Around the World in 120 Minutes

When President Reagan in his State of the Union address last week talked of a hypersonic jet that could fly from Washington to Tokyo in two hours, skeptics might have thought he was merely dreaming. In fact, the Pentagon and U.S. aerospace companies have been working for several years toward making that vision a reality. The proposed plane, already dubbed the Orient Express, would soar through the atmosphere into space and back, flying at up to 25 times the speed of sound. Though few experts think that the Orient Express will be ready ! for takeoff before the end of this century, Reagan showed off a model of the space plane on a visit last week to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Annandale, Va.

Other nations have ambitious plans of their own to develop new superfast commercial jets. Only a day after the State of the Union address, the British government announced that it would provide research money for a space plane called HOTOL, an acronym for horizontal takeoff and landing. It would be designed to fly at about the same speed as the proposed Orient Express. France's state-owned aircraft company, Aerospatiale, has more modest plans to build a second generation of the Concorde, the only supersonic commercial jet now in service. The so-called Son of Concorde would fly at 2.2 times the speed of sound, or about 9% faster than its predecessor. More important, the new Concorde would carry 200 passengers, double the capacity of the original.

Building an Orient Express will be one of the most daunting challenges that the U.S. aerospace industry has faced since it helped put astronauts on the moon. Lockheed, Boeing and Rockwell have all been working on the conceptual designs for a space plane. At the moment, says one industry consultant, "it's just a gleam in everyone's eye." But what a gleam: the plane would take off on a conventional runway and fly into orbit like a rocket. It could launch satellites, much as the space shuttle has done, or it could simply whisk U.S. passengers from coast to coast in twelve minutes. Such staggering speed would only be possible with a new kind of engine that could function both in the atmosphere and in space.

The most immediate impetus for the development of the jet is military: the space plane could carry Star Wars nuclear defense weapons into orbit. It is also designed to compete with NASA's space shuttle, lifting payloads into orbit for less than $100 a pound. That would be a bargain compared with the shuttle's fee of $2,000 a pound.