NASA is looking for a way to get into space without having to use those pesky, bulky rockets. That means hypersonic travel, which was added to NASA’s Aeronautics 2010 proposal solicitation yesterday. The type of craft that NASA's hoping for would be able to fly at five times the speed of sound--fast enough to make the jaunt from New York to Sydney in two and a half hours. We've seen some exciting hypersonic concepts before, as well as an unfortunate failure from DARPA, but with NASA money behind the research, extraterrestrial hypersonic flight could really get somewhere.

Allocating $5 million a year for the next three years, the Hypersonics Project is mainly interested in “airbreathing access to space” and “entry, descent and landing of high-mass vehicles entering into planetary atmospheres.” Crafts of this nature would be able to fly through the atmosphere the way conventional aircrafts do--imagine a turbo-charged Concorde jet--and descend and land safely on Mars’ surface. NASA is also pushing for these crafts to be reusable.

 

Read Full Story