Slashdot Mirror
First Ever Scramjet Reaches Mach 10
stjobe writes with the news that a group of US and Australian scientists successfully tested a supersonic scramjet engine in the Australian Outback on Friday. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a rocket carrying the engine reached mach 10, and climbed to an altitude of 330 miles before the apparatus re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. "Australia's Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) said it was believed to be the first time a scramjet had been ignited within the Earth's atmosphere ... Scramjets are supersonic combustion engines that use oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making them lighter and faster than fuel carrying rockets. Scientists hope that one day a scramjet aircraft fired into space could cut traveling time from Sydney to London to as little as two hours."
What about the X-43A? It also ignited successfully and flew under power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-43
This is cool, yes, but the emphasis on "first" seems a bit off.
From TFA: "Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) said it was believed to be the first time a scramjet had been ignited within the Earth's atmosphere."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-X
Is there something I'm just not getting here?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
While that is VERY cool, this particular design is mroe of a technical demonstration than an engine that could propel an aircraft.
So while this is a big step forward, it isn't as big as it seems.
Holy cow, this thing can achieve Earth orbit! So why focus just on the Sydney-London thing (or to use that ol' "New Orient Express" analogy, New York-Honk Kong) instead of cheap space travel?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I can see it now, Using the power of duct tape, they will strap the scramjet to the shuttle.
:)
I'm guessing they will need LOTS of tape
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
"scramjets are supersonic combustion engines that use oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel"
Scamjets use oxygen from the atmosphere as an oxydizer unlike traditional rocket engines which need to carry their oxydizer. Scramjets still need to carry fuel.
No. I am not a rocket scintist.
I don't know about traveling that fast. If you do it enough the time dilation might make it that my friends and family would die a few seconds sooner (relative to me of course).
</sarcasm>
This event took place in Australia, and was reported by an Australian paper; therefore, it was correctly reported in the metric altitude of 530 kilometres.
So why was the summary changed by slashdot editors to the imperial unit?
Firstly, not everyone who reads this site is American, and secondly, this is an audience of nerds. I think we can handle kilometres! Even the USA's NASA is all metric now.
The scientists who developed this scramjet used metric, the country it was tested in used metric, the newspaper that reported it used metric, so how about we keep it that way?
This is very interesting to read as I just finished reading Ben Rich's book "Skunk Works" where he talks about the SR71. When president Reagan announced the administration's intention to build a hypersonic airplane, he just shook his head. It's simply not practical, with or without the scramjet engine. The SR71 flew at 85,000 feet at about Mach 3.2, and reaches skin temperatures of 2000-3000 degrees (F I presume) just from moving through the atmosphere. Accelerating to Mach 10 would burn up or otherwise compromise any current building material, except for the carbon-carbon and ceramic materials used on the space shuttle's heat shield, but aren't practical for airplanes. So what good is this scramjet, at least as far as a hypersonic airplane goes? Seems to me all this talk of Sydney to London in 12 hours is a bit fanciful. So the question is, how exactly will this engine be used to accomplish this? The only way to reach hypersonic speeds without burning up is to make the trajectory sub-orbital so that the aircraft is in the thinnest atmosphere possible when it's firing it's engines to go Mach 10. But of course there's not a lot of oxygen at that altitude. And to really achieve sub-orbital trajectory you need a rocket engine, not any kind of air-breathing engine. So my questions are: Is Ben Rich right that hypersonic travel is essentially impossible? Will the scramjet help with a suborbital trajectory? I understand that igniting the scramjet is a breakthrough. Jet turbines at supersonic velocity have always been problematic.
Off-topic, Ben Rich says in his book that the codename Aurora that everyone likes to think refers to some hypersonic aircraft, was actually the codename placed on the B-2 project as Lockheed and Northrop were competing for the contract. It's funny to think that to this day, folks still hang onto this and imagine some mythical hypersonic airplane. Which never existed. Or does it?
