Industrial Methodologies for the Design of Hypersonic Vehicles

Abstract

After a long time of improvement of subsonic and supersonic flying vehicles, a recent interest had been devoted to push ahead vehicles of higher speed. Some tests had been done in the direction towards continuing progress in velocity and reduction of the time of travel for civil aircrafts or increase of flight envelope of military vehicles. But the technology was not mature for supporting such improvement of performance without an enormous initial money investment and excessive recurrent costs at each flight; so the technology progresses were directed towards reduction of cost of subsonic mass transportation, marginally supersonic transport capability and reduction of structure and equipment mass fraction of military vehicles allowing them to carry large weapons systems including heavy electronic-avionic equipments. With the reduction of size and weight of such equipments, improvement of high temperature materials often included in new engines technology, some returns to high velocity vehicles may begin. One of the motivation is to close the gap between orbital flight and supersonic flight. The success of U.S. Orbiter as the first space plane (although based on conventional vertical launching with liquid + solid rocket propulsion, without use of oxygen of the atmosphere) opens the way to the reassessment of more efficient or more safe hypersonic concepts.