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See here for a report on the success of the test from the University of Queensland.

For anyone bragging to their Yankee mates about how NASA couldn't fly a paper plane on the budget the size of some countries but the University of Queensland can make a scramjet work on a tiny fraction of the money, here are a couple sites so you can use some of the right words:

In fairness, I should acknowledge the funding of the UQ project in part by NASA - it is just that it is really quite exciting, given the shameful way the Government of the late 1950s abandoned the Australian space industry.
Now, Australian scientists and engineers have once again done something that no one else has... nice work!

Jim Edwards replied, to a message about the trial not being reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

It is true that success could be of a few types and we shall see exactly what was measured. That it fired and there was a measurable effect is the important part of the research. It would be nice to have an immediately usable device, but that was not the aim; this is a developmental experiment, of which there will obviously have to be many. But theory and wind tunnel testing need to be verified, and that has occurred already, I think.

A high school student colleague, who knew much more about it than me, repeated the original transistor experiment. Naturally, there was huge current leakage; there almost certainly was in the original experiment,
too. But, it was not supposed to be a working device, just a demonstration of a principle.

Similarly, with the Millikan oil drop experiment, it was actually hard to see the effect.... beats me how Millikan managed to see it the first time, actually. That is the way it is with developmental research.

So, I suppose it is possible that the SMH is waiting to grab defeat out of the jaws of victory because the acceleration of the device was poor or something. It just seems odd to me that an amazing piece of ingenuity in a highly visible (and badly funded) project is not reported.... and bloody typical.

BTW, Jim, thanks for the BBC stuff. I wonder if the story made Brisbane's Courier Mail.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists launched a hypersonic "scramjet" on Tuesday, claiming a world first with a revolutionary engine that could one day propel airliners at 8,000 km per hour or more.
"HyShot" project members fired the supersonic combustion ramjet engine from a launch site in the Australian outback into the upper atmosphere and allowed it to plunge back to earth....

Hypersonic rocket completes successful maiden flight
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/020730/afp/020730115757top.html
ADELAIDE, Australia (AFP) - A rocket which scientists believe may hold the key to hypersonic commercial aviation was launched at almost eight times the speed of sound in the Australian outback.
Accelerating up to Mach 7.6, or 7.6 times the speed of sound, the oxygen-breathing scramjet-powered rocket Tuesday pushed 300 kilometres (190 miles) into the sky above South Australia's Woomera rocket range.
Less than 10 minutes later the Terrier Orion Mk-70 rocket was back on the ground, having completed the crucial phase -- the flight experiment itself -- in the last five seconds before it came down to earth with a bang.
The HyShot program, planned by the University of Queensland's Centre for Hypersonics and supported by the Australian defence department and numerous international research organisations, was pronounced a success.

HyShot launch successful - positive signs for experiment
30-Jul-2002
University of Queensland researchers say the launch of the HyShot experiment at the Woomera Prohibited Range today was successful.
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=3414

Video - HyShot experiment explained
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/multimedia/hyshot_description.html

As some people know, I have been out in the desert, covering an experimental rocket launch, which carried a scramjet up into space, and then tested it on the way down.

The work version of the story (the early version with 3 pics only for the next few hours) is now accessible through www.websterworld.com --
no need to log in, as the story is a freebie.

Said listmember would have been there again this time, if a few bloody imperatives hadn't got in the way. Nothing traumatic, but centred on selling a property and needing to be here to clear out rubbish, exciting stuff like that.

I'm on the invite list for next time.

I have been fuming at the stupid news reports that keep churning the absolute bullshit about flying to London in two hours. Nobody believes that would happen: the costs would be huge, and you would be there before you could open the second bottle of free champagne.

The two-hour legend comes from a Ronald Reagan speechwriter in the early 1980s. I think it was then "New York to London" or some such, but people knew it was tripe even then. The scramjet will serve to get components into space far more cheaply than now.

Morris, while I realise you intend to be amusing, you are sadly misinformed, and others may be misled if they take you at face value. Solid fuel rockets use an oxidiser mixed with the propellant -- typically a 15-metre-long tube, 1.5 metres across, with a hollow down the middle, where fire roars out. Scramjets will use a liquid fuel with oxygen gathered from the atmosphere.

