| Summary: | The HIFiRE program is an Australian/US collaboration tasked with studying fundamental hypersonic phenomena and developing the technologies to enable future hypersonic flight. HIFiRE 7 is a free-flying scramjet experiment, the primary objective of which is to measure the thrust produced by a three-dimensional scramjet and compare the measurement to ground test data. It was launched from the Andøya Space Center in March, 2015; a component failure resulted in loss of data before the scramjet combustion experiment commenced. However, the flight experiment was successful in many aspects, including the achievement of several key technical objectives that will enable future hypersonic flight testing in Australia, and the demonstration of scramjet inlet self-starting at high altitude. This paper will describe the HIFiRE 7 experiment and present available flight data.
|
|---|