Abstract
The paper deals with the aerodynamic performance analysis of three reusable and unmanned flying laboratories designed to perform a return flight from low Earth orbit to provide experimental data in the framework of re-entry technologies. Several design approaches, ranging from low-order methods to computational fluid dynamics analyses, have been addressed in this work. In particular, vehicles aerodynamic performances for a wide range of free stream flow conditions, from subsonic to hypersonic regime, including reacting and non-reacting flow and different angles of attack have been provided and in some cases compared. Computational fluid dynamics results confirm that real gas effects seem to be fundamental for the assessment of the concept aerodynamics, especially concerning pitching moment evaluation.
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