Biofuel-powered passenger aircraft are becoming more and more
common. But what if you mashed that up with a rocket engine?
That's essentially what the Zero Emission Hypersonic Transport
(Zehst) project by European defense manufacturer EADS is all
about. Zehst could be the rocketplane that flies our kids around
the world in the same time it takes us to drive to work. The
Concorde was retired nearly eight years ago, and the SR71
Blackbird concluded flights 22 years ago, but if they'd got
together in the 1980s and had an airborne offspring they
would've produced something very much like Zehst. The aircraft
was unveiled yesterday before the influential Paris airshow, and
EADS seems intent that it's no pie-in-the-sky experiment: Zehst
will hopefully be flying in prototype form by 2020 and in
service 30 years after that. You may be thinking "zero emissions
and a rocket plane does not compute" but here's why it kinda
makes sense: Zehst has seven engines hidden inside its nacelles,
two that breathe air and work like