How Hypersonic Flight Tech Is Moving From Lab to Sky

Imagine you could fly from one part of the world to another in an hour, instead of taking an entire day. Isn’t that exciting? 

While it may feel like wishful thinking, it is close to becoming possible in a not-so-distant future as a new study brings hypersonic flights another major step closer to reality.

Published in Nature Communications, the study details a breakthrough in understanding hypersonic turbulence¹ that could transform long-haul travel. 

When it comes to hypersonic flights, the design of the aircraft is critical to its success. To design such a high-speed vehicle, it is important to accurately predict aerodynamic drag and heat transfer, which requires a physical understanding of turbulence at these extreme speeds.

To gain that understanding, researchers from the private research university Stevens Institute of Technology tested for the same, with their laser-based krypton experiments suggesting that turbulence at hypersonic speeds behaves more like slower airflow than expected. 

With the results showing that turbulence at extreme speeds may not differ much from that at lower speeds, this could simplify and streamline the design of hypersonic vehicles and accelerate progress toward making ultra-fast travel a reality.

And if it does transcend from the realm of science fiction and into reality, hypersonic flights can completely change global travel. Long-haul routes that currently take 10 to 20 hours of flight time can turn into brief commutes that may take only an hour. 

“It really shrinks the planet,” said the study’s co-author Nicholaus Parziale from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. “It will make travel faster, easier, and more enjoyable.”

The focus of Parziale’s research is on making hypersonic flight a reality. What this means is a flight through the atmosphere below altitudes of about 56 miles (about 90 km) at a speed greater than five times the speed of sound, which is referred to as Mach 5.

Mach 1 is simply the speed of sound, i.e., 761 miles per hour. Researchers are trying to have planes flying at as much as Mach 10 to drastically reduce the time, but of course, at such high speeds, the air doesn’t behave around the aircraft the same as at low speeds.

Scientifically, at low speeds, under 1 Mach, there’s an incompressible flow. This means air density stays almost constant, and airplane design is simple.

But this changes at higher speeds, where compressible flow occurs, and that’s because gas can compress. What this means is that due to variations in pressure and temperature, the air density changes significantly, and that compression affects how an aircraft flies.

“Compressibility affects how the airflow goes around the body, and that can change things like lift, drag, and thrust required to take off or stay airborne,” all of which are key to the aircraft design.

At ‘low Mach’ numbers, engineers have a good understanding of how this airflow works with and affects planes. But not so much at higher Mach numbers.

There is Morkovin’s hypothesis, though. The hypothesis is foundational to our understanding of supersonic and hypersonic compressible turbulence. As per the hypothesis, “we can expect with confidence that the essential dynamics of these supersonic shear flows will follow the incompressible pattern.”

Composed over half a century ago by Mark Morkovin, the hypothesis suggests that at Mach 5 or 6, turbulence behavior isn’t much different from that at lower speeds. While air density and temperature do change more in faster flows, the hypothesis says that the basic “choppy” motion of turbulence mostly remains the same. 

“Basically, the Morkovin’s hypothesis means that the way the turbulent air moves at low and high speeds isn’t that different. If the hypothesis is correct, it means that we don’t need a whole new way to understand turbulence at these higher speeds. We can use the same concepts we use for the slower flows.” 

– Parziale

This also means no need for significantly different design approaches, thus simplifying hypersonic planes.

So far, though, there hasn’t been sufficient experimental evidence to support the hypothesis. As such, Parziale and his team took up the challenge and spent over a decade building the setup for the same.

In their study titled “Hypersonic Turbulent Quantities in Support of Morkovin’s Hypothesis,” his team made use of krypton, a colorless, tasteless, odorless, and lightest noble gas, which only occurs in trace amounts in the atmosphere.

Using lasers, Parziale’s team first ionized krypton. The gas was seeded into the airflow inside a wind tunnel, temporarily causing its atoms to form a glowing line. While initially straight, the fluorescent krypton line bent and twisted as it moved through the wind tunnel’s air. The team used ultra-high-resolution cameras to capture its movement.

“As that line moves with the gas, you can see crinkles and structure in the flow, and from that, we can learn a lot about turbulence,” said Parziale. “And what we found was that at Mach 6, the turbulence behavior is pretty close to the incompressible flow.”

According to the study, their experimental data support Morkovin’s hypothesis, which is fundamental to our understanding of hypersonic and supersonic compressible turbulence.

While Morkovin’s hypothesis isn’t fully confirmed, it is an achievement. By suggesting that planes do not need a completely new design approach to fly at hypersonic speeds, it simplifies things and takes us a major step closer to hypersonic flight.

