afterburner is. It's not going to be a speed demon, and will probably cruise at Mach5.5-6 on standard jet fuel. Honestly, we need more. Give some of those smaller firms work to gain experience, and sharpen their skills in hypersonic flight. Would you rather it go to Black folk like the other 65% of the US budget?
Why does your mom need 27 different dildos?
Because there are two UFO designs regularly visiting, and we need a cover story for them
Two of them are fake for the Chinese to steal and waste their time on.
>need