SCIFIRE, or the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment, is[ as of? ] an American-Australian military technology partnership that is developing a solid-rocket-boosted, air-breathing, hypersonic conventionally-armed cruise missile that can be launched by existing fighter or bomber aircraft.
The project is led by the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Department of Defence. The United States Air Force, United States Navy, the Royal Australian Air Force Headquarters, and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group are working with contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Technologies.
The project is an "outgrowth" of the 2007-initiated HIFiRE project, which involved the same partners and explored scramjet engine technology and tested the flight dynamics of a Mach-8 hypersonic glide vehicle. SCIFiRE officially commenced in November 2020. The missile will be capable of Mach 5 speed and will be suitable for launching from an F/A-18F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler, F-35A Lightning II, or a P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft. Flight testing is expected to occur in the RAAF Woomera Range Complex in South Australia. [1] [2]
As of 2021, the missile was expected to enter service within 5 to 10 years. [3] The Australian Government considers the missile to be a potential deterrent to would-be aggressors in the Pacific region. [4]
The follow-on tactical-range Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) will be built by Raytheon Technologies and will use a Northrop Grumman scramjet. [5]
A cruise missile is an unmanned self-propelled guided vehicle that sustains flight through aerodynamic lift for most of its flight path and whose primary mission is to place an ordnance or special payload on a target. Cruise missiles are designed to deliver a large warhead over long distances with high precision. Modern cruise missiles are capable of traveling at high subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic speeds, are self-navigating, and are able to fly on a non-ballistic, extremely low-altitude trajectory.
A scramjet is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully before combustion, but where as a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion using shock cones, a scramjet has no shock cone and slows the airflow using shockwaves produced by its ignition source in place of a shock cone. This allows the scramjet to operate efficiently at extremely high speeds.
The NASA X-43 was an experimental unmanned hypersonic aircraft with multiple planned scale variations meant to test various aspects of hypersonic flight. It was part of the X-plane series and specifically of NASA's Hyper-X program developed in the late 1990s. It set several airspeed records for jet aircraft. The X-43 is the fastest jet-powered aircraft on record at approximately Mach 9.6.
Black project is an informal term used to describe a highly classified, top-secret military or defense project that is not publicly acknowledged by government, military personnel, or contractors.
The Northrop Grumman E-10 MC2A was planned as a multi-role military aircraft to replace the Boeing 707-based E-3 Sentry and E-8 Joint STARS, the Boeing 747-based E-4B, and the RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft in US military service. The E-10 was based on the Boeing 767-400ER commercial airplane.
The air-sol moyenne portée is a French nuclear air-launched cruise missile manufactured by MBDA France. In French nuclear doctrine, it is referred to as a "pre-strategic" weapon, the last-resort "warning shot" prior to a full-scale employment of strategic nuclear weapons launched from the Triomphant-class ballistic missile submarines. The missile's development was undertaken by Aérospatiale's Tactical Missile Division, now part of MBDA.
A supersonic aircraft is an aircraft capable of supersonic flight, that is, flying faster than the speed of sound. Supersonic aircraft were developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Supersonic aircraft have been used for research and military purposes, but only two supersonic aircraft, the Tupolev Tu-144 and the Concorde, ever entered service for civil use as airliners. Fighter jets are the most common example of supersonic aircraft.
The DARPA FALCON Project was a two-part joint project between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the United States Air Force (USAF) and is part of Prompt Global Strike. The first part of the project aimed to develop a Small Launch System (SLS) capable of accelerating hypersonic gliding weapons as well as launching small satellites into Earth orbit. The second part of the project aimed to develop Hypersonic Weapon Systems (HWS): a short term high performance hypersonic gliding weapon previously named the X-41 Common Aero Vehicle (CAV) that could be launched from Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELV), Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs), Hypersonic Cruise Vehicles (HCV), or Space Maneuvering Vehicles (SMP), and a long term hypersonic cruise aircraft named the Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV). This two-part program was announced in 2003 and continued into 2006.
The Boeing X-51 Waverider is an unmanned research scramjet experimental aircraft for hypersonic flight at Mach 5 and an altitude of 70,000 feet (21,000 m). The aircraft was designated X-51 in 2005. It completed its first powered hypersonic flight on 26 May 2010. After two unsuccessful test flights, the X-51 completed a flight of over six minutes and reached speeds of over Mach 5 for 210 seconds on 1 May 2013 for the longest duration powered hypersonic flight.
Scramjet programs refers to research and testing programs for the development of supersonic combustion ramjets, known as scramjets. This list provides a short overview of national and international collaborations, and civilian and military programs. The USA, Russia, India, and China (2014), have succeeded at developing scramjet technologies.
Hypersonic flight is flight through the atmosphere below altitudes of about 90 km at speeds greater than Mach 5, a speed where dissociation of air begins to become significant and high heat loads exist. Speeds over Mach 25 have been achieved below the thermosphere as of 2020.
HyShot is a research project of The University of Queensland, Australia Centre for Hypersonics, to demonstrate the possibility of supersonic combustion under flight conditions using two scramjet engines, one designed by The University of Queensland and one designed by QinetiQ.
The HSTDV is an unmanned scramjet demonstration aircraft for hypersonic flight. It is being developed as a carrier vehicle for hypersonic and long-range cruise missiles, and will have multiple civilian applications including the launching of small satellites at low cost. The HSTDV program is being run by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) is an experimental hypersonic glide vehicle developed as part of the DARPA Falcon Project designed to fly in the Mach 20 range. It is a test bed for technologies to provide the United States with the capability to reach any target in the world within one hour using an unmanned hypersonic bomber aircraft.
The Lockheed Martin SR-72, colloquially referred to as "Son of Blackbird", is an American hypersonic UAV concept intended for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) proposed privately in 2013 by Lockheed Martin as a successor to the retired Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. In 2018, company executives said an SR-72 test vehicle could fly by 2025 and enter service in the 2030s.
A hypersonic weapon is a weapon capable of travelling at hypersonic speed, defined as between 5 and 25 times the speed of sound or about 1 to 5 miles per second.
The AGM-183 ARRW is a hypersonic air-to-ground ballistic missile planned for use by the United States Air Force. Developed by Lockheed Martin, the boost-glide vehicle is propelled to a maximum speed of more than Mach 5 by a rocket motor before gliding toward its target. The program was cancelled in March 2023 after multiple failed tests. The program, however, continued despite the cancellation and was announced to still be in development following additional, undisclosed testing. However in 2024 it was announced that in the fiscal year 2025 budget, no funding would be provided for procurement or further research and development.
The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept is a scramjet powered hypersonic air-launched cruise missile project at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), that had a successful hypersonic flight announced in September 2021. It is a kinetic energy weapon, without an explosive warhead.
The Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) is a scramjet-powered hypersonic air-launched cruise missile project, the successor of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) and the SCIFiRE hypersonic programs.