22 times faster. Flying at 21,000 km / h is so crazy that nobody really dreamed of it and yet… it could happen. This is the subject of research by scientists at UCF ( the University of Florida ) who claim to have succeeded in channeling into an engine an enormous power capable of propelling an aircraft at Mach 17 (seventeen times the speed of sound ). To put it in perspective, that's about 22 times the average speed of an Airbus.

Technology that detonates. To achieve such a feat, the researchers abandoned the traditional combustion engine for detonation. Suddenly discharging a gigantic amount of energy, the detonation is here stabilized and channeled by the researchers thanks to a ramp system inclined at 30 degrees containing the shock wave in the reaction chamber. As mechanical engineer Kareem Ahmed, leading the research team, sums it up, “  it's almost like freezing an intense explosion in finite space ”. A captured explosion whose energy is recovered to power the hypersonic propulsion.

Hypersonic missile. If the first considered use of this technology is air transport, this hypersonic propulsion system could also make it possible to launch rockets into orbit or… missiles. As David Szondy explained in New Atlas in 2017 , no radar or missile defense system in the world is currently able to cope with a hypersonic missile. Not to mention the power of the machine which could cause damage equivalent to that of a nuclear bomb ... Still at the state of research, we will not fail to follow developments in the field.