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Flying the Hypert Skies
A little airplane has given new meaning to the term "going hyper."
The Hyper-X recently broke the record for air-breathing jet planes when it traveled at a hypersonic speed of seven times the speed of sound. That’s about 5,000 miles per hour. At this speed, you’d get around the world -- flying along the equator -- in less than 5 hours.
The Hyper-X is an unmanned, experimental aircraft just 12 feet long. It achieves hypersonic speed using a special sort of engine known as a scramjet. It may sound like something from a comic book, but engineers have been experimenting with scramjets since the 1960s.
For an engine to burn fuel and produce energy, it needs oxygen. A jet engine, like those on passenger airplanes, gets oxygen from the air. A rocket engine typically goes faster but has to carry its own supply of oxygen. A scramjet engine goes as fast as a rocket, but it doesn’t have to carry its own oxygen
A. it was the first air-breathing jet plane
B. it flew along the equator
C. it flew at speeds smaller than five times the speed of sound
D. it traveled at a supersonic speed