Why Were Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners glowend writes: Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has an article about sub-orbital flight, and why well never see it as a common mode of transportation. Quoting: Yes, we can save some fuel by travelling above the atmosphere and cutting air resistance, but its not a free lunch: you expend energy getting up to altitude and speed, and the fuel burn for going faster rises nonlinearly with speed. Concorde, flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 2.0, burned about the same amount of fuel as a Boeing 747 of similar vintage flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 0.85 ... while carrying less than a quarter as many passengers. Rockets arent a magic technology. Neither are hybrid hypersonic air-breathing gadgets like Reaction Engines Sabre engine. Its going to be a wee bit expensive. Stross also makes a more general proposition thats particularly interesting to me: One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options. Read more of this story at Slashdot. ift.tt/1xM7hae
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:55:24 +0000