New ‘scramjet’ can fly from from Toronto to Vancouver in less than 30 minutes

It sounds a bit like a Mythbusters experiment, but in a race between a car doing the posted speed limit across Metro Toronto and a Boeing's X-51A scramjet flying from Vancouver to Toronto, the car would lose.

But we won't be booking any flights on the "Waverider," so named because it flies by riding on the shockwave generated as it plows through the air. Boeing built the X-51A, which has been in testing for the past few years, as part of the U.S. Military's next generation cruise missile program, so it isn't built to have any passengers other than its explosive payload.

Scramjets, short for supersonic combustable ramjets, are a very promising technology that combines features of a jet engine with those of a rocket engine. Air drawn into the engine from the front is compressed, then mixed with fuel and ignited, and the exhaust exits out the back, all at supersonic speeds.

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Regardless of the X-51A's military purpose, other, more peaceful, applications have been proposed for scramjet technology.

It's possible that a scramjet-equipped aircraft could take off from an airport on the ground, achieve orbit, and then return to land again, without any assistance from rocket boosters. This would allow for easy flights up to the International Space Station and back, and could put any airport on the planet less than a 90-minute flight away.

Update: US Air Force officials released the following regarding yesterday's X51-A test flight.

"A fault was identified with one of the cruiser control fins. Once the X-51 separated from the rocket booster, approximately 15 seconds later, the cruiser was not able to maintain control due to the faulty control fin and was lost."

If the test had gone according to plan, the vehicle was supposed to have flown for 5 minutes, reaching speeds in excess of Mach 6, and then crash into the Pacific Ocean. Due to the fault, it only flew for around 15 seconds before it lost control, and the researchers were forced to destroyed it.

Since the failure occurred before the vehicle could ignite the scramjet, it's unlikely they were able to get any useful information from the test. The full details of the test and failure will be made public in a few weeks, after researchers have time to investigate thoroughly.