Virgin Galactic wants to go faster for the Concorde, Mach 3 instead of Mach 2.
The space company Virgin Galactic announced on Monday a partnership preliminary with the engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce to build an aircraft capable of flying at three times the speed of sound.
Only the Concorde, other supersonic aircraft, was carrying regular passengers in the history of air transport, from 1976 to 2003. Virgin Galactic wants to go faster (Mach 3 instead of Mach 2 (Concorde), but will have to solve the problems that doomed the Concorde, in particular the noise and fuel consumption.
The device was conceived by the Virgin in pictures released Monday is a delta wing that can accommodate between 9 and 19 passengers, at altitudes above 60 000 feet 18, 000 meters, about the double of the planes of line current. It will take off and land runways of the airports existing.
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Virgin Galactic has signed a memorandum of agreement non-binding with Rolls-Royce to develop the reactor in the future aircraft. “The team will also work on the challenges represented by the thermal management, the maintenance, noise, emissions and the economic issues related to flights to high-speed routine,” says Virgin Galactic in a news release.
Agreement with Nasa
The company was until now only on the niche market of flights of space tourism, thanks to a device mid-plane, half-rocket designed to take six passengers at a time to float a few minutes to the border of the space. Test flights have yet to be held, in the United States, prior to the start of the space flight business.
But, publicly traded since last year, it is looking to diversify and has announced in may an agreement with Nasa to develop the technology of “high speed”.
The u.s. space agency is also working for decades in the design of an experimental aircraft supersonic muffler, the X-59, and a first copy is being built by Lockheed Martin in California. The aim is that the sonic boom, the tremendous noise of the explosion caused by the crossing of the sound barrier, either little or no audible from the ground.
