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Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but this is from Janes.com (not sure about the copyright of things around here, but here's the brief article)

By Michael Sirak JDW Staff Reporter Washington DC

The X-43A Hyper-X experimental unmanned air vehicle flew at nearly 10 times the speed of sound on 16 November, eclipsing the world speed record that a Hyper-X vehicle set earlier this year, according to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NASA officials said at a post-mission briefing that the supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet)-powered Hyper-X flew at speeds of around M9.8 - or about 7,000 mph (1,130 km/h) - during its 10 seconds of powered flight, based on a preliminary analysis of the flight data. This breaks the M6.8 milestone established for an air-breathing engine set by the previous X-43A research vehicle during a test on 27 March, they said. The March mission was the first-ever successful flight of a scramjet-powered vehicle; an initial flight attempt in June 2001 failed due to an anomaly with its Pegasus booster.

NASA officials say scramjets, when coupled with a rocket or a turbine engine as part of a combined-cycle propulsion system, could provide an affordable, reliable and more efficient means of accessing space on a regular basis.

"This flight is a key milestone and a major step toward the future possibilities for producing boosters for sending large and critical payloads into space," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in a post-mission statement released on 16 November.

For the US military, scramjets could power ultra-fast cruise missiles and long-range strike aircraft that could penetrate deep into enemy territory in a fraction of the time taken by existing weapon systems.

The 16 November flight, which took place off the coast of southern California, was the third and final mission under NASA's Hyper-X programme, which began in the 1990s. Its goal was to demonstrate the viability of flying an 'air-breathing' hypersonic engine integrated with an air vehicle.

Unlike rocket engines, air-breathing engines suck in air from the atmosphere to combust fuel and produce thrust. Scramjets are 'air breathers' that, unlike conventional jet engines, have no moving parts and compress the air passing through them using the forward speed of the vehicle and the shape of its inlet. They are capable in theory of speeds between M4 and M15.

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