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end of time. But it’ll always emerge completely undamaged.
    Sunday 21 March 2004

Hurricane Hank pulls a fast one on the scramjet
    So Nasa has smashed the speed record for plane flight. In a test last weekend, an unmanned ‘scramjet’ was dropped from the belly of a B-52 bomber and reached a speed of Mach 7, or almost 5,000 mph.
    Pundits are talking about planes that could get from London to Sydney in two hours and from Paris to New York in 30 minutes. So well done, America, for making it work and God bless Mr Bush.
    Except for one small thing. Two years ago a British scramjet quietly, and with no fuss, reached similar speeds over the Australian outback. Yup, like everything else, scramjets are one of ours.
    For 40 years scramjets have been the holy grail for the world of aviation. Unlike in a normal jet, air comes into the front of the engine, is mixed with hydrogen, ignited and then hurled out of the back. There are no moving parts, no harmful exhaust gases and, best of all, the faster you go, the faster it goes.
    Theoretically, they have a limitless top speed.
    The British version was developed by an operation called QinetiQ which, over the years, has come up with stuff like microwave radar, carbon fibre and liquid crystal displays.
    Today, in their unheated pre-war prefabs, with nicotine-yellow walls and damp concrete stairwells, men withcolossal brains and plastic shoes are working on power systems for America’s new joint strike fighter and a huge sail that harvests fog. (It’s based on a sub-Saharan beetle, the stenocara, which collects moisture from the night air on its back and then has a handy water supply through the day.)
    Do you remember reading recently about the millimetric scanning device that can see through clothes? It was designed for airport security, but there was much tittering about other applications. Either way, that was one of theirs, too, so I should imagine that a simple little thing like a scramjet gave them no problems at all. They probably did it in a coffee break.
    The big question, however, is why they didn’t make more of a fuss when the test was successful. Is this a return to the days of the jet engine and the hovercraft, yet another example of British inventiveness being thwarted by British corporate and governmental apathy?
    No. No fuss was made because, contrary to what you’ve been told by the over-excited Americans, you will never go to Australia or anywhere on a scramjet.
    ‘Anyone who tells you different is in an election year,’ one expert said last week.
    Here’s why. First, the hydrogen needed for a 12,000-mile trip to Sydney – and hydrogen is light, remember – would weigh more than the plane it was fuelling.
    Next, scramjets start to work only when the plane is doing Mach 5 (3,810 mph). And how, pray, are you supposed to reach that kind of speed?
    The Nasa plane in last weekend’s test was taken to an altitude of 40,000 feet by the B-52, where it was dropped.A rocket then took it up to 90,000 feet and Mach 7. At this point the scramjet took over and yes, there was minimal acceleration, but it was out of fuel in just 11 seconds.
    You may recall the British Hotol project from the late 1980s. This, it was said, would use scramjets and rockets. Brilliant. Sydney would be just 45 minutes away.
    But not even Britain’s boffins could figure out how it would get off the ground in the first place.
    I don’t want to sound like a doom-monger, but think about it. You have a 15-minute bus ride from the car park to the terminal, a half-hour queue for check-in, another half-hour being laughed at by security staff as they ‘look’ through your clothes, and then an hour’s walk to the gate.
    Here you’ll board a bomber that will take an hour or so to reach the right altitude, before you are loaded into a rocket which shoots you up into space. You then career back down again in scramjet mode, landing in Australia at about 14 million mph. Where you’ll be eaten by a