On 28 October 1971, the bullet-shaped Black Arrow rocket blasted into the clear sky over the desert plain at Woomera in southern Australia. This launch of the British Prospero satellite into orbit was the culmination of more than 10 years of rocket development.

The mission could have marked the beginning of a new era for Woomera as a major global space port, perhaps making it as famous as Nasa’s Cape Canaveral or Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. But history didn’t work out that way. The British launcher programme was cancelled and the desert launch complex, some 500 kilometres (310 miles) north of Adelaide, was eventually abandoned.

“It’s basically a big patch of nothing,” says Michael Smart, professor of hypersonics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. “In the 60s and early 70s it was a fully-fledged space centre but after 50 years it’s faded away.”

Woomera has remained in use as a military test range for artillery, missiles and aircraft but now Smart is using the isolated site to test a brand new generation of scramjet spacecraft.

Developed in the 1960s, and first successfully flown in the ’90s, scramjets are air-breathing engines that only work at hypersonic speeds – greater than five times the speed of sound or Mach 5. Like jet engines, scramjets pull in air, and use it to burn fuel to produce thrust. Whereas jets use turbines to compress the air, however, scramjets have no moving parts. Instead, the hypersonic speed of the aircraft is enough to compress air within the motor.

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But you can see the problem: a scramjet needs some other form of propulsion to get it to Mach 5. As a result, scramjets have become something of a well-studied technology in search of a practical application.

“That’s really the limitation that’s held back scramjets for many years,” says Smart, speaking on stage at the BBC Future World Changing Ideas Summit in Sydney. “You’ve already got to be going at hypersonic speed before a scramjet works but, once you get there, it’s by far the most efficient type of engine.”

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