Following the success of the Hyper-X project, conclusion of the X-43 Program, and the retirement of the NASA B-52 (The Boeing Company, Chicago, Illinois) airplane, tail number 008, researchers at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center began to look for another research test vehicle, or testbed, for the hypersonic flight regime. A new hypersonic testbed would have to be low cost to survive in the financial environment of shrinking aeronautics funding within NASA. A low-cost approach to develop a hypersonic testbed was found in a surplus of U.S. Navy Phoenix (Raytheon Company, Waltham, Massachusetts) air-to-air missiles in combination with the NASA F-15B (McDonnell Douglas Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri) airplane, tail number 836. Currently, the only other option for hypersonic flight-testing is through the use of sounding rockets that are unguided and limited in their trajectory variability. Also, sounding rockets cannot be used to verify control system algorithms because they lack a guidance system. As shown in figure 1, the F-15B airplane will be used to carry the missiles to supersonic conditions for launch. The missiles would then be launched, carrying experimental research payloads to their test conditions at speeds in excess of Mach 5. This effort is being performed with the assistance of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWC-WD) at China Lake, California.
Design of the Phoenix Missile Hypersonic Testbed (PMHT)
2007
3 pages
Report
No indication
English
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