The Australian government and a Queensland university have joined forces with Boeing, the U.S. Air Force and NASA to test the aircraft of the future. Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation, or HIFire, a $54-million program to explore propulsion for so-called hypersonic aircraft traveling at Mach 5 or faster, was announced on January 3 and will run through 2011 with 10 flight tests.

“Hypersonic missiles -- that’s the most likely product,” says Kevin Bowcutt, a Boeing engineer. “We’re also interested in hypersonic [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] for strike and reconnaissance -- and also manned aircraft. Also, routine and affordable access to space in the way you fly in an aircraft.”

The program, which will be hosted by The University of Queensland in northeast Australia, has its roots in a glorified science project begun by university students “several years ago,” Bowcutt says. The students hand-built a small supersonic-combustion “scramjet” engine and boosted it into the air attached to a model rocket.

“That was the first time confirmed scramjet combustion occurred in flight,” Bowcutt says. “That led to industry interest in low-cost hypersonic flight partnerships with Australia.”

The University of Queensland contacted Boeing looking for an industry partner to build on the students’ work. “At the same time,” Bowcutt reports, “[U.S. Air Force Research Laboratories] started exploring a broader program with the Australians.” NASA and regional and national Australian government agencies expressed interest too and soon the disparate efforts merged.

“The primary objective is to get the fundamental science and engineering data on hypersonic flight, and to test, in flight, advanced concepts for aerodynamics and shapes,” Bowcutt reports. For shape is critical in scramjets, which use narrowing inlets that compress air in order to boost the power of a jet engine. While scramjets and their older “ramjet” cousins have been in limited use for decades, they’ve never been robust or cheap enough for large-scale use.   

Boeing, The University of Queensland and its partners hope to change that. Their HIFire represent just one slice of a growing portfolio of hypersonics research programs in the U.S. and allied countries. Boeing alone manages a parallel hypersonics effort tied to the X-51 testbed. Rival Lockheed Martin has taken the lead on the X-43 hypersonic drone and the “RATTLRS” hypersonic cruise missile.

All of these programs have the same goal: to go faster, cheaper.