Fancy flying at more than seven times the speed of sound? New hypersonic flight research undertaken by military scientists could revolutionise air travel.
While NASA’s new X-Plane could bring back the dream of supersonic air travel, a team of military researchers hailing from the United States and Australia could be about to one-up that with hypersonic flight research.
Hypersonic travel is defined as a velocity that’s over five times faster than the speed of sound, which is greatly faster than what the supersonic Concorde achieved while operational.
Read: NASA‘s new X-plane resurrects the Concorde dream
At hypersonic speeds, travellers could reach any destination on the globe in a matter of hours.
A new test as part of ongoing hypersonic flight research, which occurred in the Australian desert, saw an experimental scramjet attached to a rocket booster. The craft manager to achieve an altitude of 278 kilometres, with a top speed of Mach 7,5.
Lockheed Martin is just one aerospace company presently prototyping a hypersonic aircraft – one of their early concepts is pictured above.
The joint America-Australiant project is officially named Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE for short), and is presently developing an engine that will fly at Mach 7.
Presently, the record for a manned aircraft is Mach 6.72, which was established by the US X-15 experimental aircraft.
In a statement to AFP, Michael Smart, a hypersonic expert, said that “It’s an exciting time; we want to be able to fly with a hypersonic engine at Mach 7… The practical application of that is you could fly long distances over the Earth very, very quickly but also that it’s very useful as an alternative to a rocket for putting satellites into space.”
The team’s next experiment is scheduled for 2017, with the view of the entire project reaching completion in 2018.
In a further statement to AFP, Australia’s chief scientist Alex Belinsky said “It is a game-changing technology, and could revolutionise global air travel, providing cost-effective access to space.”
Read: New Concorde to fly London-New York in 1 hour?
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Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
Source: AFP
