Written on June 26, 2008 – 9:04 am | by Bogdan Alex |

They didn’t quite master light-speed propulsion techniques, but the DARPA guys are making some progress in this area. Assigned to come up with a propulsion system that combines a full-scale turbine engine and a Constant Volume Combustion (CVC) engine that should be capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload up to 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours, DARPA was faced with a real challenge. Eventually, they managed to put together a hybrid engine, dubbed Vulcan. This is a ramjet / scramjet that will easily take an aircraft like the unmanned Falcon HTV-3X from 0 to Mach 4 with an average turbine engine design, then activate the new CVC engine to push it to Mach 10 and maybe farther.

Supposedly, an aircraft equipped with a CVC “scramjet” engine would streamline a process that currently requires a second aircraft to take the plane up to the supersonic speeds necessary to engage into Mach 6 speeds. According to Gizmodo, the Vulcan engine is definitely an ambitious undertaking, but the 2012 date they set to have a working prototype might point to the fact that DARPA has more important projects to deal with for now. Here’s a short 3D clip of the CVC-powered Falcon: