A waverider is a
hypersonic aircraft
Hypersonic flight is flight through the atmosphere below altitudes of about at Hypersonic speed, speeds greater than Mach 5, a speed where Dissociation (chemistry), dissociation of air begins to become significant and high heat loads exist. Spe ...
design that improves its supersonic
lift-to-drag ratio by using the
shock wave
In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...
s being generated by its own flight as a lifting surface, a phenomenon known as
compression lift.
The waverider remains a well-studied design for high-speed aircraft in the Mach 5 and higher hypersonic regime, although no such design has yet entered production. The
Boeing X-51 scramjet
A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully b ...
demonstration aircraft was tested from 2010 to 2013. In its final test flight, it reached a speed of .
History
Early work
The waverider design concept was first developed by
Terence Nonweiler of the
Queen's University of Belfast
The Queen's University of Belfast, commonly known as Queen's University Belfast (; abbreviated Queen's or QUB), is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. The university received its charter in 1845 as part of ...
, and first described in print in 1951 as a re-entry vehicle. It consisted of a
delta-wing platform with a low
wing loading
In aerodynamics, wing loading is the total weight of an aircraft or flying animal divided by the area of its wing. The stalling speed, takeoff speed and landing speed of an aircraft are partly determined by its wing loading.
The faster an airc ...
to provide considerable surface area to dump the heat of re-entry. At the time, Nonweiler was forced to use a greatly simplified 2D model of airflow around the aircraft, which he realized would not be accurate due to
spanwise flow across the wing. However, he also noticed that the spanwise flow would be stopped by the shockwave being generated by the aircraft, and that if the wing was positioned to deliberately approach the shock, the spanwise flow would be trapped under wing, increasing pressure, and thus increasing lift.
In the 1950s, the British started a space program based around the
Blue Streak missile, which was, at some point, to include a crewed vehicle.
Armstrong-Whitworth
Sir W G Armstrong Whitworth & Co Ltd was a major British manufacturing company of the early years of the 20th century. With headquarters in Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, Armstrong Whitworth built armaments, ships, locomotives, automobiles and ...
were contracted to develop the re-entry vehicle, and unlike the U.S. space program, they decided to stick with a winged vehicle instead of a ballistic
capsule. Between 1957 and 1959, they contracted Nonweiler to develop his concepts further. This work produced a
pyramid
A pyramid () is a structure whose visible surfaces are triangular in broad outline and converge toward the top, making the appearance roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be of any polygon shape, such as trian ...
-shaped design with a flat underside and short wings. Heat was conducted through the wings to the upper cool surfaces, where it was dumped into the turbulent air on the top of the wing. In 1960, work on the Blue Streak was canceled as the missile was seen as being obsolete before it could have entered service. Work then moved to the
Royal Aircraft Establishment
The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) was a British research establishment, known by several different names during its history, that eventually came under the aegis of the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), bef ...
(RAE), where it continued as a research program into high-speed (Mach 4 to 7) civilian
airliner
An airliner is a type of airplane for transporting passengers and air cargo. Such aircraft are most often operated by airlines. The modern and most common variant of the airliner is a long, tube shaped, and jet powered aircraft. The largest ...
s.
This work was discovered by engineers at
North American Aviation
North American Aviation (NAA) was a major American aerospace manufacturer that designed and built several notable aircraft and spacecraft. Its products included the T-6 Texan trainer, the P-51 Mustang fighter, the B-25 Mitchell bomber, the F- ...
during the early design studies of what would lead to the
XB-70 bomber. They re-designed the original "classic" delta wing to incorporate drooping wing tips in order to trap the shock waves mechanically, rather than using a shock cone generated from the front of the aircraft. This mechanism also had two other beneficial effects; it reduced the amount of horizontal lifting surface at the rear of the aircraft, which helped offset a nose-down trim that occurs at high speeds, and it added more vertical surface which helped improve the directional stability, which decreased at high speed.
Caret wing
Nonweiler's original design used the shock wave generated by the aircraft as a way to control spanwise flow, and thereby increase the amount of air trapped under the wing in the same way as a
wing fence
A wing is a type of fin that produces both lift and drag while moving through air. Wings are defined by two shape characteristics, an airfoil section and a planform. Wing efficiency is expressed as lift-to-drag ratio, which compares the bene ...
