Hypersoar - Space Hopping Hyperplane

Flying the paper plane
Even though HyperSoar is still in the "paper airplane" stage, it has garnered interest from organizations as diverse as Federal Express and the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command. HyperSoar has appeared in Jane's Defence Weekly, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Scholastic's Weekly Reader, and daily papers from the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Times to local newspapers such as the Valley Times.

Passenger flight would be one of the last applications to become reality, but it is the one that the media and the public are most interested in. "The public gets very excited about space and air travel," said Carter. "To the general public, HyperSoar looks doable. The technology is nearly there, the concept is proven on paper. The thing now is to make it economically feasible to the defense and commercial communities so HyperSoar can get the funding it needs to take the next step in development."

Carter estimates that about $500 million would be needed to develop the technologies needed, and to build and test a 16-meter-long flyable unmanned prototype. Lawrence Livermore is positioned to help bring HyperSoar into reality because of its expertise in thermal protection materials, large-scale computational fluid dynamics, ultrahigh pressure testing design, and modeling the environmental effects of high-speed supersonic aircraft.

The question of funding aside, the day when passengers can hop a HyperSoar to London is still a way off.

"When most people hear about HyperSoar," Carter adds, "they immediately think big - building big airplanes to carry lots of passengers or cargo. But that's not economically feasible. I propose building small airplanes to justify the market and then building up from there, according to the need. That's how all the different flight technologies - airplanes, jets, helicopters - got started. It's the way that fledgling technologies like HyperSoar take wing."

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