inhabitat.com — In a hurry? Need to get from Sydney to Brussels in a dash? Not too far in the future you may be able to travel that entire distance in less than 4 hours - emissions free - thanks to an amazing hypersonic hydrogen jet project called LAPCAT.
Jan 22, 2008 View in Crawl 4
bobjr94Jan 22, 2008
The problem is it currently takes alot of power to make hydrogen. Your burning more coal, using more nuclear power, damming up more rivers, etc... to try to get something that sounds better than it is. Ive read most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, and it takes something like 1.2 gallons to make a gallon equivalent of hydrogen. And the leftover is carbon dioxide, same if you would have just burned the gas in the first place.
bdbelysianJan 22, 2008
“95% of hydrogen production comes from fossil fuels.”If there was nothing available but power generated by alternative sources such as wind, solar, wave, geothermal (bla, bla) i’ll bet that will change to “100% of hydrogen production comes from alternative fuels.”
bfdonnellyJan 23, 2008
Who the heck wants to go from Sydney to Brussels? Lagos to Sarajevo? Denver to Athens maybe?
rocketgeekJan 23, 2008
I would. I'm part of the team building one of the engines as part of the test programme for it. The engine hardware (the side I'm involved with), is coming along nicely.
privil3g3Jan 23, 2008
impressed cat is impressed. nice one
init100Jan 23, 2008
I certainly know that. What I was getting at is that hydro power is clean, unlike those fossil-fueled power plants that he was talking about.
Closed AccountJan 23, 2008
i don't know why you are getting down voted.... But this is a very good point. We could even use solar power to produce hydrogen
acontorerJan 23, 2008
It is puzzling to see comments here (and on the original site) that treat the concept drawing as if it were the finished design, e.g., the tail is impractically long or this would never go commercial without windows. Folks, this is just a concept at this point.
wolfkeeperFeb 6, 2008
It is far removed, because Bond and co. worked out why HOTOL didn't work, and fixed it. This is the result.
wolfkeeperFeb 6, 2008
Well, Concorde had no issues. They could shut down engines in flight without difficulty; even both on the same side. It's largely to do with issues like tail authority and details of the engine designs.
hangglideMar 5, 2008
Hydro power is not "clean." Dams create massive environmental damage to river ecosystems.