Hoping to bridge the gap between airplanes and rocketships, the U.S. military is preparing to test an experimental aircraft that can fly more than six times faster than the speed of sound on ordinary jet fuel.
Officially, it's known as the X-51, but folks like to call it the WaveRider because it stays airborne, in part, with lift generated by the shock waves of its own flight. The design stems from the goal of the program -- to demonstrate an air-breathing, hypersonic, combustion ramjet engine, known as a scramjet.
51 = 3 x 17, of course. More:
"We built a vehicle around an engine," said Joseph Vogel, the X-51 project manager with Boeing, which is building a series of four test planes under a $246.5-million (=17) program managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.
And:
NASA tested the concept in 2004, breaking the record for a jet-powered aircraft with a speed of Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph. But the vehicle, known as X-43 (=17), only flew for a few seconds and its copper-based engine was not designed to survive the flight.
So, what does this have to do with Kirby? Well, Machine Man (who believes it or not ties into the John Lilly memes we've been looking at- more on that later) was originally named X-51 and made his first appearance in 2001: A Space Odyssey...
1 comments:
Jeepers me brain is melting
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