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As Gilmour Space Technologies gears up for its first orbital take-off in December, the Gold Coast-based launch services company has today announced a new suborbital flight test service aimed at commercial and defence customers that require hypersonic speeds.
Gilmour's Hyper Flight service, set to launch in 2025 from a few potential sites, leverages the company's orbital launch vehicle technology and is tailored to speeds above Mach 5, or more than five times the speed of sound.
"We've witnessed a surge in the research and development of hypersonic vehicles, materials, and other related technologies in recent years, especially since AUKUS (a trilateral security partnership involving Australia, the UK and US)," says Gilmour Space's director of launch vehicles and satellites, David Doyle.
"However, as many of these ideas progress from concept to prototyping and testing, we're also seeing a growing bottleneck in high-speed flight test capabilities, beyond what ground-based shock tunnel testing and simulations can offer."
Doyle notes that while wind tunnel tests that offer hypersonic flow for 200 to 300 milliseconds are excellent for early-stage testing of materials and geometries with scaled-down models, a significant challenge remains in scaling these technologies to full-size applications.
"Our new HyPeRsonic FLight Test (HPRFLT or Hyper Flight) service will help to bridge that gap by providing a real-life environment for researchers and companies to test, demonstrate, and advance their innovations to higher Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) in Australia," he says.
"This is a sovereign, Australian solution for a low-cost, rapid turnkey, hypersonic testbed that will be essential for translating early-stage research into high TRL technologies and platforms that can be used by the Australian Defence Force and our allies."
Founded by brothers Adam and James Gilmour, the company successfully raised $55 million in a Series D round earlier this year, taking its total capital raised to date to approximately $143 million with a valuation in early 2024 of $605 million.
The group's ambitions to send a rocket into space received a boost in March after Gilmour was granted Australia's first orbital launch facility licence under the Space (Launches & Returns) Act 2018, with a launch planned later this year from its Bowen Orbital Spaceport.
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