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A History |
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by
Duncan Lunan
Waverider Should you wish to contact the
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email: In one respect we were very much in
the minority: no-one else was there to report on flying real
Waveriders. When Gordon showed a slide of his first six
Waverider models lying on the grass , a voice from the
audience said, My God, hardware! Almost everything else we
were shown in the intensive three days of the conference
consisted of computer graphics. A great deal of theoretical
work had been done, but many of the theoreticians had quite
different ideas from the intending designers of flight
hardware. The theoretical studies concentrated on generating
wing shapes which would fit within the shock cones produced
by a point source travelling at hypersonic speed. These
produce a scalloped contour for the Waverider underside, and
as a family are becoming known as lips. Gordon and several
other speakers had doubts about this approach, pointing out
that in real life the shockwave would not be generated by
the leading edge of the wing and might well not have a
conical shape. The lip shapes would also be very unsuitable
for low-speed flight and landing, a key factor in ASTRAs
efforts to design a workable Waverider space shuttle, though
not affecting Jim's interest in it as a carrier for
interplanetary transfers. During the conference, we learned
that there was another class of reentry vehicle now in the
game, giving Waveriders a possible military role. These are
termed Evaders - very loosely defined, but intended to
perform high-stress, high-temperature manoeuvres during
atmospheric entry. Tests to date have been performed with
conventional bionic designs, like those envisaged by NASA
for aerogravity manoeuvres in the atmosphere of Mars. But
Waverider shapes might be used, and there were people (in
civilian clothes) casually saying to us things like, of
course, we've cracked the control surface problem you're
working on, but we cant tell you about it. In due course it emerged that the
Evader programme was a joint effort by the McDonnell Douglas
corporation and the USAF Ballistic Missile Organisation. In
late spring 1993 they tested a full-size research model in
the US Navy's Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel, at Mach 10, 14 and
16.5 (think of the power involved!) The design of the
Waveriders upper surface closely resembled Gordon's, though
the underside was nearer the Maryland configuration. To
everybody's surprise except Gordon's the performance turned
out to be excellent even at well away from design speed. The
vehicle was instrumented for flight, and the last we heard
was that McDonnell Douglas were trying to persuade NASA to
launch it on a sounding rocket as a research vehicle.
Knowing it to be part of a military programme, NASA was not
inclined to do so. It now emerges that NASA has its own
Waverider programme. Photos were released in 1995 of a large
Waverider model being tested in a wind-tunnel at NASAs
Langley Research Centre. The design Mach number was 6, the
same as the Royal Aircraft Establishments Waverider airliner
in the 1960s, and indeed the Goddard design resembled it
closely - except that instead of a vertical stabiliser it
had tip-fins like Gordon's shuttle design! Following that,
on August 2nd 1996, NASA and the US Air Force unveiled a new
research vehicle, which they claimed to be the first of a
kind: a Waverider, very much like the test models we've been
flying here for over ten years! The new NASA/USAF vehicle is called
LoFLYTE,
and is intended to conduct low-speed tests to perfect
control systems for a Waverider which would operate at Mach
5. (For comparison, the Space Shuttle reenters the Earths
atmosphere at Mach 25; megasonic interplanetary transfers
would be at Mach 125 or more.) LoFLYTE
is eight feet four inches long and unmanned, but it will
have an 'Intelligent' control system which becomes
increasingly independent as it is taught by a human pilot on
the ground. The vehicle has been developed by Accurate
Automation Corp. of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and according to
ASTRAs sources in the USA, the control system is being
developed with Japanese participation. Since 1991 there has been continuing
speculation that the US military already has an operational
Waverider vehicle, possibly the Aurora spy-plane alleged to
be operating from airfields in Europe including Macrihanish
on the Kintyre peninsula. On August 11th the Sunday Times
speculated that this was responsible for sightings of
wedge-shaped or triangular UFOs, including one which last
year buzzed a British Airways Boeing 737 near Manchester.
The more I think about it, the less likely that seems, says
Gordon. At the present stage of development, a military
Waverider vehicle would have to fly much higher and faster
than these sightings, at several times the speed of sound.
The LoFLYTE
programme shows that they haven't solved the practical
problems of controlling them in the lower atmosphere. At the
heights and speeds quoted, I think these sightings have to
be Stealth aircraft - maybe including secret ones the USAF
hasn't shown in public yet. Page
Six
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Four
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