A British scramjet engine belonging to QinetiQ was tested during the "HyShot" flight tests in the Australian desert in October. HyShot is an international space project led by the University of Queensland (UQ), which involves the launch of two Terrier Orion rockets fitted with scramjets in experiments at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide.
The QinetiQ scramjet engine was been prepared for flight on October 30 and flew at an estimated Mach 7.6 (7.6 times the speed of sound). This followed a mission on October 24 using a scramjet designed by researchers in UQ's Centre for Hypersonics.
Scramjets are air-breathing supersonic combustion ramjet engines. They are calculated to have the best performance of any engine for vehicles flying in the Mach 7 to 15 range. If these calculations can be verified by experiment, the scramjet may make flights of only several hours between Australia and Britain possible.
It is hoped the experiment will validate information already captured in UQ's T4 ground shock tunnel, one of the few facilities on earth capable of conducting ground based scramjet experiments for flight Mach numbers of the order of 8 or higher. The British scramjet engine is currently in Australia undergoing ground tests at the T4 shock tunnel.