Conventional rockets require large amounts of fuel and oxidizer, making them heavy and expensive. Scramjets use atmospheric oxygen as an oxidizer, making them lighter and faster. NASA is interested in scramjet technology, which could revolutionize commercial spaceflight and air travel.
Conventional rockets create thrust by combining liquid fuel with an oxidizer, usually liquid oxygen. Both the fuel and the oxidizer take up a lot of space, resulting in rockets that need to be very large to get the thrust needed to launch a satellite into orbit. For example, it takes 8 grams of oxygen to ignite 1 gram of hydrogen, a typical rocket fuel. For a rocket to hold both a fuel and an oxidizer, containers for both are required, further increasing the total weight of the rocket and requiring even more fuel to deliver a given payload to orbit. Conventional rockets need a complex network of tubes and holes to ensure fuel and oxidizer mix evenly and quickly during the launch process.
Going beyond the techniques employed by conventional rockets, the Supersonic Combustion Ramjet (scramjet) uses atmospheric oxygen as an oxidizer, completely bypassing the need for an onboard oxidizer. A large scoop at the front of the boat draws in air, while onboard systems isolate the oxygen from the air, compress it, and introduce it into a fuel stream when it then uses the oxygen to burn and produce thrust. In order for a scramjet to absorb enough oxygen for self-sustaining flight, it must already be moving at supersonic speeds. For this reason, a scramjet must be mated to a conventional rocket at the start of its flight.
The first successful scramjet attempt occurred on August 16, 2002, when the University of Queensland’s HyShot team launched their scramjet rocket from a launch pad in Woomera, Australia. Mounted on a Terrior Orion rocket, the scramjet reached speeds of Mach 7.7 and flew for a total of 6 seconds, which is enough to demonstrate that the scramjet principle works. NASA has expressed great interest in scramjet technology by launching the Hyper-X program, a collaborative effort between the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia and the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, to make scramjet technology a practical reality.
One day, scramjets could get passengers from Tokyo to New York City in less than 2 hours, nearly 10 times faster than conventional airliners. Because a scramjet carries no oxidizer tanks, it can be much lighter, faster, and ultimately cheaper than conventional rocket technology. Its only output is water, released by combining hydrogen, the fuel, with oxygen, the oxidizer, and it doesn’t need to discard huge empty fuel tanks as conventional rockets do. The scramjet may be the most appropriate tool for delivering payloads and passengers to orbit in a future era of commercialized spaceflight.
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