The glory days of aviation, when record after record was set, are back – but not for long. Last Saturday, NASA’s unmanned X-43A plane flew at more than seven times the speed of sound for a few brief seconds before plunging into the Pacific ocean. The flight shattered the official speed record for an air-breathing plane of Mach 3.2, set in 1976 by the SR-71 Blackbird.
It was the first successful test of a winged plane powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet or “scramjet” engine. Russia tested a scramjet design in 1991, and in 2002 the HyShot team at the University…
