How we will fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in 30 minutes!
NEW RICHMOND, Wisconsin (PNN) - September 23, 2015 - The Wright brothers aren’t the only siblings to push the limits of flight: In 1986, pilot Dick Rutan flew nonstop around the world, spending nine days in the air on a single tank of gas. He made the trip in a plane called Voyager, which his brother Burt designed. Today he’s still at the forefront of aviation, busy building a new hyper-efficient engine and reimagining what aircraft might be.
Burt and Dick Rutan were issued flight plans instead of birth certificates. When they flew Voyager nonstop around the world, they showed that you could build a light, strong plane out of carbon fiber that will last indefinitely. Now they’re at the dawn of learning how to fly into space - in planes. Burt designed SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize. Its successor, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, is on track to send civilians into outer space.
Innovators like Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk of SpaceX can get you and me to space. They can do it more efficiently and reliably than the government. Yes, there are risks involved. They will have problems and challenges, just as people did when the development of airplanes ramped up in the 1920s. But my mom always told me that it’s not a crime to fail; it’s a crime not to try.
With a company called Engineered Propulsion Systems, Dick Rutan is now trying to transform planes’ fuel flexibility and efficiency into something worthy of this century instead of the previous one. Their liquid-cooled cycle compression engines can run on any kind of fuel, from bacon grease to diesel to traditional jet fuel - a change that will revolutionize general aviation. The engines run beautifully smooth, with 35% better efficiency, and they’re incredibly quiet.
Disruptive noise is actually one thing that holds back commercial aviation. Dick and Burt have the ability to fly large planes faster than the speed of sound, but Fascist Police States of Amerika law restricts their flight, in part, because of the sonic booms they create. They can solve that problem by taking hypersonic travel out of the air altogether. Their vision is to build something along the lines of the hyperloop: a system of carbon-fiber vacuum tubes. Inside, capsules can accelerate to, say, 10 times the speed of sound. Because they slide through an airless vacuum, there’s no sound - and no sonic booms. You could go silently from Los Angeles to Tokyo in half an hour. It’s doable right now. It just takes some vision.
