Assessment of the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic performance of a high-lift reentry vehicle

Abstract

This paper deals with the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic trade-off analysis of a hypersonic flying test bed. Such vehicle will have to be launched with an expendable launcher and shall reenter the Earth atmosphere allowing to perform several experiments on critical re-entry phenomena. The demonstrator under study is a re-entry space glider characterized by a relatively simple vehicle architecture able to validate hypersonic aerothermodynamic design database and passenger experiments, including thermal shield and hot structures. A summary review of the aerodynamic characteristics of two flying test bed concepts, compliant with a phase-A design level, has been provided hereinafter. Several design results, based both on engineering approach and computational fluid dynamics, are reported and discussed in the paper.