When Mark Thomas was hunting for funding to test how to stop a hypersonic engine from melting in mid-air, one name repeatedly came back to him: Darpa.
Thomas, whose company aims to build an engine capable of propelling a plane at five times the speed of sound, swiftly turned to America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Last year, Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines completed a landmark test at its new testing facility near Denver, Colorado, fuelled with a few million dollars from Darpa, cooling air from a jet engine from 1,000C to 100C in less than a twentieth of a second.
“Everybody we spoke to said, ‘What does Darpa think about this?’ All points of the compass went back there,” said Thomas, a former engineer at jet