Home / Channel / General Tech / NASA focuses on green flights into the blue

NASA focuses on green flights into the blue

If you want to live near a major city, but can't afford major city housing prices – then there's always the airport. Running a quick check on the flight paths around a city – and you can pretty much decide on where the lowest property prices will be. But this might not be the case in the future – not if NASA has its way. KitGuru dons a big suit and heads off for a space walk.

Having spent the last 100 years trying to find new fossil-fuel reserves, we will almost certainly spend the next 100 years trying to see if the fuel we have can be made to last at least twice as long.

While the car industry initial cried out against the idea that vehicles could be made much more efficient, we now have adverts for cars that will do 1,800 miles on two tanks of petrol. Question is, can the same kind of savings be applied to aircraft and space vehicles?

NASA thinks so.  Here's a quick 1-2-3 of the kind of improvements that the people with the Nice And Safe Attitude believe is achievable:-

  1. Double the number of flights possible – without the need to increase fuel levels from where they are today. That means arming tomorrow's Jumbo Jet with half the fuel it was using 15 years ago
  2. These cleaner burning engines should reduce the toxic/nasty parts of their exhaust chemicals by 75%
  3. Lastly, we have the home-owner-loving as NASA aims to drop aircraft noise by a whopping 83%
Planes could go twice as fast, with the same fuel, and still qualify for NASA's ambition

.
KitGuru says: We love efficiency – almost as much as we love extreme performance. When done correctly, there's no reason to say that a big increase in efficiency shouldn't be married to huge performance. Not sure what we mean? Compare the fuel efficiency and on-track performance of a 5 litres American muscle car with an F1 2012 car.

Comments below or in the KitGuru forums.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Sony is now the largest shareholder of Kadokawa, FromSoftware’s parent company

After weeks of reports regarding Sony acquiring Kadokawa, the story has concluded. Instead of a …