smitty777's Journal: Hypersonic Travel

It would seem that hypersonic travel is here to stay...finally. Most define hypersonic as travel above Mach 5. Michael Cooney reports that the good ol USAF is now preparing to launch a scramjet test platform designed to reach speeds of Mach 6+. This is fairly significant; while the last testbed reached these speeds a few seconds, this will sustain hypersonic speeds for about 5 minutes. The idea is to make sure "the engine doesn't disintegrate". Spectacular.

Scramjets are very cool in that there are no real working parts. This is an exaggeration of course - the engine relies on high speeds for compression instead of the compressor fans of a normal turbofan engine. The kicker is that you have to get the engine to extremely high speeds to start the compression cycle - most solutions so far utilize a rocket to jump-start the cycle.