Nowadays, aerodynamic shape optimization of the hypersonic vehicle is mostly optimized for local details such as the wing. In the overall shape optimization, the conceptual design of the vehicle is more common, in which the shape is described in fewer parameters and optimized roughly. Meanwhile, in the optimization, the capacity is considered only by the volumetric ratio, and it can hardly meet the actual payload size constraints, which is difficult to apply to engineer practice. In this paper, a rapid aerodynamic shape optimization method with payload size constraints is proposed. The analytic method combined with a clamped cubic spline curve is used to establish the parametric model with the payload size constraints. In order to ensure the accuracy and improve the optimization efficiency, the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle are quickly obtained based on the adaptive Cartesian grid generation method and viscosity modified Euler equations. The lift-to-drag ratio is used as the objective, and a sequence iteration method with multi-point selecting strategy is adopted to make convergence faster. In order to compare and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the optimal solution is compared with a reference shape obtained through a conventional multi-objective aerodynamic shape optimization with lift-to-drag ratio and the volumetric ratio as objectives. Through comparative analysis, the method proposed in this paper can find the optimal shape that satisfies the payload size constraints quickly, which can effectively improve the aerodynamic performance of the hypersonic vehicle and can be better applied to practical engineering optimization problems.INDEX TERMS Hypersonic, parametric design, surrogate model, computational fluid dynamics, optimization.