Integrated Conceptual Design Tools for Suborbital Vehicles

The concept of suborbital transportation of goods and people across the Earth is recently attracting increasing attention and investments. This type of flight consists in accelerating a carrier up to a speed that is not sufficient to complete an orbit of the Earth but, at the same time, allows it to reach the upper layers of the atmosphere, glide at altitudes close to or even higher than the Karman line, covering distances comparable to half of the circumference of the Earth in flight times of the order of a fraction of an hour. Such technology could radically change intercontinental commercial and emergency transport. However, commercial applications of this concept pose several technological, economical, and regulatory challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes available for deployment at scale.
This project aims at providing a highly integrated multidisciplinary approach to improve the overall hypersonic vehicle design process. A specific novel and original design tool, which encompasses trajectory optimization, conceptual design, and computational fluid dynamics techniques, will be developed, providing relevant contributions in all these areas while combining them.