NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Advanced Space Transportation office, in Huntsville, Alabama, has selected five industry teams to develop the much-vaunted but yet operationally unproven technology for air-breathing rocket engines. This could be the next step towards new propulsion techniques to take the agency into the next century and could be applied to future X-aircraft after the X-34 and X-33. A proof-of-concept demonstration firing is scheduled for 2000 as part of the $20 million programme, with a small-scale vehicle flight demonstration in 2002 and an operational flight of a larger craft in 2005.
A three-phase programme to develop a combined propulsion system which consumes atmospheric oxygen while ascending through the lower layers of the atmosphere, then store oxidiser in the rarefied atmosphere, is in progress. Participating are Californian companies Aerojet, Kaiser Marquardt and Rockwell; Pennsylvania State University; and United Technologies/Pratt and Whitney, West Palm Beach, Florida. By reducing stored oxidiser and improving engine performance, the weight and cost of a launcher could be lowered by 95%, the target set by NASA for 2009.
Russia's Central Institute of Aviation Motors will begin tests of hypersonic Mach 6.5 air-breathing scramjet engines in Kazakhstan in 1997 as part of a $1.8 million contract with NASA, which is independent of other efforts at NASA centres, including those at Marshall.
Source: Flight International