Solid fuel offers brute grunt and no control, liquid fuels offer the chance to turn the burn off, up or down. You need liquid fuels to allow precise targeting. That is why solid fuels are used in the boosters that get the whole machine going.

The point is that the oxygen weighs 8 times as much as the hydrogen if hydrogen is the fuel, and this gives a bigger payload.

There is no need to have recourse to scramjets for missiles -- the military believe size matters, so they like BIG rockets. They like rockets with evil exhaust fumes -- they are more macho.

That brings up the other issue: most solid propellants (and most liquid propellants for that matter) produce remarkably toxic exhausts, and if any space program is going to increase, that will become an issue, for example, in Russia, where launches go over inhabited areas.

Under those conditions, a hydrogen-fuelled scramjet becomes very attractive -- even more so if you know that there are already public health problems alleged for areas under the main launch route in the former USSR.

Those quibbles aside, I must largely endorse your analysis of the military mind -- but then I have read the detailed plans raised in 1911 to use balloons as airborne artillery platforms, and schemes for aircraft to drop sharp pointy things on balloons.

Whatever you say about them, the military can be more ridiculous than you can ever imagine.

Alan Emmerson noted:

I am afraid the postings on this topic have been rather more declamatory than informative..

While it is true that the scramjet does not have to carry its own oxidiser, exactly the same applies to any airbreathing engine, including the one in my trusty horseless carriage.

As military missiles are rarely reusable and don't seem to need to cruise at Mach4, the case for the
military scram jet is somewhat problematic.

The point about the scram jet idea is that it promises a reusable airbreathing engine that will deliver nett thrust beyond Mach 4.

In an airbreathing engine the air must be compressed if it is to deliver high power. The turbo jet engine does the job quite nicely until the temperature rise associated with compressing the air becomes too much for rotating compressor parts to withstand.

That's where the ram jet comes in. A tapered duct replaces the rotating compressor and the speed of the air relative to the engine is used to create the pressure necessary for high intensity combustion, Supersonic ramjets were in service around 1960. . The Bristol Thor in the Bloodhound ground to air missile was an example. So were the power units of the Blue Steel Mk2 stand off bomb (a Mach3 cruise missile) and a number of similar USA missiles.

The crucial thing about combustion is that there must be time for the chemical reactions to happen. If the air for combustion is rushing along at very high speed, the time available for combustion is very short. Conventional fuels demand that the air that is supporting combustion be travelling at much less than the speed of sound relative to the engine combustion chamber.

If you are whistling along at say three times the speed of sound and you speed up the air locally, so that its velocity with respect to you is reduced to say half the speed of sound, you increase its temperature and pressure enormously. At Mach 3 you'd get temperatures about 1500K. This is not good for engine parts which start to have insufficient strength at about that temp.

Odd things happen too . For example, even at 1500K any vanadium pentoxide from the burned fuel acts like a soldering flux and dissolves off the oxides that protect the stainless steel and other high temperature alloys.)

That lack of durability is ok if youre not going to use the engine again (as with a military missile) . Beyond flight speed of Mach 4, the temperature reached after slowing the air to combustion speed (1) is too great for the materials in the engine to endure, even for a short time. So, what you need is combustion without slowing down the air too much - supersonic combustion - and therefore a fuel which will burn very quickly. The reaction time must be in fractions of millisecs. Hydrogen is one such fuel.

Fuel handling in the field is a real problem. High test peroxide, hydrazine etc ! Hydrogen needs very low temperature storage and where would you get it from in the quantities need for commercial aeroplanes. (The Space Shuttle uses heaps of it.) And, how much replaced oxidiser weighs the same amount as its replacement cryogenic tank. So, some questions: "What is a practical fuel for extensive operations in the future? Will we use throw away engines in civil aviation?

"Is there obvious scope for exotic materials such as Zirconia?"

Note 1 Interesting transformation there. Aero engineers almost always speak in terms of a coordinate system in which the aircraft is stationary and the air rushes past.. Speeding the air up to the speed of the aircraft we call
slowing down.

Incidentally, you really shouldn't knock the military mind unless you own one.

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SCRamjet Tests