The Messerschmitt 262 Replica Project has created five close copies of the world’s first jet fighter. We lost track of the project a few years ago. It appears to have turned out well. The Collings Foundation has acquired one of the replicas, which it’s showing at air shows, and you’ll be able to buy flight time from the Foundation in the near future.

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We had the opportunity to sit in the (amazingly cramped) cockpit of the Me-262 replica a few years ago, followed by a private demonstration. It is an amazing aircraft.

Back around the turn of the 21st Century, XCOR Aerospace played with the idea of building a replica of the rocket-power Me-163. A German foundation did build an unpowered glider version, though.

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Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser is another replica, of sorts. Although NASA Langley likes to take credit for the design, they didn’t originate it. NASA’s HL-20 was derived from the MiG-105 (NATO codename Spiral), the Soviet counterpart of the X-20 DynaSoar. The HL-20 / DreamChaser is not a true replica of the MiG-105. It is larger and optimized for a different mission, but the aerodynamic planform is the same.

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Then, of course, there’s NASA’s Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle, formerly called the Orion capsule, a scaled-up replica of the Apollo capsule. Historic replicas are quite popular among aircraft homebuilders. If you attend a large fly-in like the Experiment Aircraft Association’s Airventure Oshkosh, you’ll see a lot of them. The people who build historic replicas will quite often scale them down to save money. Only government agencies choose to scale them up.

It’s sad to see Congress reducing NASA to building historic replicas instead of developing new technology. But as Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, the opposite of progress is Congress.

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Written by Astro1 on June 19th, 2012 , Space Exploration (General)

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