3 ms·

That really is the problem with scramjets - apparently the longest test flights have been only a few minutes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet#Progress

• techdragon 4y ago
  Thing is, if you’re able to hit your target in a few minutes, your engine, your avionics or even your software stack only needs to last a few minutes. I can’t find a Google reference right now on my mobile, but there’s a relatively well known example of a mission having some sort of loop related overflow in the guidance software that wasn’t fixed because by the time it could possibly happen, the rocket has burned out and the missile has done its job, it’s either exploded or is falling out of the sky and the software bug was irrelevant.
• jjk166 4y ago
  Well when you are moving at about a mile per second, a few minutes is a long flight. The issue with scramjets is they operate under extreme conditions which are both unforgiving (small errors are catastrophic) and difficult to model (experimental data is limited and expensive to gain). The only path to development is to produce lots of full scale, fully functional prototypes with the understanding most will be destroyed in seconds and there will be little if anything recoverable afterwards to study to determine what went wrong.