Design Analysis of the High-Speed Experimental Flight Test Vehicle HEXAFLY-International

Achieving airbreathing hypersonic flight is an ongoing challenge with the potential to cut air travel time and provide cheaper access to space. Waveriders are potential candidates for achieving hypersonic cruise or acceleration flight within the atmosphere. Current research tends to focus on key issues like thermal loading, aero-elasticity and aerothermodynamics at hypersonic speeds. Design problems in each of these areas must be solved if a hypersonic waverider design is to be viable. In this frame the HEXAFLY-INT project aims at the test in free-flight conditions of an innovative gliding vehicle with several breakthrough technologies on-board to be launched along a suborbital trajectory. Its preliminary conceptual design has been carried out by means of a number of numerical tools suitable to design vehicles flying in hypersonic conditions. The main results of the design analysis carried out during the preliminary phase of the study, such as vehicle aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics, re-entry trajectories, structures and mechanisms, and on the overall system, as well, are presented in this work.