NASA and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory are looking for university and industry partners to establish the national hypersonic science centers.

The jointly funded program will support university-level basic science or engineering research to improve the understanding of into flight at hypersonic speed, defined as Mach 5 or faster.

NASA's Hypersonics' Project and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research plan to set aside up to $30 million over five years to fund the centers, meaning a maximum grant of about $2 million a year.

The organizations are seeking white papers and proposals in three critical research areas: air-breathing propulsion; materials and structures; and boundary layer control.

"These three areas are the biggest hurdles to hypersonic flight and low-cost access to space using an air-breathing engine," says says James Pittman, Hyersonics Project principal investigator.

While the Air Force is interested in hypersonics for high-speed weapons and platforms, its interests concide with NASA's where is comes to building a robust database of experimental data from ground and flight tests.

NASA is already supporting the AFRL-led X-51A WaveRider hypersonic demonstrator program, with windtunnel tests of the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne flightweight fuel-cooled scramjet engine wrapping up at NASA Langley.

The agency is also a partnered with AFRL on the U.S.-Australian HiFire program to launch a series 10 of hypersonic flight experiments over five years using sounding rockets launched from Woomera in south Australia.

NASA is also reviving its own hypersonic research and building a turbine-based combined-cycle engine test rig at NASA Glenn. This will demonstrate the inlet flowpath for a combined high-Mach turbojet and dual-mode scramjet.

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