ScrambleJet = ICBM
Nothing like a dinkum Aussie WoMD.
Aussies are evil !!!
"uses oxygen" oxygen in space O.o?
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Thank you.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Sooo...it only goes to 10.
This one goes to 11!
Okay, now my funny bone has been buried....
Kudos to these people. It may have only been for some seconds, but at least they are forging onward, and I salute their work!
Proving theory is usually no easy task, a working prototype seems to be 3/4 of the battle.
Seriously, hat's off!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
330 miles is approximately 5 times the minimum altitude for entry into "space." The Kármán line is at an altitude of 62 miles (100 km) which is the boundary that defines where space begins. 75 miles is where atmospheric drag starts to have an effect. This means the craft traveled well into the Thermosphere. People who travel above 50 miles are called astronauts by NASA.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
I am sure the skunk works at CIA/Boeing have all the data/results/secrets already.
- TM-2006-214547.pdf
Hell, they made the SR71 back in the old days, imagine what they have NOW!!!
They wont say ever!!! Stupid top secret morons, showing it off will not hamper anything. I bet Boeing just wants to make another $500billion to $1500 billion selling conventional aircraft for
the next 25 years, then they will bring online the new models later.
Good article at http://www.americanantigravity.com/documents/NASA
"NASA Memorandum on Advanced Propulsion
by R.L. Sackheim, J.W. Cole, and R.J. Litchford (NASA MSFC)
Where is U.S. space flight today, and how did we get here? After 40 years, why are we slowly converging on a slightly updated Apollo architecture? Why is there no Moore's law analogy for rocketry?
Clearly, we have arrived at a watershed moment in space flight history, and it is essential that we reflect on such questions in a forthright way. Decisions are now being made that could set our future course in space for decades to come, and it is appropriate that we examine the logic that brought space transportation full circle almost back to where we started."
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yeah nerds, learn KM, not Miles.
No self respecting scientist or nerd would ever use the word MILES in their own documents.
Slashdot is NOT mainstream, get back to being NERDY!!!
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
does it run Linux?
/obligatory
It was the same fuel as HyShot, plain old hydrogen (plus oxygen gathered from the atmosphere). This scramjet project was named HyCAUSE and the engine was physically a fair bit larger than the successful HyShot flights by the same team a few years back. The team originated from the University of Queensland moved to the Defence Science and Technology Organisation about a year ago. The next flights are a series of ten over five years under the name "HiFire".
but is it a robot in disguise?
getting these to fly without using a rocket to start it. If we can get it to start from say a mach 2 or better sub sonic mach .9, then this will be feasable for more than just bombs. As it is, the only place that this will be of use is in intercontental bombs (small and cheaper).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As the theory of relativity breaks down when someone switches the lights off - as C becomes ZERO.
...Einstein didn't think of that.
Oh no
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
This is prime example of technology that has almost purely military applications.
However since that does not excite public positively, they are instead fooling the public talking about civilian use.
What might be possible some day is to deliver a bomb from Sydney to London in very short time. Not human passangers.
The inherent heat problems are about 100 times easier to solve, if you imagine
the payload is 50kg of plutonium instead of 5000 kg of humans.
Including airport queues that's only about 5 or 6 hours.
According to wikipedia, (I know), the atmosphere is usually considered to end at 328,000ft. (Karman line)
The Stratosphere goes to 160,000ft. You have to go above 50 miles (264,000ft) to be considered an astronaut, and atmospheric effects are noticeable at 400,000ft during reentry.
Significant atmostpheric drag occurs AT much hiGHer elevaTIonS. To say that it starts to have an effect at 75 miles is nuts.
tHE International space station constantly looSEs eleVATion dUe to atmostpheric drag, it's usual elevation is around 500 miles. When the space shuttle visits, it usually burns its rockets to push the ISS back to an elevation close to that.
Just last year the ISS was in a very low orbit becuase solar storms had caused the upper atmosphere to bulge, placing more drag on the station.
