According to The New Scientist, they’re going to do a scramjet test down under next week.

The scramjet results from the $1.25 million HyShot project, led by the University of Queensland and is due to launch on Thursday 25 October. It will lift off on Terrier-Orion rockets at Woomera, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide.

Lessee, now, how much was NASA’s Hyper-X program again? A couple hundred million? What is that, about two orders of magnitude more? And didn’t their test flight go into the drink?

We’ll see if the test is successful, but apparently, NASA can not only not do it faster, better, cheaper than the private sector, even foreign governments can beat them. Even if their test fails, they can fail much more cheaply than NASA can…