That would be the NASA $180 meg version, kicking around for 17 or 18 years. Sometimes known as the "Orient express", and sort of contemporary with Reagan's original "star wars". On further review, though, the NASA version is a lot more likely to amount to something that the Aussie garage shop operation. Compare and contrast: First, the breathless NYT story.
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. nytimes.com
The official account from the Aussies:
The HyShot Program uses a two stage Terrier-Orion Mk70 rocket to boost the payload and the empty Orion motor (the Orion motor remains attached to the payload) to an apogee of approximately 330km. As the spent motor and its attached payload falls back to Earth, they gather speed, and the trajectory is designed so that between 35km and 23km, they are travelling at Mach 7.6. It is during this part of the trajectory that the measurements of supersonic combustion are made. . . .
The flight experiment is a two-dimensional supersonic combustion ramjet with a back to back configuration. It includes boundary layer bleeds on the intake and constant area combustors The configuration has not been designed to produce a net thrust, as the objectives of the experiment are to measure the pressures in the combustor and on the thrust surface and correlate these with the shock tunnel data.
Hence, simplicity of the flow field was a high priority in the design of the experiment, and this resulted in an “engine” with poor performance. Developing an engine with net positive thrust is the subject of future flight trials.
mech.uq.edu.au
Er. Somebody didn't read things too closely. The official NASA PR blurb: oea.larc.nasa.gov
The NASA multi-year experimental hypersonic ground and flight test program, called Hyper-X, will demonstrate "air-breathing" engine technologies that promise to increase payload capacity -- or reduce vehicle size -- for the same payload for future hypersonic aircraft and/or reusable space launch vehicles. Built around the Hyper-X X-43 research vehicle, the first flight in this technology demonstration program is scheduled for mid 2001. It will be the first time a non-rocket, air-breathing scramjet (supersonic-combustion ramjet) engine has powered a vehicle in flight at hypersonic speeds -- speeds above Mach 5 or five times the speed of sound. This is equivalent to about one mile per second or approximately 3,600 miles per hour at sea level and far faster than any air-breathing aircraft has ever flown.
I assume this one didn't go off on time, but it sounds like a somewhat more meaningful demonstration anyway. A slightly more informative site is hapb-www.larc.nasa.gov , though the "results" page hapb-www.larc.nasa.gov is pretty ambiguous and not at all clear about anything actually flying.
Somewhat confusingly, what looks like the most concretely successful effort seems to have happened elsewhere in the US, or maybe not. arnold.af.mil
The first-ever successful free flight of a hypersonic projectile powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) engine burning hydrocarbon fuel has been made at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Center, Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn. The test is an important step towards the realization of flight at hypersonic speeds.
On July 26, AEDC fired a hydrocarbon-fueled scramjet projectile developed by GASL Inc., of Ronkonkoma, N.Y and funded under contract to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The test was the second of two successful launches, the first occurring on June 20. Together, these tests demonstrate that scramjet engines will provide enough thrust to power a free-flying vehicle. The demonstration also identifies gun launch as a viable method for boosting scramjet vehicles to the hypersonic speeds at which they operate.
The tests used the Arnold Engineering Development Center’s two-stage light gas gun to accelerate the projectile to the flight condition through a 130-foot long gun barrel using 235 feet of an enclosed 1,000-foot ballistic range at a simulated altitude of 50,000.
They seem to be weaseling on the "free flight" business there. More coverage of that operaton at aviationnow.com , along with a picture of the 4-inch diameter projectile.
Amusinging, this story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1626448.stm) describes a previously launch in Australia with ambigious results. Including the following photo with the caption "Scientists are not quite sure what happened after launch" news.bbc.co.uk
Methinks at this stage there is way too much hype in this hypersonic business. Check back in another 15 years, maybe. |
