AN AIRCRAFT that can fly at ten times the speed of sound will be tested over the Pacific Ocean today — possibly leading to “hypersonic” cruise missiles that could travel from Los Angeles to Pyongyang in less than an hour.

The aircraft was designed by Nasa to travel 850 miles in just ten seconds, or 7,000mph.

The robot-controlled X-43A, which uses a “scramjet” engine, may help commercial aircraft manufacturers to build faster and more fuel-efficient planes.

Scramjet technology could also help Nasa to develop a new, safer space shuttle to replace the doomed Columbia. The X-43A is part of a $230 million (£125 million) research programme into hypersonic flight.

Nasa delayed the launch for 24 hours yesterday after an apparent glitch with the aircraft’s electronics systems.

The test flight will be enormously important to the American space agency, which recently saw its Genesis space probe crash into the Utah desert, and before that, the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle during re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, many have questioned Nasa’s huge budgets after a private company, funded by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, sent a private spacecraft into near-orbit three times.

The X-43A is initially transported on the back of a modified B52 aircraft to 40,000ft, then carried to its launch height, at 110,000ft, on the back of a conventional Pegasus booster-rocket. At that point the scramjet engine is started.

The scramjet works by mixing fuel with oxygen obtained from the air. Rocket engines are different altogether because they carry their own bulky supplies of oxygen, allowing them to operate in the vacuum of space. It has taken a long time for scramjet engines to be developed because they can be tested only at supersonic flight speeds. “While the concept is simple, proving the concept is not,” Nasa said. “It has taken researchers decades to demonstrate scramjet technologies, first in wind tunnels and computer simulations, and recently in experimental flight tests.”

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