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A scram jet engine is an engine that is much lighter than a conventional jet engine, can propel an object at speeds of over 5000 miles per hour and has no moving parts. If you could get it to work, the trip from London to Sydney would only take two hours. This technology would also be very useful to launch small satellites. The engine runs on oxygen, which it gets from the atmosphere, and a small amount of hydrogen. The engine would save a fantastic amount on the cost of fuel. This technology has been around since the 1950s but the problem is the motor will only become efficient at five times the speed of sound or Mach 5. Because of this the plane would need two engines, an engine capable of getting it to Mach 5 and a Scram Jet.

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Source for pictures and movies: NASA

In 1947 the Russians drew up these plans for a ramjet plane. The ramjet was the predecessor to the scramjet. It was much slower. The Germans had used the Ramjet in their V1 Buzz bombs.

	X43A - U.S. Scramjet Project.
	Quick Time Movie. Size 6.8 Megs. This 37-second video shows the first flight of the B-52 with the Hyper-X / X-43A attached. There is no release of the Hyper-X
	MPEG Movie. Size 2119 KB This 14-second video animation shows the Hyper-X research vehicle (X-43A) mounted on a Pegasus launch vehicle beneath the B-52 mothership wing, followed by the launch of the Pegasus¨ with the X-43A still attached.
	MPEG Movie. Size 1,677 KB. This 32-second video animation shows the flight of the Pegasus¨ launch vehicle with the X-43A attached, the separation of the X-43A and its maneuver and flight above the Pacific Ocean. About midway through the clip, the animation portrays the firing of the scramjet engines in the X-43A vehicle.
	NASA's attempt to set a new speed record for an aircraft ended in failure June 2, 2001, when they had to blow up the rocket that was to launch the unmanned X-43A jet.

On July 30, 2002, the Australians launched a rocket carrying a small scramjet engine designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound. The University of Queensland has been developing scramjets for the past 16 years with funding from Australian, US, Japanese and German sources. The flight was a success.

Ramjet-scramjet engine, built by the Russia's Central Institute for Aviation Motors, was mounted on a surface-to-air missile for a Russian-NASA flight test in 1998. There were claims of success when this engine was first tested jointly with the French then jointly with NASA.

What does the future hold for us using scramjets? Well it looks like we will be able to fly anywhere on earth in about 2 hours or faster. The flights might be a lot cheaper since we won't need anywhere near as much fuel. Services should become cheaper also since satellite launches using scramjets should lower the launch price considerably.

NASA engineers say they want to raise the technology readiness level of this air-breathing engine concept that relies on pulses of power rather than a streaming burn of fuel. These pulses - detonations - collectively produce more thrust than a steady burn. The resulting application might be a high-Mach missile, or eventually on a larger scale, a tactical aircraft engine. One study suggests a pulse detonation engine could yield a 30 to 50 percent improvement in fuel consumption over a conventional jet engine. Another promising aspect of PDE technology is its efficiency, which remains high, above Mach 3, where conventional jet engines play out. Proponents of pulse detonation suggest it could even have higher efficiency than ramjets and scramjets. Dryden plans to mount a test PDE on a pylon beneath an F-15 to test its performance.

A Collection of X Planes