Hypersonic

Atlanta company Hermeus has its sights set on Mach 4 next year, to beat the Mach 3.3 benchmark set by the SR-71 Blackbird way back in 1976. Watch its Chimera hybrid engine nailing the switch between low-speed turbojet mode and hypersonic ramjet mode.

As the world's major powers continue their never-ending arms race into the hypersonic age, the US Air Force has set Leidos to work on a large air-breathing hypersonic drone capable of handling intelligence, recon, surveillance and strike missions.

The US Air Force has reached a major milestone, completing the first test of its All-Up-Round AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missile off the coast of Southern California last Friday.

Aerospace company Stratolaunch has bold plans to launch swift and repeatable hypersonic flights from its massive Roc carrier aircraft, and has now taken an important step forward with these ambitions.

China is reminding the world that it is very much in the race to deploy hypersonic missiles, with the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Northwestern Polytechnical University successfully launching the Feitian-1, a RBCC-propelled vehicle.

In a double-shot of hypersonics news, the US Air Force has conducted an air-launched flight test of its AGM-183A hypersonic missile, while DARPA has successfully test fired a prototype of its OpFires ground-based hypersonic missile launch system.

Reaction Engines has built a precooler for its SABRE engine that can chill a hypersonic airstream from 1,000 °C to -150 °C in 1/20th of a second. Now it's doing tests with the USAF and DoD to prove it can upgrade other existing jets to handle Mach 4.

"Top Gun: Maverick" has quickly become a monumental success at the box office, but the film's producers couldn't have done it without leveraging the expertise of some of the world's foremost experts in all things aerospace from Lockheed Martin Skunk Works.

The world's largest flying aircraft has reached record heights, with Stratolaunch today completing the seventh test flight of its gigantic Roc carrier plane and logging a record altitude for the huge aircraft in the process.

For the first time, the US Air Force has successfully recovered a reusable rocket sled traveling at hypersonic speed. The test in late March was part of the USAF's Hypersonic Sled Recovery project and saw the sled reach 5.6 times the speed of sound.

Back in 2020 we first heard about the Talon-A hypersonic aircraft, which would be released from the world's largest airplane at an altitude of 35,000 ft (10,000 m). A test version of the Talon-A, called the TA-0, was unveiled this week.

It was fourth time's the charm as the US Air Force successfully launched its hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) from a B-52H Stratofortress on May 14 off the coast of Southern California, following three failures.