(my keyboard is failing, sorry about the mixed case words)
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
What about the Aurora?
How is an altitude of 330 miles within earth's atmosphere ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
That's supersonic supersonic cramjet, twice as supersonic as a usual cramjet. Quite cool.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there. Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible. Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet. But in the end all 3 work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops. The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there.
Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible.
Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet.
Downside: a turbojet can start at zero speed, ramjets and scramjets need enough airspeed to start. Hence all these experiments involve booster rockets.
But in the end all 3 engines work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops.
The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Scramjets look good on paper. The thin air coming in is compressed by a series of standing shock waves. Unfortunately, the geometry of these shock waves can easily be upset by small distortions in the engine, which in turn can lead to changes in the stresses with in the engine, which - to cut a long story short - can mean the engine spectacularly demolishes itself when faced with real bits of atmosphere with unpredictable air currents. I found the flight time in...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/hyshot/default. htm
It may not sound like much, but six seconds is very respectable for a scramjet. Yay!
There is a lot of touting about how this would get you from London to Sydney in 40 minutes and stuff. I am not sure how true or economical this is, even if scramjets can be made safe. When you are flying fast, you can either take your oxidant with you (as rockets do) or you can scoop it up as you go along. Scooping it up as you go along means taking in air that was initially at rest and getting to move at the speed the engine is currently going. As only 20% of the air is actually the oxygen you want, this is not necessarily an effective thing to do. It becomes most effective when the oxidant (oxygen) is a lot heavier than the reductant (fuel - and hydrogen is particularly light), so scooping it up as you go takes a lot off the take-off weight.
The other London to Sydney option is to get just beyond the atmosphere using a conventional rocket, then going ballistic and weightless for the main distance, and re-entering and gliding, a lot like the space shuttle. While being weightless is fun, being weightless for 20 minutes makes most people puke, so a large passenger jet might skip the atmosphere and retain a little gravity. A scramjet might be used for this.
Nevertheless, yay!
Message intercepted. Cover blown. Please return to base for debriefing.
... all the better to bomb you with.
Probably best to refer to the original press release:
http://www.dsto.defence.gov.au/news/5118/
As it says, the test that took place is the first time flight data was taken from a certain design of scramjet, not scramjets in general. I think the media got a little carried away.
The article is a typical layman news-speak that has little detail.
Does the new craft
1) start the scramjet engine after boosting, attaining enough speed and reach apogee of 530km?
2) boost with rocket, reaching apogee of 530km, re-entry and starts the scramjet with gravitational acceleration? (ala another HyShot)?
Either way, both have a lot of previous art and whats so special about it?
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=11183
So which Skyshot plane did fly here?
My experiment consist on
40% methane as superfuel + 20% kerosene as fuel + 15% titaniate of potasium as superoxidizer + 5% sulphate of cupper as oxidizer.
530Km? What's that in furlongs?
Now, that was an explanation! Right now I regret that I'd already posted to this discussion - I can't use my mod points on you. THANKS.
You can't handle the truth.
The scramjet didn't "reach" mach 10 or 530km, the rocket carrying it did:
"They said it reached an altitude of 530 kilometres (330 miles) before the scramjet was successfully deployed"
Pretty far cry from what the article summary claimed, or from even being interesting.
This is cool, yes, but the emphasis on "first" seems a bit off.
The vague, hyped up and imageless press release is typical of the new management's style. The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation signed an unconditional surrender to M$ in May. I found those pictures when I visited the official media release and saw Steve Ballmer instead of scram jets in the image gallery. It's almost like they did this on purpose, just to show you that Vista is being accepted by any government agency.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is there something I'm just not getting here?
Get with the program, comrade, the party also invented the helicopter. All progress and innovation come from the company.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet saying supersonic scramjet is like saying IRS Service
Actually, at least theoretically a scramjet would continue to accelerate as long as you have air and fuel. You have enough air you have of that ascent (after that you have the speed anyway), and fuel you'd carry anyway. A rocket carries its fuel too.