“Today, we must use computers to design an airplane, and the computational resources to design a plane that will fly at Mach 6, simulating all the tiny, fine, little details would be impossible,” said Parziale. “The Morkovin’s hypothesis allows us to make simplifying assumptions so that the computational demands to design hypersonic vehicles can become more doable.”

According to Parziale, who has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his research into the fluid mechanics that affects high-speed flight, the study’s findings can help transform space transportation. He said:

“If we can build planes that fly at hypersonic speed, we can also fly them into space, rather than launching rockets, which would make transportation to and from low Earth orbit easier. It will be a game-changer for transportation not only on Earth, but also in low orbit.”

The Race to Unlock Hypersonic Flight, Mobility & Defence

While hypersonic flight isn’t here, the first supersonic passenger jet took its first commercial flight in 1976. Concorde, a joint effort by the UK and France, was the supersonic commercial airliner that could fly faster than the speed of sound. It was known for its luxury and speed, operating transatlantic routes and cutting flight times in half. 

But just after 50,000 flights, it was retired in 2003 after a fatal crash, low passenger numbers, and high maintenance costs. This early chapter in high-speed aviation set both the potential and the limitations for future efforts.

Although Concorde failed, it showed that it was possible to cross the Atlantic in a few hours, and now organizations are focused on increasing fuel efficiency and designing aircraft that can achieve high speeds. A new generation of jets is also working on fulfilling the promise of hypersonic flight.

While commercial planes are yet to achieve extreme speeds, military planes are already flying at about triple the speed of sound, aka Mach 3. Meanwhile, many hypersonic flights have been tested, at speeds much higher than Mach 5 or even Mach 10.

These milestones trace back to the earliest objects capable of hypersonic motion. The first one manufactured for hypersonic flight was the Bumper rocket, which, back in 1949, reached a speed of about Mach 6. It didn’t survive the re-entry, though.

To sustain and control such speeds in aircraft, new propulsion solutions became essential.

A key technology for hypersonic flight has been the scramjet. A supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet, is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine, which performs combustion in supersonic airflow, making it more efficient for hypersonic flight than a traditional ramjet.

An advanced type of air-breathing jet engine, a scramjet operates at Mach 5 and above. It has no moving parts and uses the aircraft’s forward motion to compress air for combustion.  

Before scramjets, ramjets offered the most efficient path to Mach 3 to Mach 5, serving as the lower stage of many hypersonic systems. Between ramjet and scramjet are dual-mode ramjets that enable Mach 3 to Mach 8 flight in one engine.

Then there are turbo-based combined cycle (TBCC) engines, which are a hybrid of a traditional turbojet and a ramjet/scramjet. While turbojets can work up to about Mach 2 to Mach 3, for higher speeds, they transition to ramjet/scramjet mode.

Other kinds of engines include air-turbo-rocket (ATR) engines that use atmospheric oxygen to burn fuel, rotating detonation engines (RDEs) that use a continuous rotating detonation wave for combustion, and combined-cycle engines by Reaction Engines (SABRE), which is an airbreathing and rocket hybrid with a precooler that chills incoming hypersonic air to ambient.
Swipe to scroll →

These innovations have paved the way for ambitious commercial concepts. For instance, the A-HyM Hypersonic Air Master envisions a commercial aircraft operating at Mach 7.3. This futuristic jet concept is designed for a commercial airliner that would allow a trip from London to Los Angeles to be completed in just 90 minutes. It is estimated to have a capacity for about 170 passengers.

Its engine system would combine oblique detonation engine (ODE), ramjet, and turbojet technologies in a combined-cycle configuration. Also, it would be powered by a hydrogen engine. Moreover, A-HyM would have a titanium and carbon fiber structure, and to address the noise concerns, it will incorporate a Sonic Boom Mitigation System.

A sonic boom is a thunderous noise caused by an object traveling faster than the speed of sound. It’s not just a single “boom” but rather a continuous sound emitted as long as the object is flying at supersonic speeds. 

Then there’s the reusable hypersonic spaceplane concept called Stargazer, proposed by Venus Aerospace, which targets speeds around Mach 9, a range on the order of 5,000 miles, and cruising altitudes well above 100,000 feet—positioning it as an ultra-fast platform for global travel.

Recently, Lockheed Martin (LMT +0.85%) Ventures acquired a strategic stake in the rocket propulsion startup amidst growing competition to accelerate hypersonic missile development.

Venus Aerospace has developed a propulsion system, a rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE), that uses a continuously rotating detonation shockwave to generate thrust and completed its flight test of a 2,000-pound-thrust RDRE earlier this year. The undisclosed funding will help the company advance its “capabilities to deliver at scale and deploy the engine.”

