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A Brisbane-based hypersonics start-up is preparing to go suborbital, with a launch window later this month to test its scramjet technology over the Atlantic Ocean.

Hypersonix Launch Systems, with its origins in the University of Queensland’s Centre for Hypersonics, has designed an engine with no moving parts capable of propelling a vehicle up to 12 times the speed of sound.

The company will face its moment of truth late this month in the United States, when its Dart AE is launched 50 kilometres into the atmosphere from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, about 175 kilometres south-east of Washington, DC.

From there, it will demonstrate its potential to the United States’ Defence Innovation Unit, which selected the Queensland-based company from a field of more than 60 for the program.

If successful, the NASA-backed test flight would mark the world’s first sustained hypersonic flight using green hydrogen. Along with the defence and travel applications, the technology could also be used as part of staged payload deliveries to Earth’s orbit.

But getting the 3.5-metre Dart AE to the launch site proved more challenging than Dr Michael Smart, the co-founder of Hypersonix, had anticipated.

“We shipped the vehicle and all its equipment over here to the US, and then it got caught in that snowstorm that was here two weeks ago,” he said.

“It sat at an airport on the west coast at some sort of import-export place for a week – we couldn’t get it on a flight, so we had to truck it across the States.”