Ibadan, July 29, 2024. – Australian launch services company Gilmour Space Technologies is launching a new suborbital flight test service in Australia targeting commercial and defense customers requiring hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5. The Hyper Flight service, planned to launch in 2025 from a select number of potential sites, will leverage Gilmour Space’s orbital launch vehicle technology.
Explaining the new suborbital flight test service, David Doyle, director of launch vehicles and satellites at Gilmour Space, said:
“In recent years we have seen a surge in research and development into hypersonic vehicles, materials and other related technologies, especially from AUKUS (a trilateral security partnership involving Australia, the UK and the US). However, as many of these ideas progress from concept to prototyping and testing, we are also seeing a growing bottleneck in high-speed flight test capabilities beyond what ground-based crash tunnel testing and simulations can deliver.”
However, Mr Doyle noted that while wind tunnel testing (which delivers hypersonic flow for 200 to 300 milliseconds) is great for initial testing of materials and geometries with scaled-down models, for example, there remains a significant challenge in scaling up these technologies to full-size applications.
As a result, Gilmour Space’s “new HyPeRsonic Flight Test Service (HPRFLT or Hyper Flight) will help bridge that gap by providing a real-world environment for researchers and companies to test, demonstrate and advance their innovations to higher Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) in Australia,” the launch vehicle director added.
“This is a sovereign Australian solution for a turnkey, low-cost and rapid hypersonic testbed, which will be essential to translating early-stage research into high TRL technologies and platforms that can be used by the Australian Defence Force and our allies.”