So, private aerospace firms are accelerating toward reusable hypersonic platforms, but they are not alone; government agencies worldwide are also investing in advanced hypersonic research.

Engineers at NASA are working with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) on a Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation Program (HIFiRE) Program that would test a dual-mode ramjet/scramjet for a targeted speed of Mach 8. 

The Australian government recently committed a $10 million equity investment into local aerospace firm Hypersonix Launch Systems (HLS), which is developing an aircraft that would fly at over Mach 12 and will be powered by hydrogen fuel. Their proprietary scramjet engine is called “SPARTAN,” and it is reusable and 3D-printed.

Last month, GE Aerospace (GE -0.54%) flight-tested ATLAS, a demonstrator powered by the company’s new solid-fueled ramjet, under the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Production Act Title III program.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has also launched a research program called INVICTUS to develop its own hypersonic flight technologies. It will demonstrate key technologies for sustained hypersonic flight and will be a fully reusable vehicle capable of flying at Mach 5.

Investing in Hypersonic Flight Tech

Lockheed Martin Corporation is an aerospace and security company that designs, manufactures, integrates, and supports advanced technology systems. It operates through:

• Aeronautics
• Missiles and Fire Control (MFC)
• Rotary and Mission Systems (RMS)
• Space segments

The company mainly engages in the development of military aircraft, air, sea, and land-based missile defense systems, military and commercial helicopters, manned and unmanned ground vehicles, satellites, space transportation systems, and energy management solutions.

In partnership with NASA, Lockheed Martin has developed X-59 to specifically address the problem of sonic boom.

Featuring an elongated fuselage, X-59’s design aims to redistribute the shock wave when breaking the sound barrier. It has reduced the perceived noise on the ground to about 75 decibels, only creating a sonic “thump”, which is “about as loud as a car door closing.”

Late last month, X-59 flew for the very first time, from its Skunk Works’ Palmdale facility to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, which Lockheed Martin describes as a “momentum” that proves that “the future of flight can be faster and quieter than ever before.”

It is less than 100 feet long, has a wingspan of about 30 feet, and stands about 14 feet tall. It cruises at around 55,000 feet and can reach Mach 1.4 speeds of 925mph.

“The X-59 will be used to collect community response data on the acceptability of a quiet sonic boom generated by the unique design of the aircraft. The data will help NASA provide regulators with the information needed to establish an acceptable commercial supersonic noise standard to lift the ban on commercial supersonic travel over land,” says the company. “This breakthrough would open the door to an entirely new global market for aircraft manufacturers, enabling passengers to travel anywhere in the world in half the time it takes today.“

Not only has it developed the X-59 with NASA, but it is also working on the SR-72, with an operational target of about Mach 6. While not much is known about this conceptual successor to the SR-71 Blackbird, SR-72 is intended for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is commonly referred to as “Son of Blackbird.”

This one is positioned as a hypersonic aircraft that could enter service in the 2030s.

With a market cap of $109 billion, Lockheed Martin shares are currently trading at $470.78, with its 52-week range being $410.11 and $546.00. It has an EPS (TTM) of 17.95 and a P/E (TTM) of 26.22.

Lockheed pays a dividend yield of 2.93%. Early last month, it authorized a fourth-quarter dividend payment of $3.45 per share, a 5% increase over the prior quarterly dividend payment. The company also returned $1.8 billion of cash to its shareholders in Q3 2024 through dividends and share repurchases, which were increased by $2 bln to a total of $9 billion.

During this period, it recorded sales of $18.6 billion and net earnings of $1.6 billion, or $6.95 per share. Its cash from operations was $3.7 billion, while free cash flow was $3.3 billion. 

Lockheed also reported a record backlog of $179 billion, which CEO Jim Taiclet said, “underscores the trust our customers place in us and underpins our company’s long‑term growth prospects.” He also noted that as a result of “unprecedented demand, we are increasing production capacity significantly across a wide range of our lines of business.”

Latest Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT) Stock News

Conclusion

Hypersonic flight is no longer a distant frontier but a testable engineering challenge, which is getting closer to becoming a reality with breakthroughs in propulsion systems, global investment in reusable high-speed vehicles, and new experiments validating decades-old hypotheses.

References

1. Segall, B. A., Keenoy, T. C., Kokinakos, J. C., Langhorn, J. D., Hameed, A., Shekhtman, D., & Parziale, N. J. “Hypersonic turbulent quantities in support of Morkovin’s hypothesis.” Nature Communications 16, Article 9584 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65398-4