Air Force's X-51 WaveRider close to first flight
December 01, 2009 Filed in: Aerospace
technology
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – The first “captive carry” flight of the Air Force's revolutionary X-51 WaveRider is scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 9, in California, a spokesman said today.
It will be a major step towards an eventual free flight of the experimental craft early next year and an attempt at an engineering first – reaching six times the speed of sound on the power of an air-breathing engine burning jet fuel. If achieved, it could open the door to a new class of high-speed weapons and quick-response, airplane-like space lifters.
Weather
permitting on Dec. 9, a B-52 carrier jet will fly
from Edwards Air Force Base with the unmanned craft
snugged under a wing, Derek Kaufman, a spokesman for
the Air Force Research
Laboratory at Wright-Patterson,
told AviationDayton.com.
Air and ground crews with the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards will use the flight to check various systems aboard the X-51A while the B-52 performs gentle maneuvering over Edwards' airspace, Kaufman said.
Following successful captive carry, the next X-51 flight is expected in mid-January, said Charlie Brink, X-51 program manager for AFRL's Propulsion Directorate at Wright-Patterson. Telemetry support and systems will be evaluated, but the X-51 will not be released from the B-52 and its engines will not ignite. It will be a "full dress rehearsal" for its first hypersonic test flight, now planned for mid-February, Brink said.
During the February flight test, the B-52 will carry the X-51A to 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, then release it, according to Kaufman. A solid rocket booster from an Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile will then ignite and accelerate the X-51 to about Mach 4.5, or 4.5 times the speed of sound. Then the booster will be jettisoned and the test vehicle's supersonic combustion ramjet engine will ignite to propel the vehicle for nearly five minutes at more than Mach 6.
Engineers expect to learn a great deal about hypersonic flight during the nearly 300 seconds under scramjet power, Kaufman said.
A practical scramjet has been the holy grail of high-speed flight research for decades. Traditional turbine engines are impractical at high supersonic speeds. NASA’s scramjet-powered X-43A achieved Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 miles per hour, in 2004, but its engine ran for only a few seconds and it burned hydrogen, an exotic fuel that isn’t practical for military uses.
The scramjet engine that's to the X-51 at its peak speeds is designed to run for minutes rather than seconds and to burn JP-7, a type of military jet fuel.
The X-51A WaveRider program is a joint effort by the Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and Boeing.
Air and ground crews with the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards will use the flight to check various systems aboard the X-51A while the B-52 performs gentle maneuvering over Edwards' airspace, Kaufman said.
Following successful captive carry, the next X-51 flight is expected in mid-January, said Charlie Brink, X-51 program manager for AFRL's Propulsion Directorate at Wright-Patterson. Telemetry support and systems will be evaluated, but the X-51 will not be released from the B-52 and its engines will not ignite. It will be a "full dress rehearsal" for its first hypersonic test flight, now planned for mid-February, Brink said.
During the February flight test, the B-52 will carry the X-51A to 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, then release it, according to Kaufman. A solid rocket booster from an Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile will then ignite and accelerate the X-51 to about Mach 4.5, or 4.5 times the speed of sound. Then the booster will be jettisoned and the test vehicle's supersonic combustion ramjet engine will ignite to propel the vehicle for nearly five minutes at more than Mach 6.
Engineers expect to learn a great deal about hypersonic flight during the nearly 300 seconds under scramjet power, Kaufman said.
A practical scramjet has been the holy grail of high-speed flight research for decades. Traditional turbine engines are impractical at high supersonic speeds. NASA’s scramjet-powered X-43A achieved Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 miles per hour, in 2004, but its engine ran for only a few seconds and it burned hydrogen, an exotic fuel that isn’t practical for military uses.
The scramjet engine that's to the X-51 at its peak speeds is designed to run for minutes rather than seconds and to burn JP-7, a type of military jet fuel.
The X-51A WaveRider program is a joint effort by the Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and Boeing.
