Hypersonic Vehicles: Past, Present and Future

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**1. Introduction**

Space Shuttle retirement.

hypersonic flights.

cutting-edge design.

**2. Past developments**

vehicle at the time [1].

for each country.

Future Insights

*Antonio Viviani and Giuseppe Pezzella*

Introductory Chapter: Hypersonic

In the aviation field, great interest is growing in high-speed vehicle design. The increase in manned and unmanned space operations in low earth orbit (LEO) demands an evolution in the vehicle for payloads transportation up to and from LEO to improve the levels of flexibility, affordability and safety of routine accessto-space missions. Today this need is utmost stringent in the light of the NASA

On the other hand, in the last few years, the attention to hypersonic travels for civilian application has also increased dramatically. Many start-up industries are focusing attention on hypersonic aircrafts able to fly, e.g., from New York to Sydney in less than 2–3 hours, thus providing a lot of insights on the oncoming market of

As a result, over the decades the potential benefit of an operational hypersonic vehicle (HV) has driven continued researches in basic and applied technologies. Indeed, several high-speed aircraft concepts (i.e., lifting and winged vehicles) have been conceived or developed in the USA, Russia (former USSR), Europe, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to simplify access to LEO and sustained high-speed flight routinely and in a safe way. Most of these projects, however, were just prototypes or developed at the conceptual design stage and linked to flight testing focused mainly on some technologies rather than assessing the effectiveness and the advantages of a

A look on the HV research programs developed so far is hereinafter described

US research on HVs lies on the X-plane (XP) programs. They are a series of experimental aircrafts to test and evaluate innovative technologies and aerodynamic concepts. Most of the XP have been operated by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) or, later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), often in conjunction with the United States Air Force (USAF). The manned Bell X-1 and the North American X-15 were the most famous [1]. The former was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier in level flight in 1947. The latter was a hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft that achieved the world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a manned

Vehicles - Past, Present, and
