High Praise for Hypersonics

Dr Ron Sega & Dr Alan Paull

A former US astronaut and senior figure in the George W. Bush administration has praised the high quality of research in UQ's Centre for Hypersonics.

Dr Ron Sega, who is the US Director of Defense Research and Engineering, visited the Centre in August for briefings on scramjet and other research activities, and to meet staff and students.

The Centre for Hypersonics is the largest group of hypersonics researchers in Australia and the largest University-based hypersonics group in the world. Hypersonics is the study of velocities of Mach number five (five times the speed of sound or more).

Dr Sega was briefed on the worldleading HyShot? program, and met UQ undergraduate students working on the Mars Gravity Biosatellite program, which aims to pave the way for human exploration of Mars.

The HyShot project rockets are powered by scramjets, air-breathing supersonic combustion ramjet engines set to revolutionise the launch of small space payloads, such as communications satellites, by lowering costs.

Dr Sega inspected the Centre's facilities, including some of the world's most advanced equipment for simulating hypervelocity flows of between eight and 50 times the speed of sound, the speeds experienced by re-entry vehicles such as space shuttles after interplanetary missions.

Dr Sega is known as the "father" of the National Aerospace Initiative.

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