By Peter Weiss
Traveling 29,000 meters above Earth, a small unmanned craft last week became the first airplane to fly powered by an exotic type of engine known as a scramjet. The wedge-shaped vehicle, called an X-43A or Hyper-X, separated from its booster rocket and zoomed at a hypersonic speed of seven times the speed of sound—a record for air-breathing jet planes.
Although the little plane’s self-powered flight lasted only 11 seconds, that brief journey on March 27 marks a major milestone on the way to a new breed of very fast airplanes, comments Werner J.A. Dahm of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Such hypersonic jets could potentially ferry payloads cheaply to the brink of space or deliver lethal force anywhere around the globe in just a couple of hours (SN: 9/19/98, p. 182: https://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/9_19_98/fob5.htm). Eventually, hypersonic transports carrying passengers may zip just as quickly over the Pacific, Dahm adds.