Boeing's Unmanned Scramjet, the X-51A WaveRider, Achieves Hypersonic Speeds

What is the world going to look like in 20 years? If you could get on an airplane and get from one end of the country to the other in less than an hour, that would be pretty cool. I think this technology offers that to people at some point in the future. This is the warp drive of today. A scramjet is a new type of engine. The scramjet engine functions by compressing the air with the shock wave as you move through the atmosphere and as it's compressing the air, it's compressing the fuel in the air and then it ignites it, releasing heat and energy, which is then expanded out the back end through a nozzle. We light the scramjet engine when we're flying at about Mach 4.5. It's akin to lighting a match in a hurricane and keeping it lit. Mach 5, you're traveling about a mile a second, so if you fly at 160 seconds, you've managed to fly 160 miles in that rough period of time. Access to space, it's another piece of that growth path. It's the golden ring in space access and transportation. I think X-51 is one of those type of technologies. It's a turning point in technology. You will look back in the history books, I would suspect, and this will be one of the technologies that will make that transition to a new world of travel. I am told on a regular basis that you can't do this. That's actually a challenge that I like to take. We don't believe in impossible. We believe that anything is achievable if you set your mind to it. It's back to doing something nobody's ever done before.