India Achieves Major Hypersonic Breakthrough with 12-Minute Full-Scale Scramjet Engine Test

Raksha Mantri Shri Rajnath Singh congratulated DRDO, industry partners and academia, describing the achievement as a solid foundation for India’s Hypersonic Cruise Missile Development Programme.

India has crossed a critical technological threshold in hypersonic weapons development, as the Defence Research & Development Laboratory (DRDL), a Hyderabad-based laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), successfully conducted a long-duration ground test of a full-scale, actively cooled scramjet combustor, marking a decisive step toward operational hypersonic cruise missiles.

The test, conducted on 9 January 2026 at DRDL’s state-of-the-art Scramjet Connect Pipe Test (SCPT) Facility, achieved a continuous run time of more than 12 minutes, a globally significant benchmark for air-breathing hypersonic propulsion systems.

From Subscale to Full-Scale: A Hypersonic Leap

The milestone builds on an earlier long-duration subscale scramjet test conducted on 25 April 2025, and represents the successful transition to full-scale, flight-representative hardware — one of the most complex challenges in hypersonic propulsion development.

Both the scramjet combustor and the SCPT test facility were designed and developed indigenously by DRDL, with realisation and fabrication support from Indian industry partners — reinforcing India’s growing defence-industrial ecosystem.

Why This Matters: Sustained Hypersonic Flight

Hypersonic Cruise Missiles operate at speeds exceeding Mach 5 (over 6,100 km/h) for extended durations. Unlike rocket-based systems, they rely on air-breathing scramjet engines, which compress incoming air at supersonic speeds and sustain combustion without onboard oxidisers.

The successful ground test validates:

• The advanced combustor design

• Active cooling systems critical for extreme thermal loads

• Long-duration supersonic combustion stability

• Performance of India’s high-enthalpy hypersonic test infrastructure

Together, these capabilities are essential for sustained, controlled hypersonic cruise flight.

Strategic and Technological Significance

Raksha Mantri Shri Rajnath Singh congratulated DRDO, industry partners and academia, describing the achievement as a solid foundation for India’s Hypersonic Cruise Missile Development Programme.

Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO Dr Samir V Kamat also lauded the teams involved, calling the test a commendable demonstration of advanced aerospace engineering and systems integration.

With this achievement, India joins a small, elite group of nations possessing validated long-duration scramjet propulsion technology — a domain that demands mastery of materials science, thermal management, fluid dynamics, combustion physics and precision manufacturing.

Built in India, with Industry and Academia

The programme underscores DRDO’s model of deep collaboration between government laboratories, private industry and academic institutions, accelerating the translation of frontier research into strategic capability.

It also validates India’s growing capacity to design and test complex hypersonic systems entirely within the country, reducing dependence on external technologies.

Call to Action: Strengthening the Hypersonic Ecosystem

As India advances toward flight trials and operational deployment, the achievement opens new avenues for:

• Advanced materials and thermal protection system developers

• High-speed aerodynamics and propulsion researchers

• Precision manufacturing and instrumentation firms

• Academia–industry collaboration in extreme-environment engineering

The hypersonic domain is no longer experimental for India — it is transitioning toward deployable, indigenous capability.

This milestone signals not just speed, but technological maturity, strategic intent and engineering confidence.