That's actually one thing that makes scramjets tempting: the fact that it doesn't cap lower than that orbital velocity, and it can work with rather thin atmosphere too. So if you can go upwards at all with it, and modify the trajectory to have enough air for more of the time, you can eventually get it to stay up there.
Probably the only thing that _might_ change, if your scramjet doesn't get enough acceleration, is that you shoot it closer to the horizontal than upwards. Well, normal rockets don't really go vertically either. As you've said, they have to end up with that mach 30 horizontal speed. The difference would be that the rocket starts closer to vertical, to clear the dense atmosphere as fast as possible, and bends later, while probably a scramjet would start directly oblique, to make the most of that atmosphere.
Of course, when experimenting to just get the thing sorted out at all, there's somewhat less point in aiming directly for LEO. So probably 14 seconds are enough for experimental purposes.
Also, well, while scramjets are still experimental, ordinary ramjets aren't. A heck of a lot of missiles already use ramjets. E.g., IIRC the Russians were the first to use them on anti-aircraft missiles, but in the meantime almost everyone else does.
So technically we'd already have a pretty damn fast engine to put on an aircraft. If anyone wanted to make a Mach 5 passenger aircraft, that's probably already feasible with ramjets. The reasons why we don't are completely different, and IMHO somewhat unlikely to change because of scramjets.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/SCRAM-Spencer1 .html
But a sneak peek that I had of next months popular mechanics had a scramjet flying car on its cover. They're just around the corner!
As the theory of relativity breaks down when someone switches the lights off - as C becomes ZERO.
...Einstein didn't think of that.
Oh no
He did, actually, but he spent too long on that thought experiment and got eaten by a grue.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
It says that using air from the atmosphere as fuel is basically what makes a scramjet a scramjet, then claims this is the first scramjet ignited within the atmosphere. How the hell did they ignite the other ones without the atmosphere they use as fuel? Further it goes on to say that they sent it into space. Last I checked there isn't much air to use as fuel in space either.
Anyone care to explain? Preferably in English.
That just shows you how fast it was - it traveled back in time and therefore was indeed the first.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
TFA: They said it reached an altitude of 530 kilometres (330 miles) before the scramjet was successfully deployed following re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.
So the scramjet was deployed during a ballistic rocket dive? Seems like an easy way to reach mach-10, with or without a scramjet.
Now they're talking about using it on the way UP, that's quite different from what they did.
Bzzzt. Wrong again! Oxygen could be used as fuel in a fusion process.
Internet Explorer's CSS rendering: WYSIWTF
This one had me laughing and crying at once.
I do only standards-compliant web design. With no hacks even, if I can avoid it at all. I develop my layouts with simultaneous testing in Safari and FF (which agree on rendering 95%+ of the time), then I go back and try to make them work in IE 5.0 through 7.0. Still with no hacks.
The IE-compatibility phase of my design process consumes about 80% of the total time for a typical site. No amount of experience seems to improve this, either, because I find new bugs every time. I've found at least three IE bugs not documented at positioniseverything.net.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I didn't know that Happy Noodle Boy was a /. user.
(JTHM reference)
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Getting to the core of this story is definitely a real challenge, and we may not get it until Aviation Week http://www.aviationweek.com/ reports on it. However, connecting the dots together, this may be the first test flight of the HiFire project, a joint USAF/NASA/Australian effort.
AvWeek ran an article on March 18 this year entitled "The HiFire Flight Tests Will Help Integrate Aeronautics and Space Technologies". (URL was really long, possibly session dependent.) From that article: The HiFire payloads will dive into the atmosphere at Mach 4-8 to obtain data directly applicable to new hypersonic flight vehicles. The tests are to begin in the outback of southern Australia.
The AvWeek article further explains that HiFire will "directly support technology needs for the X-15" and that the X-51 is "the jewel in the crown of hypersonics".