By Jeff Hampton
A futuristic type of aircraft that will take astronauts to space is being designed with the help of Kiwi scientists from Canterbury University.
NASA wants to replace its space shuttles with a hypersonic aircraft that can fly at speeds of up to 5,000 km/h and a vital part of the project is to make sure it doesn't overheat.
It's the future of space flights; an aircraft shuttling astronauts at almost unthinkable speeds – a vital part of it designed in New Zealand.
Associate professor Susan Krumdieck is part of the team helping design the heatshield for an aircraft that'll carry astronauts to an orbiting space station.
“They want to have a vehicle that can actually take off and fly to space but it's got to go real fast – mach 10 or something – and going that fast it's going to get really hot, so we need real high temperature materials and real strong materials that can handle this,” Ms Krumdieck says.
The hypersonic aircraft to be used by NASA will look similar to the B2 Stealth Bomber.
It'll be powered by a revolutionary scramjet engine which has few moving parts and will be made from woven material, a composite of silicon and carbide.
“They're actually going to weave this thing; it's going to be knitted, blown up into shape and impregnated with a real hard ceramic material,” Ms Krumdieck says.
The heatshield is a crucial part of the aircraft; failure can mean disintegration like the shuttle Columbia back in 2003.
Ms Krumdieck is developing a thin film of alumina that'll go on the outside of the heat shield ceramics; protection so it can handle temperatures of more than 1500 degrees.
“We need a thermal coating on the outside – like the heat shields on the space shuttle – but it can't be big heavy tiles this time, it has to be a thin layer of ceramics that can handle the very high heat.”
The hypersonic aircraft will take over from space shuttles like Atlantis which this week returned to earth for the last time; ending 25 years service of shuttling astronauts.
Atlantis has carried 189 astronauts and visited the international space station 11 times, but its next stop will be an American Museum.
Future space travel will be hypersonic in an aircraft with a New Zealand connection.
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