Scramjet, The nytimes.com
[ I don't know if you're into stuff like this, Carl, but I found this quite an interesting "idea". NASA has been kicking this stuff around for a long time, couple Aussies in a garage may have bested them though ]
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
Imagine flying from London to Sydney in less than two hours or hopping from New York to Paris in an hour at seven times the speed of sound. If a small group of Australian scientists at the University of Queensland has its way, we could be doing just that in a matter of decades. This year, the Australians, armed with only a $2 million budget, beat a NASA team armed with $180 million and became the first to test fly a rocket powered by a ''scramjet.''
A scramjet is a lightweight supersonic-combustion engine that sucks in oxygen from the atmosphere at high speeds instead of using the heavy-liquid variety. Half the weight of a conventional engine, the scramjet, which rams compressed oxygen into a chamber and then mixes it with liquid hydrogen, promises to deliver what NASA's Glen Nagle has called the Holy Grail: cheap access to space. Once scramjet vehicles replace space shuttles in the years to come, commercial travel may well be next.
The family team that designed the Australian engine -- Allan Paull, his brother Ross and father, Bert, a retired electrician -- didn't even have enough money to fly from its headquarters in Brisbane to the test site near Adelaide. So they drove and camped for two days across the outback, hauling the scramjet in a trailer.
The 10-minute flight was a stunning success. Soaring to 195 miles and flaming like a meteor over the Australian desert, the scramjet and its awesome burst of speed electrified space agencies around the world. The 245-pound, 5-foot-long prototype reached staggering speeds of up to 1.5 miles per second.
Having beaten the Americans, the Russians and the French in the scramjet race, Allan Paull confidently predicts that speeds of up to Mach 14 will eventually be possible, and that scramjets could be lifting microsatellites into orbit within the next seven years. As for passenger planes, it will probably be another 50 years before scramjets allow them to crisscross the globe at three times the speed of the Concorde.
But will the saved time compensate for the sheer terror of climbing almost vertically into the stratosphere at Mach 14? The Concorde is bad enough. And won't zipping to Paris from New York in an hour make visiting the City of Light banal? Then again, as the historian Paul Johnson has said: ''There will be no boredom when we take the road to the stars.''
[ other coverage I dug up on google:
spacedaily.com
space.com
news.bbc.co.uk
abc.net.au ] |
