Word: scramjets
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...Speed, in miles per hour, attained by NASA's "scramjet," the first jet aircraft to go Mach 9.6, or 2 miles per second...
...that doesn't pollute the atmosphere, flies at seven times the speed of sound and doesn't carry any fuel. Sound like a blue-sky pipe dream? One day last July, 300 km above the South Australian Desert, that dream became a reality in the form of the HyShot scramjet. A scramjet (that's top-gun shorthand for "supersonic ramjet") is a jet engine that is powered by oxygen it scoops out of the air as it flies, so it's not weighed down by a fuel tank (though it needs an initial boost to get going). This summer...
Plenty of money is needed. Paull's team built a scramjet for just $750,000 but it has no body attached and hitches a ride on a former U.S. Navy rocket. The American version is also unready for boarding: the X-43 is only 4 m long, 1.6 m wide and 60 cm thick. But the leaders of world aeronautics seem to believe the future is hypersonic. nasa has invested $185 million in Hyper-X and partly funds Paull's work at the University of Queensland...
...scramjet?as different from a jet engine as a rocket was from the steam engine?and this will be its first flight. If all goes to plan, it should smash every world airplane record. It will make the fastest aircraft, the rocket-powered X-15 (Mach 6.7), look turgid, and leave the fastest jet, the SR-71 Blackbird (Mach 3.2), in its stratospheric dust. Says Vince Rausch, director of the Hyper-X project: "It's the future. We're convinced of that. What we've not done yet is demonstrate to the people it's real. And that's what...
...Scramjet is short for supersonic combustion ramjet. It uses the rush of air at high speed to ignite fuel and produce thrust, rather than relying on compressed air from a jet engine's fan blades. As well as being capable of hypersonic speeds (greater than Mach 4), scramjets get their oxygen from the air rather than tanks (as rockets do), reducing cost and freeing up space for cargo or passengers. They are also currently environmentally friendly: all three models under test run on pollution-free hydrogen...