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NASA's Langley, Va., Research Center Pegs Program Hopes on Unmanned Jet Flight

Posted on: Monday, 22 March 2004, 06:00 CST

Mar. 23--HAMPTON, Va. -- Engineers at NASA Langley Research Center hope their second attempt at flying an unmanned jet to seven times the speed of sound will be successful because the $230 million program may depend on it.

The flight scheduled for Saturday on the West Coast will likely play a role in whether Langley will be able to launch the third vehicle in the supersonic Hyper-X program five months from now. The program costs $3.5 million per month and, if this flight fails, that funding may evaporate as the first flight did nearly three years ago.

"It's always an evolving story on the budget," said Hyper-X program manager Vincent L. Rausch of Langley.

The research may be key to the future of the space shuttle. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hopes the research will help it design a space shuttle that can take off and land like an airplane, rather than on the back of a volatile mix of liquid oxygen and hydrogen as it does now. It would be safer and less expensive in the long run, Rausch said.

Hyper-X is also important for Langley, which has researched supersonic flight for more than 40 years. Langley is the lead on the joint project with Dryden Flight Research Center. As many as 115 Langley researchers worked on the program with about 60 researchers from Dryden.

The 12-foot-long, 5-foot-wide X-43A research aircraft looks like a spatula, Rausch said. It will be attached to a Pegasus booster rocket and dropped from a converted B-52 bomber.

The supersonic-combustion ram jet, or scram jet, uses the velocity of the air as it "rams" against the engine as a compressor, mixing the atmospheric oxygen with hydrogen to create combustion and propel it forward.

The flight is scheduled to begin at noon Saturday, when the B-52 is to take off from Edwards Air Force Base, outside of Los Angeles, with X-43A and booster attached to it. The bomber will climb to 40,000 feet and release the vehicle and booster at 1 p.m. Five seconds later, the booster will ignite and climb to almost 100,000 feet in 90 seconds before separating from the X-43A.

The craft will only fly on its own for 10 seconds as researchers on the ground collect aerodynamic and propulsion data. The vehicle then will slow until it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean about 440 miles from its launch from the B-52.

If the booster separates and the vehicle flies at Mach 7, or about 5,300 miles per hour, under its own power, NASA will have achieved what Rausch called an "aviation first," setting a new speed record. The planned third flight late this summer aims to top that by going 10 times the speed of sound, or 7,600 miles per hour.

That's a big if. The first flight in June 2001 lasted only 13 seconds before the booster and vehicle broke apart and had to be destroyed in the air. Researchers realized they had mis-estimated the flight conditions because the booster flew differently than they had modeled it for in Langley's wind tunnels.

This time around, the vehicle and booster are made of different materials that can handle the torque and air pressure. They added a second motor to the booster and more batteries and circuits. Also, the B-52 will release the booster and vehicle at a higher altitude than before, at 40,000 feet rather than 23,000 feet.

"Obviously, we learned a lot from the flight," Rausch said.

Cloud cover and turbulence could postpone the flight a day or more.

Officials at Dryden will send up weather balloons each day this week to check conditions.

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To see more of the The Virginian-Pilot, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.pilotonline.com

(c) 2004, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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