—— Could you tell us about the recent results of the X-43A program?
The X-43A program, which we just recent completed at NASA- Dryden, was a collaborative project between the NASA-Dryden Flight Research Center and the NASA-Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. A number of private companies in the industry were also partners in the program.
The objective was to demonstrate the advanced technology of flying very fast engine technology, called Supersonic Combustion Ramjet technology. So the demonstrations that we completed in March 2004 and November 2004 were experimental flight research tests of a small research vehicle that was boosted to very high mach numbers using a rocket. The test vehicle was then separated from the booster rocket and this engine technology was demonstrated in flight. So this Supersonic Combustion Ramjet, or Scramjet, technology experiment was really the core of the program. We demonstrated that we could build that engine concept, and that it did work in flight at a mach number of 7, which is about 5,000 miles per hour, or 8,000 kilometers per hour. That test was done in March, and then in November we repeated the test, but at a higher mach number - to a mach number of 9.8, which is a little over 7,000 miles per hour, or about 11,000 kilometers per hour. So those two tests did demonstrate the early feasibility of this engine technology.
—— Will you continue developing a hypersonic airplane, or a space plane, with X-43A technology?
I believe so. I think the technology that we demonstrated last year will find its way into future applications.
Currently NASA does not have a follow-up planned in the hypersonic flight program. There are still a lot of discussions about the next steps associated with this hypersonic technology. So currently, we're not involved with another test in this regime, but I fully expect that somewhere in the future this technology will be picked up again and developed further.
—— What other projects are happening at NASA-Dryden?
In the last few years we have been flying a number of unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and we've had a number of successes with these. One included the flight of the vehicle that we called Helios. That was a large unmanned flight vehicle that was completely solar powered. It was a solar electric airplane that flew above 96,000 feet, a world altitude record for that type of aircraft. So that's just an example of some of the unpiloted vehicle technology that we're pursuing, and we have a particular interest in extending that technology for very-high-altitude and very-long-endurance unpiloted vehicles, primarily for scientific applications within other elements of NASA. We support the Earth Science program as well as the Space Science program within the agency with these high-altitude science-platform capabilities.
