Big things are happening with little fanfare at the Woomera Rocket Range in the deserts of South Australia.
While there is no such thing as a traffic jam in that bleak landscape, either on or above it, there is plenty of action going on to tap the potential power of the ultra-high speed scramjet technology.
British, Australian-American and Japanese projects are all scheduled for firings at Woomera this year and US planemaker Boeing has quietly decided to fund research at the University of Queensland's Center of Hypersonics, which famously stole a march on everyone by being the first, in 2002, to actually make a scram jet engine work in flight.
Scram jets are "in theory incredibly simple and in practice quite complex devices" according to Professor Allan Paull, the project leader at the center, which is collaborating with all of the current projects.
"They use velocity to scoop up and compress the air in a manner that allows propulsion to occur at speeds where normal engines, even in Concorde or the fastest military jets, can't function," he says.
Provided they, or the aircraft they are powering at eight times the speed of sound don't melt. The current projects are about getting the engine technology right before designing aircraft that can use it.
As soon as late next month the recently stock-market listed UK defense firm Qinetiq will test its unique design for a hypersonic "scramjet" engine, by firing it back to earth at 11,000kph after it is launched 400km into space atop a research rocket.
In the few seconds before the test flight becomes a crater the engine will attempt to boost its velocity using the scram jet principle.
Qinetiq should be followed into space, and then sharply back from it, by test vehicles from a joint US-Australian defense collaboration and a so far low-key Japanese research project quite distinct from last year's successful rocket launched test flight of a scale model of a proposed supersonic airliner.
However like most of the activities that take place at Woomera, the British mission is low-key even in name.
Qinetiq is simply identifying this mission as the third of a series of the Australian Hyshot scramjet launches even though its rakish quadruple intake design looks very different to the local product.
Hyshot I was a dud, but Hyshot II achieved the world's first scram jet flight back on July 30, 2002, beating the American US$300m Hyper-X program by 21 months in demonstrating the process, and with a budget of a mere US$1.5m.
It was so unbelievably cheap the device became known in aerospace circles as "the scrooge jet," with the Australian researchers buying some of the equipment needed to make it from DIY home improvement stores.
Yet more than low launch costs explain the various national and international scram jet activities that are going on at Woomera.
The Hypersonics Center more than 1,000km away in Brisbane, has the world's original "shock tube" wind tunnels dating back to 1993, built for small change in terms of space budgets, yet considered the best in the world today.
"Shock tubes" generate air flows that can't be achieved in conventional wind tunnels.
"We have a longer practical experience than anyone else," Paull says. "But we emphasize research into unanswered questions more than anything else.
"Some experts claim that using an air breathing scram jet stage in a satellite launch vehicle could increase the payload as much as seven fold. We don't know. We are trying to find out by how much as our own projects continue," he added.
Typical satellite launching rockets, weighing roughly 300 tonnes at ignition, only place around half of 1 percent of that mass into orbit.
Boeing, which never publicly announced its decision late last year to invest unspecified research funds in the Australian hypersonics program, is however quite clear as to why. A spokesman for the company pointed out successful application of the technology would mean planes going so fast they could connect any two points on earth in two hours.
In fact Boeing has been vocal for several years over its intention to "invest in brains" all over the world. The company points to joint research ventures with Russia's Sukhoi design center in Moscow, with multiple heavy industry partners in Japan in making the high-technology 787 Dreamliners out of more carbon fibre and less metal, and with French aerospace component makers to design elements of aircraft that will compete against Airbus.
"If this works," he says, "it will be the most exciting thing to happen to air transport since the first airlines handed out goggles and fur coats to passengers who sat in the slipstream."
However Professor Paull has a more startling view as where the scramjet technology might lead. He says a commercial application, if feasible, will take some decades, and before economies of scale start to bring down ticket prices a different role might be the speedy distribution of donor organs.
"At the moment these are very expensive and time critical medical procedures," he says.
"They are also dependent for that reason on donors limited to a small geographical region. Yet Hyshot technology could allow automated high speed access to donors world wide, saving lives before it becomes sufficiently affordable to save time for long-distance travelers," he added.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique