SYDNEY, July 30: Australian scientists were cock-a-hoop on Tuesday after making aviation history by getting a scramjet airborne.

A scramjet, or supersonic combustion ramjet, is a revolutionary type of engine that could propel a passenger jet from Sydney to London in just two hours.

The test launch of two identical rockets took place at the Woomera space port, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, in outback South Australia.

Each rocket blasted a scramjet 315 kilometres into space. As it fell earthwards at eight times the speed of sound, the engine was fired for about five seconds.

The object of the test was to see whether experiments carried out in a wind tunnel at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Hypersonics could be replicated in the atmosphere.

The launch was watched carefully by rival teams of engineers in the United States and Japan, where attempts at lofting a scramjet have not been successful. Theoretically, scramjets could cruise at 25 times the speed of sound.

Its advantage over traditional rocket propulsion systems is that, rather than carry bulky oxygen tanks, it can take in oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere. Scramjets are also simply constructed, containing no moving parts.

There is a downside, however, as its engine only fires up at speeds of more than 5,000 kilometres an hour.

The first application for a scramjet would not be to power hypersonic aircraft but to put a spacecraft into orbit.

The Queensland University team said it would be 24 hours before the success of the Woomera launch could be gauged.

Scramjet pioneer Ray Stalker, who set up Queensland’s Centre for Hypersonics, said it was the first time that combustion, an essential part of scramjet technology, had been tested in the atmosphere.—dpa