Aerodynamic Characteristics and Glide-Back Performance of Langley Glide-Back Booster

Abstract

NASA-Langley Research Center is conducting system level studies on an-house concept of a small launch vehicle to address NASA's needs for rapid deployment of small payloads to Low Earth Orbit. The vehicle concept is a three-stage system with a reusable first stage and expendable upper stages. The reusable first stage booster, which glides back to launch site after staging around Mach 3 is named the Langley Glide-Back Booster (LGBB). This paper discusses the aerodynamic characteristics of the LGBB from subsonic to supersonic speeds, development of the aerodynamic database and application of this database to evaluate the glide back performance of the LGBB. The aerodynamic database was assembled using a combination of wind tunnel test data and engineering level analysis. The glide back performance of the LGBB was evaluated using a trajectory optimization code and subject to constraints on angle of attack, dynamic pressure and normal acceleration.

Reducing the Computational Expense to Train Euler-level Aerodynamic Surrogate Models for a Family of Vehicle Configurations

“…Pamadi et al 11 demonstrated that Cart3D predictions agreed well with wind tunnel data for a winged booster vehicle at most flight conditions, whereas APAS predictions exhibited decreasing accuracy as the angle of attack increased. UDP, the low-speed component of APAS, did not capture the nonlinear aerodynamic behavior observed in the wind tunnel data.…”

“…Other applications of multi-fidelity modeling abound, both for aerospace applications 19,20 and otherwise. 21,22 Pamadi et al 11 compared the predictions from two analysis tools, APAS 23 and Cart3D. 14 It should be noted that for low angles of attack (below 10-15 o ), Pamadi found that the vortex-lattice and impact methods of APAS were fairly accurate.…”

“…During the vehicle's return to its launch site, it experiences supersonic, transonic, and subsonic flight conditions. Additionally, the angle of attack may reach as high as thirty 9 , forty 10 , or even fifty degrees 11 during the unpowered return. The simplifying assumptions of many analysis tools will be violated for much of the return trajectory, driving analysts to use more complex tools.…”

“…The other parameters were set to default values based on similar vehicles 11,33 and results from a sparse sampling of the design space. The pitching moment of each case would be analyzed at a flight condition of Mach 0.8,  0 o ,  0 o .…”

Development of an Environment for Determining Vehicle Mass Properties of a Reusable Booster Design

“…[4][5][6] Another study by NASA's Langley Research Center of a glide-back booster also found similar trim problems. 7 Based on these previous studies of similar vehicles, it is clear that trim analysis must be taken into account during the initial phases of vehicle design.…”