Click to play videoBrisbane (Australia): If you had to take a long flight, say, from London to Sydney, you'd like to do it in minimum time. Rocket scientists in Australia are busy finding a way to make it possible.
Blink and you'll miss it. On a range in the Australian outback, the Hyshot III experiment, led by the University of Queensland, achieves a lift off. It has a revolutionary rocket engine called Scramjet, capable of astonishing speeds, around seven times faster than a typical 747 jet.
"The engines that we've tested go at Mach 8 (eight thousand kilometers per hour). You could go from Sydney to London in two to three hours," says rocket engineer, Michael Smart.
Scramjet has the potential to transform air travel. It stands for 'supersonic combustion ramjet'.
The technology was first designed forty years ago. But getting it in the air is the real challenge.
"We can test them in a wind tunnel which goes so far, but then the real test is actually flying one of these things. And trying to make one of them fly in the past has been very very difficult because it's very expensive on a tight budget," says Hyshot team leader, Alan Paull.
Paull's team's first attempt in 2001 had failed. But not long after, the Hyshot team became the first to achieve a Scramjet flight test, even ahead of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
"You'd be really looking at people trying to launch satellites with these things, and probably in 30 to 50 years time, someone might actually be game enough to put a human being on it," says Paull.
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