Road to Mach 10: Lessons Learned from the X-43A Flight Research Program

摘要

Intended as a lessons-learned history to give aerospace engineering undergraduates "an understanding of the difficulties they will face working on an advanced project" (p. xi), Road to Mach 10 tells the story in the words of its participants. Curtis Peebles, the historian assigned to the X-43A project in late summer 2004, combines his personal observations with information obtained from e-mail updates, oral interviews, technical papers, and official reports to deliver a skillfully crafted, remarkably detailed, extraordinarily analytical, delightfully readable account of how the world's first in-flight, hypersonic testing of a scramjet engine came to pass. He chronicles, from project inception to completion, the abundant challenges, numerous miscalculations, frequent modifications, and ultimate success experienced by Hyper-X scramjet engineers and managers.