x-51

X-51A Waverider hits Mach 5.1 in final flight

The final flight of the U.S. Air Force's X-51A Waverider program wasn't a long one, but it was long enough.

The Air Force cheerfully announced Friday that the scramjet-powered X-51A flew for more than six minutes earlier this week. Of that total flight time, partner Boeing said, three and a half minutes was done on scramjet power and the vehicle reached a top speed of Mach 5.1, which pushed it into the hypersonic range that researchers had been hoping for.

The accomplishment marked the longest flight for the $300 million X-51A technology demonstration program and, the … Read more

Unlocked fin likely brought down X-51A in August crash

The U.S. Air Force said today that an experimental test in August of its hypersonic X-51A Waverider failed due to a fin inadvertently unlocking and sending the aircraft into a corkscrew that ended in a crash into the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, the Air Force said only that the August flight had ended with the crash, but didn't reveal what had been at fault. But in a conference call today, X-51A program manager Charlie Brink explained what he and his colleagues have learned over a couple of months of investigation.

The August flight was the third of … Read more

Futuristic X-51A fails in hypersonic bid

No one ever said it would be easy going Mach 6.

The U.S. Air Force's experimental X-51A Waverider failed yesterday in its bid to hit that hypersonic speed. Although the aircraft did separate as planned from its B-52 mother ship in midair, things quickly went wrong. Today's official Air Force statement, issued just minutes ago, describes things this way:

The X-51 safely separated from the B-52 and the rocket booster fired as planned. However after 16 seconds, a fault was identified with one of the cruiser control fins. Once the X-51 separated from the rocket booster, approximately … Read more

Alienware X51 review: A proper, affordable gaming slim tower

I expect Alienware will sell a lot of these.

There's very little about the new Alienware X51 gaming slim tower a mainstream buyer won't appreciate. You can buy a reasonably fast configuration, like our review unit, for less than $1,000. It's on an aesthetic par with an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. You can even put it on its side and slide it into your media rack.

It's still a PC, of course, with all the content benefits and interface and software hang-ups implied therein. And in spite of Alienware's clever work cramming in a full-size 3D card, the X51 will make a finicky upgrade platform. You get no other expansion card slots, there's room for only one hard drive, and the 330-watt power supply (an upgrade over the 230-watt default) limits you to mainstream graphics cards.

Still, the bumped-up GeForce GTX 555 card in our review config can run Battlefield 3, Skyrim, or pretty much any other game at 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution with smooth frame rates and respectable quality settings. That's all many gamers will ask for, particularly those shopping for a PC like this one.

Read the full review of the Alienware X51.… Read more

Hands-on with the Alienware x51

To its credit, Alienware's new x51 has introduced some real innovation to slim tower desktop design.

I was wary of the x51. Slapping an alien-themed case around a Core i-series motherboard doesn't really bring anything new to the table. This system does more than the slim towers we've seen from Acer, Lenovo, HP, Gateway, and others. Its competitors all have standard motherboard layouts, and because of their size, they require half-height, lower-power graphics cards. The x51 has a full-size card inside of it. In the case of our review unit, it has a respectable double-wide GeForce GTX … Read more

Alienware pursues mainstream gamers with x51 slim tower

As promised, Alienware launched its new x51 slim tower PC tonight, at a live event in San Francisco.

Features in the customizable system will include Intel Core i3, i5, i7 series processors, Nvidia GT and GTX graphics cards, a slot-loading DVD or Blu-Ray drive, internal Wi-Fi, and HDMI and 7.1 digital audio output. The starting price is $699, and it will be available to purchase on January 18.

The complete list of specs below comes from the Dell Community blog post on the Alienware x51's announcement:… Read more

X-51A races to hypersonic record

The X-51A Waverider flew today, and it flew fast.

The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials. (Editors' note: A separate Air Force News Service report had initially cited a higher speed, but was amended to give … Read more

Legacy B-52 to launch futuristic WaveRider

The X-51A WaveRider is one step closer to its inaugural test flight later this year, now that airmen at Edwards Air Force Base have successfully "mated" the scramjet-propelled vehicle to a B-52 Stratofortress.

In December, an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 is scheduled to papoose the X-51A to 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean before cutting it loose. At that point, a solid rocket booster from an ATACMS missile will fire up, accelerating the X-51 to about Mach 4.5. That's when the supersonic combustion ramjet kicks in, pushing the WaveRider to more than Mach … Read more