British car will use Norwegian rocket engine in land speed record try

LONDON, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- The team behind a British attempt to break the land speed record says they've teamed up with a Norwegian company for the car's rocket engine.

The British Bloodhound supersonic car project will employ a rocket from the Nammo company in its record attempt for 2015, the BBC reported Thursday.

The Bloodhound will be powered by two engines -- a jet and a rocket -- as it tries to break the current record of 763 mph.

It will use a Rolls-Royce Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine to take it to about 350 mph, and then ignite the rocket motor to go supersonic.

Nammo builds motors that are found in military missiles and are used also to separate the stages on the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 launch rocket.

The British team had been developing its own hybrid power setup -- using a mixture of both solid and liquid propellants -- and had tested its own rocket but realized further development would require too much time and expense, so it turned to the Norwegian firm for its expertise and facilities.

"It's a perfect match, a perfect opportunity," Bloodhound's chief engineer Mark Chapman said. "It was almost uncanny when we started looking at the power requirements, the duration of burn, the scale and size -- to find Nammo was already working on something very close to what we wanted."