randychase
07-30-2002, 05:24 PM
http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=Business&cat=Aviation_and_Aerospace
Australians Launch Hypersonic Scramjet Engine
Tue Jul 30, 4:27 AM ET
By Michael Christie
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists launched a hypersonic "scramjet" on Tuesday, claiming a world first with a revolutionary engine that could one day propel airliners at 5,000 miles per hour or more.
"HyShot" project members fired the supersonic combustion ramjet engine from a launch site in the Australian outback into the upper atmosphere and allowed it to plunge back to earth.
The engine was designed to ignite on the way down but project members said it would take several weeks to analyze the data from the experiment to establish whether it had worked as planned.
Using the rush of oxygen in the air to ignite hydrogen fuel, scramjets would allow aircraft or rockets to fly in excess of Mach 8, or eight times the speed of sound.
A dream of aviation experts since the 1950s, an airliner with scramjet engines could cut flight times between London and Sydney to two hours from 24 now, making inflight movies obsolete.
The engines could slash satellite launch costs as rockets would carry less fuel, leaving more room for the payload. "We had a successful launch, no doubt about it, we had a beautiful launch," project leader Allan Paull told Reuters from Woomera, a former British rocket testing range in the south Australian desert.
Data was collected throughout the experiment and although it would be up to two weeks before the information could be analyzed, Paull said all the indications were that the air-breathing engine had performed as planned.
The ground-breaking Australian experiment, led by the University of Queensland, came after a failed test a year ago of U.S. space agency NASA ( news - web sites)'s multimillion dollar, unmanned X-43A scramjet prototype and a previous failed launch by the HyShot crew. The HyShot scramjet has previously worked in a wind tunnel.
The scramjet was fired off in the late morning into a hazy sky over the Australian outback on a Terrier Orion Mk70 rocket, which took it into the upper atmosphere.
The scramjet was supposed to kick into action on the way back down at 22 miles above the earth, with data transmitted by radio until it began to burn up at around 12 miles up.
A previous plan to eject a capsule of data as the jet came down was abandoned because of the extreme heat of re-entry.
"We actually won't get that data before next week and it'll take us about a week or two to have a preliminary guess at what it means," he said.
"It was a world first in what it attempted to do and we certainly did what we attempted to do, but whether or not the results were as we hoped we don't know."
The project team said if it was confirmed that the scramjet worked in flight it would be one of the most significant technological advances since American Chuck Yaeger became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australians Launch Hypersonic Scramjet Engine
Tue Jul 30, 4:27 AM ET
By Michael Christie
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists launched a hypersonic "scramjet" on Tuesday, claiming a world first with a revolutionary engine that could one day propel airliners at 5,000 miles per hour or more.
"HyShot" project members fired the supersonic combustion ramjet engine from a launch site in the Australian outback into the upper atmosphere and allowed it to plunge back to earth.
The engine was designed to ignite on the way down but project members said it would take several weeks to analyze the data from the experiment to establish whether it had worked as planned.
Using the rush of oxygen in the air to ignite hydrogen fuel, scramjets would allow aircraft or rockets to fly in excess of Mach 8, or eight times the speed of sound.
A dream of aviation experts since the 1950s, an airliner with scramjet engines could cut flight times between London and Sydney to two hours from 24 now, making inflight movies obsolete.
The engines could slash satellite launch costs as rockets would carry less fuel, leaving more room for the payload. "We had a successful launch, no doubt about it, we had a beautiful launch," project leader Allan Paull told Reuters from Woomera, a former British rocket testing range in the south Australian desert.
Data was collected throughout the experiment and although it would be up to two weeks before the information could be analyzed, Paull said all the indications were that the air-breathing engine had performed as planned.
The ground-breaking Australian experiment, led by the University of Queensland, came after a failed test a year ago of U.S. space agency NASA ( news - web sites)'s multimillion dollar, unmanned X-43A scramjet prototype and a previous failed launch by the HyShot crew. The HyShot scramjet has previously worked in a wind tunnel.
The scramjet was fired off in the late morning into a hazy sky over the Australian outback on a Terrier Orion Mk70 rocket, which took it into the upper atmosphere.
The scramjet was supposed to kick into action on the way back down at 22 miles above the earth, with data transmitted by radio until it began to burn up at around 12 miles up.
A previous plan to eject a capsule of data as the jet came down was abandoned because of the extreme heat of re-entry.
"We actually won't get that data before next week and it'll take us about a week or two to have a preliminary guess at what it means," he said.
"It was a world first in what it attempted to do and we certainly did what we attempted to do, but whether or not the results were as we hoped we don't know."
The project team said if it was confirmed that the scramjet worked in flight it would be one of the most significant technological advances since American Chuck Yaeger became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------