Waste of time and energy?

[InertiaM]

Could hypersonic flight become a reality?

It was this paragraph that made me realise that their time would be better spent elsewhere:-

At present, to create enough hydrogen to fly 10 hypersonic planes from the UK to Australia every day would use up to 20% of the UK's national grid, according to one calculation.

[Countrypaul]

The sentence immediately following doesn't suggest that the author really understands what he's writing about either:

And in the European Union, airlines will from 2012 be obliged to pay for each unit of carbon they emit

Totally irrelevant for a hydrogen powered vehicle surely?

Paul

[billt]

Not really. The hydrogen has to be 'produced' somehow and that involves lots of energy. That energy will probably come from fossil fuels so there will have been lots of carbon emitted during the production of useable hydrogen. True, it's not emitted during flight but it's still emitted - just the same as electric vehicles actually!