This 32-second video shows the successful launch of the NASA’s X-43A from B-52 Mothership on its second test flight.
NASA’s multi-year hypersonic flight research program was designed to overcome one of the greatest aeronautical research challenges – air-breathing hypersonic flight. The X-43A was a small experimental research aircraft designed to flight-demonstrate the technology of airframe-integrated supersonic ramjet or “scramjet” propulsion at hypersonic speeds above Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. Its scramjet engine is an air-breathing engine in which the airflow through the engine remains supersonic.
Far outpacing any supersonic aircraft, the three X-43A vehicles were designed to fly at speeds of Mach 7 and 10. Ultimately, the revolutionary technologies exposed by the Hyper-X Program promise to increase payload capacities and reduce costs for future air and space vehicles.
MicroCraft, Inc. of Tullahoma, TN, (now ATK GASL) was the industry partner chosen by NASA to construct the X-43 vehicles. The contract award announcement occurred on March 24, 1997, with construction of the vehicles beginning soon thereafter. Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Launch Vehicles Division in Chandler, AZ constructed the Hyper-X launch vehicles.
The Hyper-X Phase I program was an agency-wide effort, conducted jointly by Dryden and Langley, to demonstrate technology that could ultimately be applied in vehicle types from hypersonic aircraft to reusable space launchers. Each of the vehicles is 12 feet long with a span of about five feet.
March 27, 2004
