China invents most powerful detonation engine for hypersonic flight

Zerush@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 36 points – China invents most powerful detonation engine for hypersonic flight
scmp.com

The “revolutionary” air-breathing engine could, in theory, lift an aircraft from a runway to more than 30km (18.6 miles) into the stratosphere and continuously accelerate it to 16 times the speed of sound.

At this velocity, even the longest intercontinental flights could take just one or two hours while consuming less fuel compared with conventional jet engines.

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I'll wait until other countries validate the findings, or until someone makes a working prototype, before getting excited. Seems like it's one of those "too good to be true" stories like the LK-99. Hype in tech and science almost always leads to disappointment.

This article is bullshit: they're reporting that a blueprint was made. No demonstration, no proof of it working.

Rotary detonation isn't a new concept and GE has demonstrated a rotary detonation scramjet for 0 - Mach 5.

https://www.geaerospace.com/press-release/other-news-information/ge-aerospace-demonstrates-hypersonic-dual-mode-ramjet-rotating

If you really think that 0 to Mach 16 is within reach with current technology RDEs I have a bridge to sell you.

Darpa has all the money of God and they've been throwing billions at the exact problem of rotary detonation. Everybody knows that detonation is more fuel efficient than deflagration and that turbine engines are holding jet aircraft back from hypersonic flight.

When they make a Mach 16 demonstrator I'll believe them. Until then I'm still very excited for the demonstrated and actual capabilities of RDE Scramjets.

If that engine actually works, it would be cool to see it on a space plane. Mach 16 is nearly 2/3rds of orbital velocity. If you could go that fast on an air breathing engine, you wouldn't need to carry nearly as much oxygen to get into LEO.

Fuck the CCP with a bucket of rusty nails.

You need to draw the line between a country's government and some of its brightest minds. This is a scientific breakthrough, and should be celebrated as such. Period.

No. Sorry, but if the government is horrific then any scientific advancements will be used in unethical ways. It’s unfortunate but true.

The CCP is brutally evil and that’s that.

The research has been published. Everybody in the world is free to replicate it. The CCP is no more or less capable of doing so, just because it happened on their turf.

It has been published, but a staggering number of scientific "papers" coming out of China are turning out to be complete fabrications.

Correct, so it should be independently reviewed and recreated to validate the claims. Crying wolf just because there were issues before wouldn't be fair.

So you don’t base any of your decisions on past experiences?

Not when it comes to scientific research.

If the same person or someone acting under the same supervisor in the same faculty published some more amazing sounding research after previous ones had been debunked, I'd be sceptical.

But in a country with 1.4bn people and more than 3.000 universities? There's gotta be some bad eggs, but you can't discredit every single one due to the actions of a few.

I've met brilliant scientists in and from China.

Most of these inventions will be used by military first, in China as also in the USA, which isn't an atom better in this and other aspect. It's precisely the USA which use more investment in weapons and defense as any other country and not precisely for humanity reasons.