"I probably wouldn't be a good spokesman for an electric car, because I'll still get on a private jet, and one flight on a private jet undoes all my electric-car good deeds."
- George Clooney -
A Supersonic Electric Aircraft?
Elon Musk has dropped hints about design ideas for such a craft in the past.
In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk revealed some fascinating insights into the ideas that he has for a battery powered aircraft. I've compiled a partial transcript of their conversation to archive here on Steemit for ready future reference.
Supersonic Electric Aircraft - Image courtesy of Daniel Olah
Note: For reasons not clear to me, the video below may not start at precisely the right point. Please adjust the time line yourself in order to listen to the segment between about 1:15:00 and 1:20:30.
Supersonic Electric Aircraft.
The text below the video is a reasonable transcript of the electric aircraft portion of this video. Joe Rogan's dialog is in italics, and the rest is Elon Musk's.
Begin Transcript
"Now have you ever looked at planes and gone 'I can fix this?
I just don't have the time.'"
"I have a design for a plane."
"You do?"
"Yeah."
"A better design?"
"I mean probably... I think it is."
"Who have you talked to about this?"
"I've talked to friends."
"Friends?"
"Friends. And girlfriends."
"I'm your friend. You can tell me. What have you got? What's going on?"
"Well I mean, an exciting thing to do would be some sort of electric vertical take-off and landing supersonic... jet of some kind."
"Vertical take-off and landing, meaning--no need for a runway--just shoot up straight in the air, and, tschooo! Oooh! How would you do that? And they do that on some military aircraft, correct?"
"Yes. The trick is that you have to transition to level flight? And then you--the thing that you would use for vertical takeoff and landing is not suitable for high-speed flight."
"So you have two different systems? Vertical takeoff, and landing system?"
"I've thought about this quite a lot. Quite a lot. The interesting thing about an electric plane is that you want to go as high as possible. But you need a certain energy density in the battery pack, because you have to overcome gravitational potential energy.
"Once you've overcome gravitational potential energy, and you're at a high altitude, the energy you use in cruise is very low. And then you can recapture a large part of your gravitational potential energy on the way down.
"So you really don't need any kind of reserve fuel, if you will, because you have the energy of height. Gravitational potential energy. This is a lot of energy.
"So, once you can get high, you... In fact, the way to think about a plane is that it's a force balance... so the force balance... So, a plane that is not accelerating is in neutral force balance. You have the force of gravity, you have the lift force of the wings, then you've got the force of whatever thrusting device--the propeller or turbine or whatever it is--and you've got the resistance force of the air.
"Now the higher you go, the lower the air resistance is. Air density drops exponentially, but drag increases with the square, and exponential beats a square. The higher you go, the faster you'll go for the same amount of energy.
"And, at a certain altitude, you can go supersonic with less energy per mile--quite a lot less energy per mile--than an aircraft at 35000 feet, because it's just a force balance."
"I'm too stupid for this conversation."
"It makes sense, though."
"No, I'm sure it does. Now, when you think about this new idea of designing--when you have this idea about improving planes--are you gonna bring this to somebody? Do you shop this around?"
"Well, I have a lot on my plate."
"Right, that's what I'm saying. I don't know how you do what you do now, but if you keep coming up with these... It's gotta be hard to pawn these off on someone else either... 'Hey, go do a job good job with this vertical take-off and landing system that I want to implement on regular planes.'"
"The electric airplane isn't necessary right now. Electric cars are important. Solar energy is important. Stationary storage of energy is important. These things are much more important than creating an electric supersonic VTOL.
"Also, the planes, naturally, you really want that gravitational energy density for an aircraft, and this is improving over time.
"So, it's important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. That's why electric cars--it matters whether electric cars happen sooner or later. We're really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans.
"Yeah."
"We're taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this--putting this in the atmosphere. This is crazy. We should not do this. It's very dangerous. We should accelerate the transition to sustainable energy."
"I mean the bizarre thing is that obviously we’re going to run out of oil in the long term. There’s only so much oil we can mine and burn. That’s totally logical, we must have a sustainable energy transport and energy infrastructure in the long term. So we know that’s the end point, we know that. So why run this crazy experiment where we take trillions of tons of carbon from underground and put it in the atmosphere and oceans. This is an insane experiment. It’s the dumbest experiment in human history. Why are we doing this? It’s crazy.”
End Transcript
I was frustrated that the topic of conversation changed drastically at that point, right when the aircraft discussion was starting to get interesting.
Could we clone Musk? I really want my very own personal, electric, VTOL, supersonic gad about. Really badly. I want it!
I've written a story about it here:
"Free to Move About The World"
I have another article in the works for publication on Steemit later. When I get time to complete that article, I hope to discuss some of Musk's electric aircraft ideas further.
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