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Home | Update | Latest Issue | Gallery | FR Profile | Datafiles | FR 7/97 WITH HYPER-X TO MACH 10 by Karl Schwarz Nasa is to work faster and more efficient. Test aircraft can't cost hundreds of millions of dollars any more. "With Hyper-X, that costs significantly less than $10 million per aircraft, we are following this course", says John Hicks who is responsible for the program at the Dryden Flight Research Center. After the flop with the NASP (X-30) which costed billions and would probably never have led to a successful end, Nasa, with the Hyper-X, now wants to take a more realistic, yet still risky, step towards the development of a hypersonic aircraft. This time, the goals are clearly defined: Flight tests of a simple built scramjet up to Mach 10. Nasa has never flown with such a propulsion and the Russian's experience only reaches to Mach 6.5. Integration tests of fuselage and engine under real conditions. Since with ramjets and scramjets the compression of the air depends much on the shape of the airframe, the design has a major importance for the performance. Verification of the computations and comparison to the wind tunnel data. In wind tunnels, very high speeds can be reached only for a very short period of time. Four Hyper-X are supposed to be built for flight tests, each with an optimized propulsion module for Mach 7, Mach 5 and Mach 10 (two configurations) respectively. The unmanned vehicles are only 3,65 meters long and have a wingspan of 1,5 meter. Their structure is supposed to be kept simple, featuring heat-resistent TPS tiles on the outer skin. Other systems will be taken from existing technology also. Hyper-X will be built by Micro Craft, a specialist for wind tunnel models. The first flight is scheduled before the end of 1998. Before the flight tests, the Hyper-X will go into the wind tunnel at the research center at Langley. The research program will be conducted off the California coastline. After taking off from Dryden, the Nasa B-52 will take the Hyper-X, carried underneath its wing, to an altitude of approximately 40000 feet. After the release, the first stage of the Pegasus booster will push the test vehicle to Mach 5. Reaching an altitude of 100000 feet the aircraft splits, the scramjet starts and burns the onboard hydrogen for 20 to 30 seconds. Twenty minutes later, following some flight maneuvers to deplete altitude and energy, the Hyper-X touches down on water. While a retrieval of the Hyper-X is planned to examine the equipment, it will not be reused. Approximately 120 people are currently working on the Hyper-X program which is jointly conducted from Langley and Dryden. The budget is not to surpass $170 million until the last test flight in 2001 - a comparably small amount for the valuable know-how about scramjets and hypersonic flight. From page 60 of FLUG REVUE 7/97 Home | Update | Latest Issue | Gallery | FR Profile | Datafiles | FR 7/97 Copyright 1997 by Motor-Presse Stuttgart. All rights reserved. Last updated June 4, 1997