Certain things excite me. Spurs playing Manchester City tonight is ‘fairly’ exciting. In a bit of a scary way. Lila stringing a few words together excites me much more than it really should do. But something that has always given me the biggest ‘frill’ is speed. Particularly, acceleration. I like driving fast, I like cycling fast and I like skiing fast. But to reach that level of frisson, to reach that ‘whooooo’ moment, you need to be just a smidgen beyond comfortable control. Some might say that’s dangerous. Whatever. It is what it is. I love the acceleration of planes just before take-off. Jet engines have even more horse power than a Porsche. But I never got to go on Concord. Even though I wanted to. Stow away even. But didn’t happen.

But Concorde is history. Our only commercial supersonic plane could never afford to pay for its fuel with its relatively meagre pay-load so was more a spectacular vanity project. To show the world that Britain is great and even though the French really aren’t, they can chip in at times for something worthwhile.

Now we’re talking ‘hypersonic’. Ooooooohhh. Hyper; that’s big. Which is defined as speeds over Mach 13. Thirteen times the speed of sound. Sound travels at 1235km/hour. So Mach 13 is… fucking quick. In fact, should many things happen well, (standard caveat for ‘don’t hold yer breath), they’re looking at a… plane? rocket?? thing that is possible to fly at Mach 25. Holy Moly. 30,000 km/hr!

Might be a bit noisy. I mean Concorde, at Mach 2, stopped the traffic flying 200 miles away and you couldn’t even see it. So within our atmosphere this new thing (as yet unnamed) will travel at Mach 3.3. And arrive in New York in less than 1 hour. Los Angeles in under 2. Southend in 47 seconds.

They haven’t named ‘it’ yet because ‘it’ is not really the problem. The problem is the engines. So they’ve given them a name instead. SABRE. It’s an acronym. Synergic air-breathing rocket engine. And, should they work as expected/hoped/dreamed they will be the key. Because the problem with all rocket propelled flight is that it all tends to get a bit warm up there. Oxygen has to be forced into the fuel and the pressure creates massive heat. So some fairly bright people have invented a game-changing ‘pre-cooler’ which is so clever that it can cool air from 1000 degrees to about 20 in one twentieth of a second. Heat is lost in proportion to surface area. If you increase that you cool down. So this pre-cooler uses thousands of tubes, each finer than a human hair and filled with liquid helium, creating a massive effective surface area to keep things cool.

How very exciting.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx