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A concise overview of the overall layout of an experimental powered high-speed flight vehicle including its subsystems is given. A mission scenario, the different flight segments and events to which the payload is exposed are described and justified. This allowed the definition of the aero-thermo-mechanical loads required to conceptually design all elements on board of the vehicle. The final vehicle configuration could achieve the different mission objectives. In particular an aero-propulsive balance, i.e. thrust ≥ drag and lift ≥ weight, could be established at a cruise Mach number of M = 7.4 on the basis of a hydrogen powered scramjet engine while guaranteeing a good aerodynamic efficiency L/D ≥ 4 in a stable, trimmed and controlled way. The experimental combustion campaign could last for at least for 3s up to 9s pending on the finally obtained flight level. This test time is very valuable as it is about 3 orders of magnitude higher of what can be tested in European ground facilities. The vehicle made maximum use of databases, expertise, technologies and materials elaborated in previously EC co-funded projects ATLLAS I & II and LAPCAT I & II.Based on this conceptual design, the consortium has arrived at a key point where they feel comfortable to go to the next step in establishing a detailed design of the vehicle and the preparation of the launch vehicle and flight campaign.

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In the present paper the comparison between experiments and numerical simulations for a generic Scramjet configuration are been presented. The experiments have been conducted for a Mach 7 condition at the hypersonic blow down wind tunnel H2K at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne. The corresponding numerical simulations have been performed using two different numerical solvers. During the experiments, air was injected through central strut and wall-ramp injectors to simulate a combustion backpressure. In order to generate a database for a comparison between numerical and experimental data, wall pressures were measured along the bottom and top side walls, Pitot pressure at the exit of the combustor, and heat flux on the sidewalls. The reasonable good agreement between the experiments and the numerical solutions show the feasibility of the numerical tools to predict complex flow structures in high-speed flows. Furthermore, an extrapolation of the numerical and experimental data to real flight conditions at an altitude of 30 km was undertaken and the feasibility of the proposed Scramjet configuration is been shown.