Facing the Heat Barrier: A History of Hypersonics

by T.A. Heppenheimer, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Editor)

Hypersonics is the study of flight at speeds where aerodynamic heating dominates the physics of the problem. It is an engineering science with close links to supersonics and engine design. Within this field, many of the most important results have been experimental. The principal facilities have been wind tunnels and related devices, which have produced flows with speeds up to orbital velocity. Why is this important? Hypersonics has had two major applications. The first has been to provide thermal protection during atmospheric reentry. Success in this enterprise has supported ballistic-missile nose cones, has returned strategic reconnaissance photos from orbit and astronauts from the Moon, and has even dropped an instrument package into the atmosphere of Jupiter. The second application has involved high-speed propulsion and has sought to develop the scramjet as an advanced airbreathing ramjet. Atmospheric entry today is fully mature as an engineering discipline, but work with its applications continues to reach for new achievements. Studies of scramjets still seek full success, in which such engines can accelerate a vehicle without the use of rockets. Hence, there is much to do in this area as well.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Thomas A. Heppenheimer (January 1, 1947 – September 9, 2015) holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan, and is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has held research fellowships in planetary science at California Institute of Technology and at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany.

He has been a freelance writer since 1978. He has written extensively on aerospace, business and government, and the history of technology. He is a frequent contributor to American Heritage and its affiliated publications, and to Air & Space. He has also written for the National Academy of Sciences, and contributed regularly to Mosaic of the National Science Foundation. He has written some 300 published articles for more than two dozen publications.

Reviews

[Craig Beyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the difficulties in many NASA books is the technical language barrier to understanding the contents. The author does an admirable job in clarifying the technical language in describing and explaining the many technical, funding, and political (!) issues in working towards hypersonic flight. He describes the initial problem of the high-speed heating and the materials science that solved the reentry heating problem (i.e., ablative materials and ceramic tiles). He spends considerable time describing the problems of hypersonic propulsion, primarily scramjets, and the constraints of testing in the hypersonic realm on the ground. NASA, universities, and aerospace companies attempted to workaround the testing constraints by computer simulations using computational fluid dynamics. The author describes the successes and failures of this approach and the difficulties in calibrating the models and simulations with the limited flight data.