. While working on these concepts, he noticed that it was possible to shape the wing in such a way that the shock wave generated off its leading edge would form a horizontal sheet under the craft. In this case, the airflow would not only be trapped horizontally, spanwise, but vertically as well. The only area the air above the shock wave could escape would be out the back of the sheet where the fuselage ended. Since the air was trapped between this sheet and the fuselage, a large volume of air would be trapped, much more than the more basic approach he first developed. Furthermore, since the shock surface was held at a distance from the craft, shock heating was limited to the leading edges of the wings, lowering the thermal loads on the fuselage.
In 1962 Nonweiler moved to
Glasgow University
The University of Glasgow (abbreviated as ''Glas.'' in post-nominals; ) is a public research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded by papal bull in , it is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ...
to become Professor of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics. That year his "Delta Wings of Shapes Amenable to Exact Shock-Wave Theory" was published by the ''Journal of the
Royal Aeronautical Society
The Royal Aeronautical Society, also known as the RAeS, is a British multi-disciplinary professional institution dedicated to the global aerospace community. Founded in 1866, it is the oldest Aeronautics, aeronautical society in the world. Memb ...
'', and earned him that society's
Gold Medal
A gold medal is a medal awarded for highest achievement in a non-military field. Its name derives from the use of at least a fraction of gold in form of plating or alloying in its manufacture.
Since the eighteenth century, gold medals have b ...
. A craft generated using this model looks like a delta wing that has been broken down the center and the two sides folded downward. From the rear it looks like an upside-down V, or alternately, the "
caret
Caret () is the name used familiarly for the character provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofre ...
", ^, and such designs are known as "caret wings". Two to three years later the concept briefly came into the public eye, due to the airliner work at the RAE that led to the prospect of reaching
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
in 90 minutes. Newspaper articles led to an appearance on
Scottish Television
Scottish Television (now legally known as STV Central Limited) is the ITV (TV network), ITV network franchisee for Central Belt, Central Scotland. The channel — the largest of the three ITV franchises in Scotland — has been in operation si ...
.
Hawker Siddeley
Hawker Siddeley was a group of British manufacturing companies engaged in list of aircraft manufacturers, aircraft production. Hawker Siddeley combined the legacies of several British aircraft manufacturers, emerging through a series of mergers ...
examined the caret wing waverider in the later 1960s as a part of a three-stage lunar rocket design. The first stage was built on an expanded
Blue Steel, the second a waverider, and the third a nuclear-powered crewed stage. This work was generalized in 1971 to produce a two-staged reusable spacecraft. The long first stage was designed as a classical waverider, with
air-breathing propulsion for return to the launch site. The upper stage was designed as a lifting body, and would have carried an 8000-pound (3.6 t) payload to
low Earth orbit
A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...
.
Cone flow waveriders
Nonweiler's work was based on studies of planar 2D shocks due to the difficulty understanding and predicting real-world shock patterns around 3D bodies. As the study of hypersonic flows improved, researchers were able to study waverider designs that used different shockwave shapes, the simplest being the conical shock generated by a cone. In these cases, a waverider is designed to keep the rounded shockwave attached to its wings, not a flat sheet, which increases the volume of air trapped under the surface, and thereby increases lift.
[Jones, J.G., K.C. Moore, J. Pike and P.L. Roe]
"A Method of Designing Lifting Configurations For High Supersonic Speeds, Using Axisymmetric Flow Fields"
Ingenieur-Archiv, 37, Band, 1, Heft, pp. 56-72, 1968.
Unlike the caret wing, the cone flow designs smoothly curve their wings, from near horizontal in the center, to highly drooped where they meet the shock. Like the caret wing, they have to be designed to operate at a specific speed to properly attach the shock wave to the wing's leading edge, but unlike them the entire body shape can be varied dramatically at the different design speeds, and sometimes have wingtips that curve upward to attach to the shockwave.
Further development of the conical sections, adding canopies and fuselage areas, led to the "osculating cones waverider", which develops several conical shock waves at different points on the body, blending them to produce a single shaped shock. The expansion to a wider range of compression surface flows allowed the design of waveriders with control of volume,
upper surface shape, engine integration and centre of pressure position. Performance improvements and off-design analysis continued until 1970.
During this period at least one waverider was tested at the
Woomera Rocket Range, mounted on the nose of an air-launched
Blue Steel missile, and a number of airframes were tested in the wind tunnel at NASA's
Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
. However, during the 1970s most work in hypersonics disappeared, and the waverider along with it.
