Palm Beach Post April 18, 2011
Excitement builds over Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's supersonic 'scramjet'
By Jeff Ostrowski
Curtis Berger could barely contain his enthusiasm as he briefed journalists about the first flight of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's new "scramjet."
The experimental aircraft hit Mach 5, or about 3,750 mph, over the Pacific Ocean last year. That's five times the speed of sound and about twice as fast as the speediest fighter jets fly.
Berger called the flight "highly successful" and stressed that the scramjet — aerospace jargon for supersonic combustion ramjet — sustained its trip for 143 seconds.
"We're talking minutes of flight here," Berger told reporters in March.
Berger, director of hypersonic programs at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, stood at the head of a nondescript conference room on the Pratt & Whitney campus and showed off a slide comparing the scramjet to other seminal developments in transportation — the horse, the train and the jet.
"On trajectory to enter the 22nd century at 6,000 mph," the slide read.
After last year's test flight, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's scramjet garnered no shortage of accolades. Aviation Week bestowed an award on it, and a manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory compared it to the first engine on the Wright brothers' aircraft. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne already is talking about ramping up hiring as early as 2014 to build scramjet engines.
"There's a lot of excitement starting to stir over the success of this," Berger said.
But all the excitement irks John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org . He calls hypersonic flight a decades-old mirage that never seems to grow closer.
"They've been trying to take the 'hype' out of hypersonics for half a century now, and it hasn't happened yet," Pike said. "They draw a lot of pretty pictures, and every once in a while they build some hardware."
The most promising piece of hardware, the engine tested last year, was one of four built at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's plant in northwestern Palm Beach County. The first engine lies — by design — at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The other three are ready to be tested. However, the second test has been delayed, and Berger declined to say why. During his presentation, Berger pointed to a prototype of the engine. It's surprisingly small — a foot wide, a couple of feet tall and maybe 4 feet long. The engine also is deceptively simple — it has no moving parts.
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