For I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth . . .

[unixronin]

. . . and left'em WAY behind in the dust, this time.  dafydd found this press release on the first successful powered flight of NASA's X-43A scramjet research platform, also known as Hyper-X.  After being boosted to around 3,500mph (5,600kph) and 100,000 feet by an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus air-launched booster, the X-43A made a 10-second powered flight, during which the 2,800lb craft burned about two pounds of gaseous hydrogen fuel, followed by a six-minute unpowered glide to splashdown in the Pacific.  It isn't known at this time exactly what speed the X-43A achieved, but it is designed for speeds approaching 5,000mph (8,000kph)

This is the first ever controlled free flight of a scramjet-powered vehicle and, just by the way, has without the slightest question shattered all existing maximum-speed records for air-breathing vehicles.

Update:

It is now being reported that the X-43A achieved 4,780mph (7,700kph), or around Mach 7, more than twice the previous air-breathing record of Mach 3.2 held by the Lockheed SR71.  This means the X-43A has also broken the X-15's Mach 6.7 record under rocket power, making it (unless I'm badly mistaken) the highest speed ever attained by any winged atmospheric vehicle of any kind.  (The Shuttle attains higher speeds, but does so on the way to and from space; the Martin-Marietta Sprint ABM was also faster, but Sprint is little more than a conical ablative fairing wrapped around a nuclear warhead and the biggest, most powerful solid rocket motor available.)

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• Find dafydd's original post here.
• Scramjet is short for supersonic combustion ramjet, so called because the air-fuel mixture is still supersonic as it passes through the combustion chamber.  This simple-sounding thing is actually stunningly difficult to achieve without the engine blowing out like a candle in a high wind.
• I worked on the design of the onboard computer system for the Pegasus in association with Dryden Flight Research Center while I was at Eastern Washington University, including wire-wrapping the first prototype CPU board, which makes it particularly cool for me every time something cool flies on a Pegasus.
• Sprint's first stage generated 650,000lb of thrust for 1.2 seconds, igniting just after the missile was ejected from its silo by a gas-generator and captive piston, and accelerating Sprint at 100 G.  According to some reports, the missile was already supersonic when it exited the silo.  The second stage ignited 1.2 seconds into flight, and Sprint exceeded Mach 10 within four seconds of second-stage ignition.  It is reported that the radar-targeted command-guidance system had to be detuned during testing, because Sprint was so accurate it often physically hit incoming re-entry vehicles.  Even this was slow compared to another ABM, HiBEX (High-G Boost EXperiment).  Intended for last-ditch interception of incoming re-entry vehicles below 20,000ft altitude, HiBEX was designed to exit its silo within a quarter second and accelerated at 400 G.  Reportedly, ring laser gyros were developed by ARPA for HiBEX because no mechanical gyro could be spun up fast enough.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Ah. No, I meant a vehicle with multiple engines. So, you've got your big RAM/SCRAM in the middle, with a pair of turbines on the sides.

And yes, I didn't mean the specific 400G booster would be useful for anything, but the brainpower it represents, if turned to more peaceful purposes, could have done wonders for getting us out there.

-Ogre