An exciting new voyage

Volume 48, No. 22, November 30, 2006

By Barry Rollings

AIR travel from Sydney to Los Angeles in two hours might be one of the future commercial spin-offs from the multi-million dollar agreement between DSTO and USAF to advance research into hypersonic flight.

The Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, Senator Sandy Macdonald, said the eight-year Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) project was one of the largest collaborative research ventures undertaken between the two nations.

“The HIFiRE project will result in up to 10 hypersonic flight experiments conducted over the next five years at Woomera in South Australia,” Senator Macdonald said.

At the November 10 launch, experts said that if the high end of hypersonics was 10km a second, 5km a second was “the dream” and achieving 2.5km a second, or 8500km/h, was hard.

Senator Macdonald said the ADF is developing a high-technology, network-enabled force and its reliance on space is increasing for intelligence-gathering, communications and a range of support operations.

“Hypersonics offers low-cost methods of transporting payloads into space, using reusable air- breathing propulsion systems.”

He said Australia had an extensive team of experienced researchers in hypersonics, along with state-of-the-art equipment for simulating velocities up to 50 times the speed of sound.

.