Leave it to the Chinese to come up with new and bizarre creations…
A team of Chinese scientists has created a concept for a hypersonic drone that weighs 1100 pounds and can travel up to five times the speed of sound, at 5000 meters of altitude. If you think they’re moving too fast (no pun intended), then you’re absolutely right as this is still in the very early stages and would take at least a few decades to implement.
Xu Xu, a researcher at Beihang University and working on the team said, “The first hypersonic flight on Mars may not happen within 30 years because many technical issues need to be solved.” Another question that arises from this proposal is whether the aircraft would be traveling five times faster than the speed of sound on Earth or on Mars because that makes all the difference. The speed of sound on Earth is about 760 mph while its around 540 mph on Mars.
The reason behind creating a hypersonic aircraft is to connect the future colonies in Mars, that would be spread all over the Red Planet. These aircrafts would be helpful in traveling between the colonies and sharing different resources among them. “When humans start to colonize Mars, with some settlements built at different locations across the planet, there will be a demand for long-distance transport,” said Xu. Always think far ahead, kids.
According to reports by SCMP, the aircraft would loosely resemble a cruise missile and be big enough to transport goods as well as people from one place to another. It will also be fueled by magnesium as Mar’s atmosphere is almost 96% carbon dioxide which magnesium burns efficiently. It seems like China is hoping to launch the hypersonic spacecraft by as early as 2045 which sounds quite ambitious.
