Hypersonic Airliner Idea

[KJ_Lesnick]

I was thinking about several different things regarding a fictitious hypersonic commercial aircraft design.  Personally, I think the LAPCAT A2 is a pretty cool idea, fast, antipodal range, even a limited subsonic overland capability and efficient engines for low-speed flight.  The problem with the design is that it's so ridiculously long (almost 500 feet) though admittedly reasonable in weight, it could have had a higher L/D ratio had the design been a wave-riding design.  It could also have been a more reasonable length.  From a purely scientific standpoint, we had the ability to produce a supersonic airliner probably since the 1980's, and if some money was put into it I could easily envision with 25-40 years from inception one could have produced such an aircraft -- with Rockwell's proposals starting in 1967 that would yield a workable design by 1992 to 2007.

I have ideas to get some line drawings made and I have a basic idea of what I want the design to look like.  The questions I have are about the finer details for the purposes of making the design reasonably accurate and realistic

1: Could NASA's Supersonic Cruise Research program to have either been amended to include some research into hypersonic designs, or have spun off into a hypersonic research program?
2: NASA did do some research into hypersonic airliner designs.  Could they have proceeded there to a more in-depth study?


KJ Lesnick

[KJ_Lesnick]

Nobody has anything?

[Go4fun]

NASA having been ordered out of manned space launches with it's own craft turned their egg-heads loose on the hypersonic airliner field.  At first they thought a robust spin-off version of this work could be used to lift a smaller shuttle-type craft to a high enough altitude and speed to be launched from a 'Piggy Back' rack to achieve orbit without all the dangers of large rockets and attendant high G loads of a normal launch.
While NASA has not received much support of the Hyer-launch program enough different airlines showed an interest in the hyper-sonic airliner to get the White House to give NASA a go ahead on that for commercial reasons.

[KJ_Lesnick]

Go4fun

NASA having been ordered out of manned space launches with it's own craft turned their egg-heads loose on the hypersonic airliner field.

I'm thinking of starting with Rockwell and Lockheed's proposals which started in the late 1960's, and either the SCV program being expanded to include hypersonic airliners, or a separate program ran parallel with it, and then from the 1980's funds offered for the Orient Express used to launch and develop the design. 

I'm not sure the full details but it seems like it could have plausibility -- I could be wrong however.

[KJ_Lesnick]

Nobody?