Viscous optimized waveriders
One of the many differences between supersonic and hypersonic flight concerns the interaction of the
boundary layer
In physics and fluid mechanics, a boundary layer is the thin layer of fluid in the immediate vicinity of a Boundary (thermodynamic), bounding surface formed by the fluid flowing along the surface. The fluid's interaction with the wall induces ...
and the shock waves generated from the nose of the aircraft. Normally the boundary layer is quite thin compared to the streamline of airflow over the wing, and can be considered separately from other aerodynamic effects. However, as the speed increases and the shock wave increasingly approaches the sides of the craft, there comes a point where the two start to interact and the flowfield becomes very complex. Long before that point, the boundary layer starts to interact with the air trapped between the shock wave and the fuselage, the air that is being used for lift on a waverider.
Calculating the effects of these interactions was beyond the abilities of aerodynamics until the introduction of useful
computational fluid dynamics
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid dynamics, fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required ...
starting in the 1980s. In 1981, Maurice Rasmussen at the
University of Oklahoma
The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma, United States. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two territories became the ...
started a waverider renaissance by publishing a paper on a new 3D underside shape using these techniques. These shapes have superior lifting performance and less drag. Since then, whole families of
cone
In geometry, a cone is a three-dimensional figure that tapers smoothly from a flat base (typically a circle) to a point not contained in the base, called the '' apex'' or '' vertex''.
A cone is formed by a set of line segments, half-lines ...
-derived waveriders have been designed using more and more complex conic shocks, based on more complex software. This work eventually led to a conference in 1989, the ''First International Hypersonic Waverider Conference'', held at the University of Maryland.
These newest shapes, the "viscous optimized waveriders", look similar to conical designs as long as the angle of the shock wave on the nose is beyond some critical angle, about 14 degrees for a Mach 6 design for instance. The angle of the shock can be controlled by widening out the nose into a curved plate of specific radius, and reducing the radius produces a smaller shock cone angle. Vehicle design starts by selecting a given angle and then developing the body shape that traps that angle, then repeating this process for different angles. For any given speed, a single shape will generate the best results.
Design
During
re-entry
Atmospheric entry (sometimes listed as Vimpact or Ventry) is the movement of an object from outer space into and through the gases of an atmosphere of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite. Atmospheric entry may be ''uncontrolled entry ...
, hypersonic vehicles generate lift only from the underside of the
fuselage
The fuselage (; from the French language, French ''fuselé'' "spindle-shaped") is an aircraft's main body section. It holds Aircrew, crew, passengers, or cargo. In single-engine aircraft, it will usually contain an Aircraft engine, engine as wel ...
. The underside, which is inclined to the flow at a high
angle of attack
In fluid dynamics, angle of attack (AOA, α, or \alpha) is the angle between a Airfoil#Airfoil terminology, reference line on a body (often the chord (aircraft), chord line of an airfoil) and the vector (geometry), vector representing the relat ...
, creates lift in reaction to the vehicle wedging the airflow downwards. The amount of lift is not particularly high, compared to a traditional
wing
A wing is a type of fin that produces both Lift (force), lift and drag while moving through air. Wings are defined by two shape characteristics, an airfoil section and a planform (aeronautics), planform. Wing efficiency is expressed as lift-to-d ...
, but more than enough to maneuver given the amount of distance the vehicle covers.
Most re-entry vehicles have been based on the
blunt-nose reentry design pioneered by
Theodore von Kármán. He demonstrated that a
shock wave
In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...
is forced to "detach" from a curved surface, forced out into a larger configuration that requires considerable energy to form. Energy expended in forming this shock wave is no longer available as heat, so this shaping can dramatically reduce the heat load on the spacecraft. Such a design has been the basis for almost every re-entry vehicle since, found on the blunt noses of the early
ICBM
An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range (aeronautics), range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear warheads). Conven ...
warheads, the bottoms of the various
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
capsules, and the large nose of the
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...
.
The problem with the blunt-nose system is that the resulting design creates very little lift, meaning the vehicle has problems maneuvering during re-entry. If the spacecraft is meant to be able to return to its point of launch "on command", then some sort of maneuvering will be required to counteract the fact that the Earth is turning under the
spacecraft
A spacecraft is a vehicle that is designed spaceflight, to fly and operate in outer space. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including Telecommunications, communications, Earth observation satellite, Earth observation, Weather s ...
as it flies. After a single
low Earth orbit
A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...
, the launching point will be over to the east of the spacecraft by the time it has completed one full orbit. A considerable amount of research was dedicated to combining the blunt-nose system with wings, leading to the development of the
lifting body
A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift (force), lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as ...
designs in the U.S.
