A study on fundamental aerodynamic characteristics of future space transportation systems

Experimental studies of Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV) fundamental configurations were conducted. There are two configurations in RLV configurations; wing body and lifting body. Therefore we conducted experiments on fundamental configurations of wing body and lifting body in present study to obtain their aerodynamic characteristics as reference data and to understand these characteristics. Also the effects of the cross section of RLV fuselage on aerodynamic characteristics were studied. We conducted an intensive study on various shapes of cross section in order to improve Lift-to-Drag ratio (L/D) characteristics of RLV. For wing body models, the effects of wing planform on aerodynamic characteristics are strong at subsonic speed and the effects become weak as free stream Mach number is increased. The difference of aerodynamic characteristics between single delta and double delta is mainly due to the structure of separation vortices. There are little differences in the (L/D) _max value of wing body models and lifting body model 2 at supersonic speed. Wing body models have high (L/D) _max value at subsonic speed. For fuselage alone models, triangle model has highest value of (L/D) _max=2.90 at U∞ = 20 m/s. The result suggests that high L/D can be possible by using high performance fuselage.