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."

Comments

Why was the altitude changed?

[thesolo]

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?

Re:Why was the altitude changed?

[Anonymous Coward]

England invented proper rules of capitalization and punctuation, and they officially use the metric system now. Is there any country other than the US which doesn't? (According to Wikipedia two other countries actually do; Liberia and Myanmar. Great company.)
Not to mention that the US has been butchering proper English spelling and grammar ever since Webster. Just switch to Metric measurements and the Celsius temperature scale already. The rest of the world is getting tired of having to convert measurements for the sole purposes of dealing with the US. [/troll]

Re:Suborbital trajectories?

[Rei]

All of his points are basically correct in the present day. However, the most critical one -- the expense of heat-resistant materials -- may only be temporary. It's hard to say. Carbon fiber was once the "we'd love to use it, but it'd be too expensive except for pricey custom luxury jobs" material for airplanes. Now look at the Dreamliner -- a mass-produced majority-carbon-fiber giant by Boeing, which despite delays, companies have been snapping up.

I wouldn't rule out the concept of hypersonic travel just because heat resistant materials are expensive today. If the rest of the tech is there and is affordable, and there is sufficient demand... who knows? The airline industry is bloody huge and there is lots of money to be made by faster travel, so it could draw a lot of R&D money if the other tech looks good.

Re:X-43A?

[tbischel]

...it was believed to be the first time a scramjet had been ignited within the Earth's atmosphere
Ah I see... as opposed to the many airbreathing scramjets ignited outside earths atmosphere.

Military, not Civilian applications

[moikka]

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.