NASA Funds Hypersonic Flight-Test Studies With Two New Awards

NASA has awarded contracts worth a combined $1.7 million to two companies to study how their existing vehicles could support reusable hypersonic flight testing. The work sits under NASA’s Hypersonic Technology Project, part of the agency’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program.

SpaceWorks Enterprises of Atlanta, Georgia, received $500,000 to examine its X-60 platform. Stratolaunch of Mojave, California, received $1.2 million to look at its Talon-A vehicle. Both will carry out six-month studies exploring how their platforms could be modified to deliver affordable, high cadence flight-test operations.

The two vehicles are air-launched, meaning they are released from a carrier aircraft in flight. That removes the need for fixed ground launch infrastructure and allows testing over a wider range of locations.

Unlike rockets, which carry their own oxidizer, airbreathing hypersonic vehicles pull oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere. This supports longer sustained cruise at speeds above Mach 5. Ground facilities can replicate the extreme temperatures and pressures these vehicles face, but only for short durations. They cannot easily reproduce the combination of real-world atmospheric conditions and repeated flight cycles that maturing these systems requires.

“With these awards, NASA will collaborate with the commercial hypersonics industry to identify new ways to evaluate technologies through flight tests while we address the challenges of reusable, routine, airbreathing, hypersonic flight,” said Dr. Nateri Madavan, director of NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program.

NASA wants the two companies to help define the performance envelopes, payload options, flight rates, and logistical support that would be needed for a future flight-test service available to both government and commercial users.

Results from the studies may also feed into a potential future initiative called Making Advancements in Commercial Hypersonics, or MACH. If pursued, MACH would focus on building the cost models, schedule frameworks, and other planning tools required to move a hypersonic flight-test capability from concept to routine operation.

The Hypersonic Technology Project is part of NASA’s broader aeronautics portfolio, which targets advances in both supersonic and hypersonic flight. By partnering with companies already developing or operating relevant vehicles, the agency aims to reduce the technical and economic barriers to regular hypersonic flight testing in the United States.

Article & image source: NASA