The first scramjet, an airbreathing jet engine capable of pushing an aircraft beyond Mach 5, was successfully flown in the early 1990s. But while pretty much any other technology you could imagine has progressed by leaps and bounds in the nearly 30 years that have passed, the state-of-the-art in hypersonic scramjets hasn’t moved much.
We still don’t have practical hypersonic aircraft, military or otherwise, and any missiles that travel at those sort of speeds are rocket powered. NASA’s X-43 hit Mach 9.6 in 2004 This is somewhat surprising since, at least on paper, the operating principle of the scramjet is simplicity itself.
Air rushing into the engine is compressed by the geometry of the inlet, fuel is added, the mixture is ignited, and the resulting flow of expanded gases leaves the engine faster than it entered. There aren’t even any moving parts inside of a scramjet, it’s little more […]
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