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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 107 - Boulder - March 2011
Agenda Location	5 SUBCOMMITTEE B – MISSILES AND SPACE 5.2 X-51 Overview
Title	X-51 Overview Best Presentation Award
Presenter	Kevin Bowcutt
Affiliation	Boeing
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Dr. Kevin G. Bowcutt Boeing Abstract The dream of hypersonic flight powered by air-breathing propulsion was born in the late 1950’s when the concept for a supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) engine was first conceived. In the 60 or so years since much work has been done to develop, test and prove the performance and operability of scramjet engines. Although there were two national programs in the 1960’s and 1980’s to design, build and fly a scramjet-powered aerospace plane (e.g., the NASP program from 1986-1994), neither culminated in flying a scramjet to prove that they worked as theorized. It wasn’t until this century that scramjets were finally flown and proved to not only work, but to produce the level of thrust predicted by theory and measured in imperfect ground facilities. The first flight test of an airframe-integrated scramjet occurred in 2004 when the NASA X-43A flew at nearly Mach 7 and then again at almost Mach 10 with a hydrogen-fueled scramjet. In this case the test vehicle was rocket-boosted to the test speed, it was heavier than the lift generated by its aerodynamic shape, it employed a heavy heat-sink scramjet, it was statically stable, and it produced only five to 10 seconds of scramjet data in flight before running out of hydrogen fuel. The second flight test of a scramjet occurred in May, 2010 on the first USAF X-51A vehicle. The X-51 scramjet flight test program differs from X-43 in that the test vehicle is boosted to scramjet starting speed, accelerates to a cruise speed as high as Mach 6 using a flight-weight scramjet engine cooled by its own fuel, burns storable JP-7 hydrocarbon fuel, is highly unstable, and can fly for up to 300 seconds on scramjet power. Two to three additional X-51A flight tests are planned. This presentation will summarize the design, development, and first flight test of the X-51A vehicle. A new design approach, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), was used to design the vehicle, which included stability and control directly in the process. Vehicle GNC for X-51A was very challenging, and these challenges and how they were tackled also will be discussed.