Concorde is due to be mothballed this week forever. A lot of English people are very sad about this as they see it as one of the greatest achievements we have ever made. It probably isn’t, but it still is by far the coolest looking paseesnger aircraft in the world.
Anyway, I digress. It seems a total shame to put these planes in a museum, particularly as they still work fine. They just became uneconmical to fly as a passenger service.
It occurred to me that NASA might be able to use one. As far as I remember, Concorde flies higher and faster than any other passenger plane. I seem to remember being told it flies on “the edge of space”. Even though “the edge of space” sounds like a very vague term, if Concorde really flies so high, couldn’t Nasa use if as a launching platform?
They could piggy back smaller aircraft on the back of it in the same way they used to with the Shuttle Enterprise and a 747. I doubt that concorde could cope with a whole shuttle, but what about a modified rocket. If you rip out all the passenger compartment, then it should be able to support a pretty decent payload. It would be high enough to launch a rocket without having a large booster section, and seeing as it would be travelling at over mach 2 when launched, it would be able to use SCRAM jets (SCRAM jets need to be running at a certain speed before you turn them on IIRC, but then provide more thrust than normal engines).
All this, plus much reduced mission costs, and fast turnaround times.
I know that I’m a little ropey on the science involved, but would any of this be feasible?
Your basic plan is certainly feasible. For examle, the Pegasus launch vehicle uses an L-1011 aircraft as a first stage lifter to get to 40K feet. However, tacking anything on the outside of an aircraft can introduce an incredible amount of load on the airframe and change the flight characteristics dramatically. You have to have an aircraft designed for that if you’re going to add any significant payload.
You also have significant problems just launching a vehicle from a moving platform. NASA does piggy-back the shuttle on a 747 for transport, but they don’t launch it from there. I’ve seen some hair-raising video from flight tests of weapon systems where a missle fired from under a wing stayed with the aircraft, rolled outboard around the tip of the wing, back inboard over the wing and bumped the fuselage before spinning off. Some really interesting aerodynamic effects can be created when you separate two vehicles, and if they’re both moving at supersonic speeds you can get shock interactions that can cause vehicle damage just like a collision with a solid body would. None of these issues are insurmountable, but they make it a non-trivial problem.
As you mention, launching from a fast-moving aircraft might have significant advantages if it allowed you to get your vehicle to a speed where a SCRAM jet could operate, but going fast really isn’t that hard. The Concorde doesn’t have any special talent in going fast, it was just unique in being able to go fast with a bunch of civilians on board. If you want to launch a payload, it’s likely to be cheaper and more reliable to use a booster designed for that purpose than to piggy-back on an old airframe that wasn’t designed to carry the load.
It’s a terrific idea, Bakhesh. So much so that it’s been done for the last ten years, ;).
Pegasus is a launch system using this very idea. I think it’s a private company that has the contract. They take a L-1011 and fly a two or three stage rocket up to 40 or 45 thousand feet and light the candle. You enjoy the benefits of being above 80% of the atmosphere at launch and 5 or 6 miles up.
The Pegasus is built and operated by Orbital Science Corporation which is indeed a private company, though I think the Pegasus was developed under a NASA contract. It used to be launched by one of NASA’s B-52 motherships, the same planes used to launch the X-15.
NASA has also used the SR-71 Blackbird for research flights. I don’t think the Concorde offers any new possibilities beyond what they can do with the SR-71 and the Pegasus, certainly not enough to justify the enormous cost. Remember, operating a Concorde not just a matter of out-bidding the Smithsonian and acquiring one aircraft. You need a full staff of qualified technitians, and you need to make sure that spare parts continue to be available.
Another thing - scramjet engines are not practical yet. The current state of the art is the X-43 experimental plane which needs to be pushed to Mach 7 by a Pegasus rocket. There’s no sense in maintaining a Concorde fleet while waiting for the scramjet technology to mature.
I thought it would actually work out less to take an existing, tried and tested aircraft and modify it, rather than trying to develope a new aircraft from scratch.
Guess I’m just viewing it all too simplistically.
Seems a shame that they can’t find a decent reason to keep concorde around.
I would imagine NASA could get ahold of any number of ex USAF planes faster and/or able to carry more than Concorde much easier/cheaper.
The way I see it, the Concorde is too beautiful to be turned into a research vessel with a bunch of crap stuck to it and a crappy paint job (although NASA has some nice schemes).
I think the ones that are left should be mounted on pylons or put into museums to show future generations what the high water mark looked like before the wave crested and broke.
The concordes are museum queens now , there is no real economic reason to keep them.
Lockmart and boeing are probably gonna come out with the next gens anyways , and I would rather see the concordes on the ground and being accessilbe to all, rather than 10 k a ticket , i think ?.