It was while working on one such design that Nonweiler developed the waverider. He noticed that the detachment of the shock wave over the blunt
leading edge
The leading edge is the part of the wing that first contacts the air;Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, third edition'', page 305. Aviation Supplies & Academics, 1997. alternatively it is the foremost edge of an airfoil sectio ...
s of the wings of the Armstrong-Whitworth design would allow the air on the bottom of the craft to flow spanwise and escape to the upper part of the wing through the gap between the leading edge and the detached shock wave. This loss of airflow reduced (by up to a quarter) the lift being generated by the waverider, which led to studies on how to avoid this problem and keep the flow trapped under the wing.
Nonweiler's resulting design is a
delta-wing with some amount of negative
dihedral — the wings are bent down from the
fuselage
The fuselage (; from the French language, French ''fuselé'' "spindle-shaped") is an aircraft's main body section. It holds Aircrew, crew, passengers, or cargo. In single-engine aircraft, it will usually contain an Aircraft engine, engine as wel ...
towards the tips. When viewed from the front, the wing resembles a
caret
Caret () is the name used familiarly for the character provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofre ...
symbol (

) in
cross section, and these designs are often referred to as carets. The more modern 3D version typically looks like a rounded letter 'M'. Theoretically, a star-shaped waverider with a frontal cross-section of a "+" or "×" could reduce drag by another 20%. The disadvantage of this design is that it has more area in contact with the shock wave and therefore has more pronounced
heat dissipation problems.
Waveriders generally have sharp noses and sharp leading edges on their wings. The underside shock-surface remains attached to this. Air flowing in through the shock surface is trapped between the shock and the fuselage, and can only escape at the rear of the fuselage. With sharp edges, all the lift is retained.
Even though sharp edges get much hotter than rounded ones at the same air density, the improved lift means that waveriders can glide on re-entry at much higher altitudes where the air density is lower. A list ranking various space vehicles in order of heating applied to the
airframe
The mechanical structure of an aircraft is known as the airframe. This structure is typically considered to include the fuselage, undercarriage, empennage and wings, and excludes the propulsion system.
Airframe design is a field of aeros ...
would have
capsules at the top (re-entering quickly with very high heating loads), waveriders at the bottom (extremely long gliding profiles at high altitude), and the
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...
somewhere in the middle.
Simple waveriders have substantial design problems. First, the obvious designs only work at a particular
Mach number
The Mach number (M or Ma), often only Mach, (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound.
It is named after the Austrian physicist and philosopher Erns ...
, and the amount of lift captured will change dramatically as the vehicle changes speed. Another problem is that the waverider depends on
radiative cooling
In the study of heat transfer, radiative cooling is the process by which a body loses heat by thermal radiation. As Planck's law describes, every physical body spontaneously and continuously emits electromagnetic radiation.
Radiative cooling has b ...
, possible as long as the vehicle spends most of its time at very high altitudes. However these altitudes also demand a very large wing to generate the needed lift in the thin air, and that same wing can become rather unwieldy at lower altitudes and speeds.
Because of these problems, waveriders have not found favor with practical aerodynamic designers, despite the fact that they might make long-distance hypersonic vehicles efficient enough to carry
air freight
Air cargo is any property carried or to be carried in an aircraft. Air cargo comprises air freight, air express and airmail.
Aircraft types
Different cargo can be transported by passenger, cargo or combi aircraft:
* Passenger aircraft use th ...
.
Some researchers controversially claim that there are designs that overcome these problems. One candidate for a multi-speed waverider is a "
caret wing", operated at different angles of attack. A caret wing is a
delta wing
A delta wing is a wing shaped in the form of a triangle. It is named for its similarity in shape to the Greek uppercase letter delta (letter), delta (Δ).
Although long studied, the delta wing did not find significant practical applications unti ...
with longitudinal conical or triangular
slots or
strakes. It strongly resembles a
paper airplane or
rogallo wing. The correct angle of attack would become increasingly precise at higher Mach numbers, but this is a control problem that is theoretically solvable. The wing is said to perform even better if it can be constructed of tight mesh, because that reduces its drag, while maintaining lift. Such wings are said to have the unusual attribute of operating at a wide range of Mach numbers in different
fluid
In physics, a fluid is a liquid, gas, or other material that may continuously motion, move and Deformation (physics), deform (''flow'') under an applied shear stress, or external force. They have zero shear modulus, or, in simpler terms, are M ...
s with a wide range of
Reynolds number
In fluid dynamics, the Reynolds number () is a dimensionless quantity that helps predict fluid flow patterns in different situations by measuring the ratio between Inertia, inertial and viscous forces. At low Reynolds numbers, flows tend to ...
s.
