A Beijing-headquartered aerospace firm has carried out a successful test flight of a commercial aircraft twice as fast as supersonic legend, Concorde.
Space Transportation, or Lingkong Tianxing Technology, founded in 2018, specialises in hypersonic solutions and rockets. Its latest announcement confirms that, following prototype testing of its Yunxing plane, the aircraft’s all-composite structure has stood up to the exercise’s extreme conditions. As well as its robustness, the test included aerodynamics, avionics, control systems, and thermal dynamics.
Making space travel affordable?
The plane, which is designed to be able to take-off and land vertically to altitudes of 65,600 feet (20,000 metres), can travel at speeds of Mach 4 (approximately 5000 kilometres per hour), Space Transportation claims, making it capable of flying Beijing to New York in around two hours.
More tests are set to take place before the end of November, including of the plane’s engine technology. What’s more, a full-sized supersonic aircraft is in the pipeline for first take-off in 2027, according to reports by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The company has its sights set on the “affordable space tourism market” and has ambitions to bring the cost of a ticket to space down from nearly half a million US dollars to less than $100,000.
The “hypersonic economy”
With cruising rates more than four times the speed of sound, the Yunxing’s development could mean that so-called “sonic booms” become a more regular occurrence again in our skies. The last time a commercial aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier caused plane enthusiasts to lift their gaze skywards was over twenty years ago in 2003, when the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde, completed its swansong from London to Bristol in the UK.
But with hundreds of tech unicorns in the “low altitude” eVTOL economy and the “hypersonic economy” vying for investors, the Chinese are not the only ones knocking on the sound barrier again though. Elon Musk has expressed curiosity about the effect flying so high could have in an eVOTL. “The higher you go, the faster you will go for the same amount of energy,” the billionaire has explained. “And at a certain altitude you can go supersonic with less energy-per-mile – quite a lot less energy per mile – than aircraft at 35,000 feet.”
Although Musk has made noises about entering the fray, US-start-up Venus Aerospace has beaten him to it and is aiming for Mach 6 with a new jet it says will “make the hypersonic economy a reality.”
