The X-51A Waverider hitches a ride beneath the wing of a B-52 bomber last week before flying into history at Mach 5.1.
The future of aviation just flashed by at an eye-watering 3,000 miles an hour.
That’s Mach 5.1, for you space travelers. It was the longest air-breathing hypersonic – five times faster than sound, or Mach 5 — flight ever.
No wonder you missed it.
The unmanned X-51A Waverider leapt from the wing on a B-52 bomber and flew westward over the Pacific Ocean last Wednesday. It zipped more than 230 miles in six minutes and flew into the history books before its planned plunge into the sea.
“It was a full mission success,” Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in an Air Force statement. “I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight.”
The Air Force has been seeking to fly at such speeds – faster than a bullet – for decades. Developing such a capability in aircraft and missiles could be a game-changer: letting you fly coast-to-coast in an hour, and letting the U.S. military take out a terrorist, or nuclear-tipped missile on its launchpad, on little more than a moment’s notice.
This was the last of four flights in the decade-long, $300 million program designed to achieve sustained, air-breathing hypersonic flight. Three earlier flights ended prematurely due to various problems.
The B-52 released the WaveRider at 50,000 feet above the southern California coast triggering a solid-rocket booster and then a supersonic combustion ramjet — scramjet — engine. The Waverider team included Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the Air Force’s 412th Test Wing and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, both based at Edwards Air Force Base, and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“Without any moving parts, hydrocarbon fuel is injected into the scramjet’s combustion chamber where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber and is ignited in a process likened to lighting a match in a hurricane,” the Air Force said. “The use of logistically supportable hydrocarbon fuel is widely considered vital for the practical application of hypersonic flight.”
Here’s a video of the start of the test flight (hard to keep up, you understand, once it takes off):
And a little more about the program itself: