64 th International Astronautical Congress, Beijing, China. Copyright ©2013 by the Authors. Published by the IAF, with permission and released to the IAF to publish in all forms. IAC-13-D6.1.8 Page 1 of 10 IAC-13-D6.1.8 AEROTHERMODYNAMIC AND SYSTEM ANALYSIS OF A SMALL HYPERSONIC AIRPLANE (HYPLANE) V. Carandente 1 , V. D'Oriano 1,* , A. Gallina 1 , G. Russo 2,** , R. Savino 1 1 Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples "Federico II", Italy 2 Space Renaissance Italia, Naples, Italy Access to Space is still in its early stages of commercialization. Private enterprises have been making big progresses hoping to create a Space tourism business. Most of the attention is currently focused on suborbital Space Tourism, while orbital flights still appear limited and expensive. In the present work a preliminary study in the frame of the Space Renaissance (SR) Italia Space Tourism Program, regarding a small hypersonic airplane for a long duration space tourism mission named HyPlane, is presented. It is also consistent with a point-to-point medium range (5000 km) hypersonic trip, in the frame of the “urgent business travel” market segment. Main idea is to transfer technological solutions developed for aeronautical and space atmospheric re-entry systems to the design of such a hypersonic airplane. A winged vehicle characterized by high aerodynamic efficiency and able to manoeuvre along the flight path, in all aerodynamic regimes encountered, is taken into consideration. Rocket-Based Combined Cycle and Turbine-Based Combined Cycle engines are investigated to ensure higher performances in terms of flight duration and range. Different flight-paths are also considered, including sub-orbital parabolic trajectories and steady state hypersonic cruise. The former, in particular, takes advance of the high aerodynamic efficiency during the unpowered phase, in combination with a periodic engine actuation, to guarantee a long duration oscillating flight path. These trajectories offer Space tourists the opportunity of extended missions, characterized by repeated periods of low-gravity at altitudes high enough to ensure a wide view of the Earth from Space. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years some private enterprises have been approaching Space flight with a relatively low-cost philosophy, in great contrast with the one followed by government agencies in the past years. In fact, some examples of small reusable airplane-like vehicles have been developed to perform sub-orbital missions, which could represent a first step towards a safer, more comfortable and less expensive access to Space in the near future. Main idea is to merge part of technological solutions developed for aeronautical and atmospheric re-entry purposes in order to design such vehicles, as also discussed in [1-4]. The Scaled Composite launched for the first time the Space Ship One (SS1) in 2004. The vehicle reached 100 km altitude on a suborbital trajectory 36 years after the X-15, developed by NASA at the turn of 50s and 60s. The company is presently test qualifying an enlarged version of the SS1, named SS2, which is intended to carry passengers for a short-duration Space flight at a fare of about 200 k$ with first commercial flights in early 2014. This suborbital flight should allow passengers to experiment weightlessness for a few minutes and to see a large area of the Earth, along with its curvature [5]. Other projects which are included in this frame are the BSP Ascender, the EADS spaceplane and the XCOR Lynx [5-7], all of which could be used even for technological flight test [8]. * * Ph.D. at Blue Engineering ** President of Space Renaissance Italia, Member of IAA Recent survey studies assessed the potential market for suborbital vehicles [7,9]. The one performed by EADS and IPSOS [7] shows that there is a sizable market for suborbital tourism and that people willing to pay around 200 k€ for that could be in the order of 50000, just 16 years after the market start. This market is of course much larger than the one related to orbital Space tourism missions on the ISS. In this case, in fact, only 7 people had the opportunity, up to now, to perform this experience paying from 20 M$ to 40 M$. It is obvious that these fares can be paid only by the so called Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI). Suborbital Space tourism may also be seen as an intermediate step towards a novel concept of orbital Space tourism, based on reusable winged vehicles. Indeed, the employment of reusable components could strongly reduce the cost per seat up to 2 orders of magnitude, depending on the number of flights scheduled. In addition, the development of a winged re- entry vehicle could represent a safer and more comfortable way to cross the atmosphere [10-13]. As shown in Fig. I, secondary markets directly linked to the commercial Sub-Orbital flights may include microgravity research, high altitude Aerospace technological testing and development, astronauts training, remote sensing, and so forth. A longer term perspective is also characterized by point-to-point hypersonic transportation. In this frame, up to now, Skylon seems to be the most promising project [14]. It uses the hydrogen- powered Combined-Cycle SABRE engines to reach a