- Booster ignition and lift off.

The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon.

- [Evan] For the first time in more than 50 years, NASA is sending astronauts to the moon.

Artemis II, a 10-day test mission for a lunar landing down the road.

Launching into space costs a fortune.

Right now, getting a pound of anything off the launch pad to orbit runs thousands of dollars.

- Confirm separation.

- [Evan] But is there a solution where an engine that doesn't carry its own oxygen, one that breathes in air from the atmosphere as it flies?

Well, NASA started experimenting with a super-fast vehicle called the X-43 around 2004.

And researchers here hope to design the perfect craft for the future.

And this is part of figuring out how.

- Six, Five, four, three, two, one, go.

[ignition fires] - [Evan] This is the Turbulent Shear Flow Laboratory at NC State.

Somewhere in that fire might be the answers to a question that has stumped engineers for decades.

So, what is the problem we're trying to solve here, Doc?

- So we are trying to build extreme devices, which are hypersonic drones, also called hypersonic space planes.

And the goal is to bring down the launch cost to less than $100 per pound from the current $10,000.

- [Evan] A traditional rocket carries its own oxygen all the way from the pad to orbit.

That oxygen carries most of the weight.

- Roger, roll pitch.

- [Evan] This research lives in the sky, where something called a ramjet comes into play.

A ramjet works by literally ramming air into the engine and burning fuel with it.

No moving parts, no compressor.

But the catch is it can't start on its own.

It's got to be boosted at least to one mach, or the speed of sound, before it can start operating.

And above mach four or five, NC State is studying how it could morph into something faster, a scramjet.

- So, a scramjet stands for supersonic ramjet.

And instead of taking fuel and oxidizer, like a rocket, these scramjets use oxygen from air to burn the fuel it takes.

- [Evan] Remember the Concorde?

It was the first ever supersonic passenger jet able to go from New York to London in about three hours.

- Concorde was mach two.

So, we are talking thrice as fast as Concorde.

We are talking less than an hour.

- [Evan] The idea is to fly as high as possible on air.

A rocket booster gets the vehicle to speed.

At seven miles up, a ramjet ignites, scooping air.

No oxygen tanks required.

By mach four, it morphs into a scramjet, hypersonic, self-sustaining.

At 50 miles, a rocket takes it the rest of the way.

This is where NC State's research lives.

It's called two-stage to orbit.

That means two separate experiments.

One that studies the combustion and the power needed to propel that engine.

The other half of the research happens down the hall, at a 25-foot wind tunnel where Emma Cavanaugh studies what happens to the outside of the vehicle at mach six.

- What I study is typically what type of damage that can happen to the propulsion system and the overall vehicle itself at these speeds.

So if we can combust or achieve the same amount of thrust, either with less weight or whether that be through the actual vehicle itself or by not having to carry both oxidizer and fuel, that's kind of primarily what we're looking at here.

- [Evan] While the tunnel is about 25 feet long, they use a model you can hold in your hand in the shape of a wave rider, the hypersonic craft designed to use shockwaves for lift.

- This is actually a subscale model of a mach six vehicle.

- So this is the thing that you've dropped down inside this chamber?

- Exactly.

- Okay, go ahead.

- Good.

Opening.

Alrighty.

Testing in three, two, one.

[air wooshing] - But we're seeing the shockwaves.

- [Evan] What are the shockwaves telling you right now?

- This is our mach six flow.

So mach six is going to be coming in this way from this side of the screen.

We're getting an idea of what the shock angles and overall shock structures are at these conditions.

So if we're under a different mach number conditions, these shock angles are actually going to change.

Big question that we're trying to answer here, and I think that's the very exciting part, at least to all of us here, is that there have been instances where we've been able to reach hypersonic speeds, but it's definitely not a given.

So trying to make vehicles that can operate at that condition and even still make vehicles that are efficient and cost effective at those speeds is still a huge challenge.

- [Evan] The tunnel, the chamber, the three second burn, none of it looks like the future of space travel.

That's usually how it starts.

- We want to understand how effectively we can burn these fuels and what are the conditions that are needed to burn these fuels efficiently.

- Towards the end of this century, we will have real commercial airplanes that take tens and hundreds of people across the world.

So we are stepping into a future where you can go any place in the world in an afternoon.