Ryan Helbach

The engine basically melted because it got so hot, they didn’t actively cool it. So for our program, we actively cooled the engine, which means that along the outside of the engine, we cycled the fuel around it to suck out the heat from the engine, heat up that fuel, and then inject it into the combustor for the scramjet engine.

It basically means you can dump a lot of heat into that fuel, when you crack the fuel, it actually makes it more combustible. It increases the amount of combustion you can create from the fuel.

We are the Air Force. What do we want to do with this technology? We want to weaponize it, the follow-on program to this is the High Speed Strike Weapon effort. It’s taking a lot of the lessons learned and the technology and moving to a weapons acquisition.

There are no moving parts in the flow path, so that means there are no compressor blades to suck in the air, so we need something to get us up to above Mach 4 in order to get the compression into the engine.