The temperature problem can be solved with some combination of a
transpiring surface, exotic materials, and possibly
heat-pipes. In a transpiring surface, small amounts of a
coolant
A coolant is a substance, typically liquid, that is used to reduce or regulate the temperature of a system. An ideal coolant has high thermal capacity, low viscosity, is low-cost, non-toxic, chemically inert and neither causes nor promotes corr ...
such as water are pumped through small holes in the aircraft's skin (see
transpiration
Transpiration is the process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from aerial parts, such as leaves, stems and flowers. It is a passive process that requires no energy expense by the plant. Transpiration also cools plants, c ...
and
perspiration
Perspiration, also known as sweat, is the fluid secreted by sweat glands in the skin of mammals.
Two types of sweat glands can be found in humans: eccrine glands and Apocrine sweat gland, apocrine glands. The eccrine sweat glands are distribu ...
). This design works for Mach 25 spacecraft
re-entry shields, and therefore should work for any aircraft that can carry the weight of the coolant. Exotic materials such as
carbon-carbon composite do not conduct heat but endure it, but they tend to be
brittle
A material is brittle if, when subjected to stress, it fractures with little elastic deformation and without significant plastic deformation. Brittle materials absorb relatively little energy prior to fracture, even those of high strength. ...
.
Heatpipes are not widely used at present. Like a conventional
heat exchanger
A heat exchanger is a system used to transfer heat between a source and a working fluid. Heat exchangers are used in both cooling and heating processes. The fluids may be separated by a solid wall to prevent mixing or they may be in direct contac ...
, they conduct heat better than most solid materials, but like a
thermosiphon
A thermosiphon (or thermosyphon) is a device that employs a method of passive heat transfer, heat exchange based on natural convection, which circulates a fluid without the necessity of a mechanical pump. Thermosiphoning is used for circulation ...
are passively pumped. The Boeing X-51A deals with external heating through the use of a tungsten nosecone and space shuttle-style heat shield tiles on its belly. Internal (engine) heating is absorbed by using the
JP-7
Turbine Fuel Low Volatility JP-7, commonly known as JP-7 (referred to as Jet Propellant 7 prior to MIL-DTL-38219) is a specialized type of jet fuel developed at Pratt and Whitney by master chemist Clarence Brown CB Eichman in 1955 for the Centra ...
fuel as a coolant prior to combustion. Other high temperature materials, referred to as SHARP materials (typically
zirconium diboride and
hafnium diboride) have been used on steering vanes for ICBM reentry vehicles since the 1970s, and are proposed for use on hypersonic vehicles. They are said to permit Mach 11 flight at altitudes and Mach 7 flight at sea level. These materials are more structurally rugged than the
Reinforced Carbon Composite (RCC) used on the space shuttle nose and leading edges, have higher radiative and temperature tolerance properties, and do not suffer from oxidation issues that RCC needs to be protected against with coatings.
Surface material
A surface material for waverider and
hypersonic
In aerodynamics, a hypersonic speed is one that exceeds five times the speed of sound, often stated as starting at speeds of Mach 5 and above.
The precise Mach number at which a craft can be said to be flying at hypersonic speed varies, since i ...
(
Mach
The Mach number (M or Ma), often only Mach, (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a Boundary (thermodynamic), boundary to the local speed of sound.
It is named after the Austrian physi ...
5 – 10) vehicles developed by scientists at the
China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics (CAAA) in
Beijing
Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...
was tested during 2023.
An alternative developed by
RTX Corporation
RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Technologies Corporation, is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by reve ...
uses a perspiring membrane developed under work supported by the United States Air Force under Contract No. United States Air Force FA8650-20-C-7001''
See also
*
Index of aviation articles
Aviation is the design, development, production, operation, and use of aircraft, especially heavier-than-air aircraft. Articles related to aviation include:
A
Aviation accidents and incidents
– Above Mean Sea Level (AMSL)
– ADF
– Acces ...
References
{{Reflist, 35em
External links
Hypersonic Waveridersfrom Aerospace.org
from gbnet.net
Accurate Automation Corporation a company that has built several model waveriders, including the
LoFLYTE and the
NASA X-43
The NASA X-43 was an experimental unmanned hypersonic aircraft with multiple planned scale variations meant to test various aspects of hypersonic flight. It was part of the X-plane series and specifically of NASA's Hyper-X program developed i ...
Aerodynamics
Aerospace engineering
Aircraft configurations
Hypersonic aircraft