On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of M. A. Lavrent'ev, it seems pertinent to summarize the longterm work on the physical foundations, design, and manufacturing of sources of high-pressure gases for hypersonic wind tunnels in the pages of a journal founded with the immediate participation from M. A. Lavrent'ev. This direction of experimental aerodynamics received invaluable support of M. A. Lavrent'ev in early 1970s, without which the scientific ideas would not, probably, be put into practice.The idea of using high (up to 20,000 atm) pressures of a gas in the plenum chamber in an aerodynamic experiment was first put forward in the late 1960s by M. A. Plotnikov [1] who worked at that time in Research Institute-1 in the group of Prof. E. I. Shchetinkov, one of the founders and proponents for using supersonic combustion in air-breathing engines of hypersonic flying vehicles (HFV) for Mach numbers from 8 to 20 [2]. At the same time, the papers of Soviet and American scientists posed the question of the necessity of developing of a reentry HFV with an aircraft-type take-off and landing, capable of taking payloads to the orbit of an Earth's satellite and back. It is expected that, with the use of these vehicles, the cost of putting payloads to orbit, which is the key economic factor of using spacecraft systems in practical activity outside of the military field, will decrease by 5 to 8 times. One of the main obstacles for the use of such systems is the absence of knowledge on the complex of fundamental phenomena that accompany and ensure the HFV flight. The existing hypersonic aerodynamic facilities do not allow one to create conditions necessary for testing the corresponding HFV models [4]. This is especially true for reproduction of Reynolds numbers and ensuring test-gas purity and run time.At the end of the 1960s, M. A. Plotnikov and his colleagues developed tables of thermodynamic functions of nitrogen [1] from which it followed that the transition to the pressure region up to 10,000-20,000 atm leads to an additional contribution to the gas enthalpy equivalent to a temperature increase by approximately 1000 K per each 10,000 atm. On the one hand, this offered a possibility of increasing the Lavrent'ev Institute