Airbus appears to be developing a hypersonic jet that would fly from London to New York in just one hour. For comparison, the Concorde needed three and a half hours to travel the same distance, and regular commercial flights need seven to eight hours for the trip. The hypersonic plane just take three hours to get you from San Francisco to Paris or from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Businessinsider.com says the new Airbus jet, described in a recently discovered patent application, would reach speeds as high as Mach 4.5, or four and a half times the speed of sound. Comparatively, the Concorde reached top speeds of Mach 2 in its glory days.
It would use a variety of engines that would serve different purposes, and power would be provided by various forms of hydrogen stored aboard.
Two turbojets under the fuselage and a rocket motor in the rear would be used during takeoff. The Airbus would lift off the runway vertically like the Space Shuttle, and the turbojets would be shut down and retracted into the belly of the plane right before it reached the speed of sound.
The rocket motor would then be used to climb to a cruising altitude of more than 100,000 feet. Then that engine would be shut down and retracted into the fuselage, and the ramjets on the wings would push the Airbus to a top speed of Mach 4.5.
The bad news is that the hypersonic jet might be extremely expensive. Airbus says the aircraft can be used for both military and commercial applications. In the latter version, the airplane would have enough room for just 20 passengers.
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Facebook has been awarded a patent that could help filter spam emails and offensive content, improve searches and, according to thenextweb.com, allow lenders to use your social habits to determine a credit approval. Under the process described, if you apply for a loan, your lender could potentially check out the credit rating of your Facebook friends. The average credit rating of your friends collectively needs to be at least a minimum credit score for your loan to be approved. Do you know your friends’ credit scores? Yeah, I don’t either. Scary stuff!
Amazon is now live with dedicated apps on both Android and iOS for Cloud Drive. According to techcrunch.com, the Amazon answer to Dropbox, Google Drive, and the rest just got the iOS app over the weekend. The Android app was out in June. Amazon has done this a bit under the radar, with no formal announcements. The mobile versions complement the desktop versions already available, and are aimed at productivity…where previously Amazon had focused more on saving your pictures and music. Amazon’s Unlimited Everything plan lets you store everything in its cloud for just $60 per year. Its Unlimited Photos service is even cheaper at $11.99 per year. Services like Google Drive and Dropbox are much pricier when you start getting up into the terabytes of storage space. Plus, Dropbox individual accounts are capped at 1 TB.
Over all of recorded history-for better or worse- a lot of tech innovation has come from military wants or needs. Here’s a project that could produced amazing results eventually for civilian use if it comes to fruition. The Department of Defense is working to develop a hypersonic jet that could fly anywhere in the world in 4 hours. Military.com says it would fly at Mach 5. The Concorde only flew slightly above Mach 2! Air Force Chief Scientist Mika Endsley hopes a joint project between the Air Force and DoD will have the blazing fast plane airborne before 2023!
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