Idea for testing hypersonic craft

[Enola Straight]

There are designs for pushing atmospheric craft to high mach numbers using SCRAMjets, but, as I understand it, we just cant reach because of too much air resistance, gravity and limited internal volume for fuel.

What if we simply dropped a test drone from orbit, carried up and dropped from the space shuttle's cargo bay?

Orbital objects re-enter the atmosphere at Mach 25, IIRC.

Instead of using up so much fuel to get to a certain speed, just drop in and sustain a speed once reached?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Uh, the US and UK have both tested such machines with relative ease to launching a shuttle. I fail to see what your proposal will do for anything.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

There are designs for pushing atmospheric craft to high mach numbers using SCRAMjets, but, as I understand it, we just cant reach because of too much air resistance, gravity and limited internal volume for fuel.

What if we simply dropped a test drone from orbit, carried up and dropped from the space shuttle's cargo bay?

Orbital objects re-enter the atmosphere at Mach 25, IIRC.

Instead of using up so much fuel to get to a certain speed, just drop in and sustain a speed once reached?

Because then you'd have to spend a lot more fuel getting it to orbit atop a rocket big enough to do the job. So your scheme would add mucho dinero to the cost for absolutely zero gain.

[Enola Straight]

From what I gather, we can only go about mach 6 before we run out of gas.

We need a mach 10 motor if we are to have a feasible, fuel-efficient one-stage-to-orbit craft.

What other way do we have to directly observe mach 10 velocities?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Build Skylon with the SABRE engines. Et voila, an SSTO with considerable ferry potential.

[Winston Blake]

From what I gather, we can only go about mach 6 before we run out of gas.

We need a mach 10 motor if we are to have a feasible, fuel-efficient one-stage-to-orbit craft.

What other way do we have to directly observe mach 10 velocities?

The University of Queensland in Australia designed, built and demonstrated a Mach 7.6 scramjet on a budget of 2 million AUD. Each shuttle launch costs over 400 million USD (if taking development costs into account, it's 1.5 billion USD).

[Howedar]

From what I gather, we can only go about mach 6 before we run out of gas.

We need a mach 10 motor if we are to have a feasible, fuel-efficient one-stage-to-orbit craft.

What other way do we have to directly observe mach 10 velocities?

A big friggin' rocket. Which is all the shuttle is. Except if all you're doing is launching a test scramjet, you're not forced to put it into orbit or something silly like that.

This, of course, also doesn't require you to build your test unit such that it can withstand reentry. Aerodynamic heating at mach 25 would tear to hell anything that is supposed to only sustain mach 10.