Comparison of Faceted and Blunt Lifting Bodies for Reentry Flights

The design of a reentry vehicle strongly depends on the entry strategy of the projected mission. From the aerodynamic point of view, the layout of a hypersonic vehicle is a compromise between a vehicle being blunt enough to reduce the aerodynamic heating and sharp enough to obtain acceptable aerodynamic and propulsive efficiency. The selected flight configurations in this paper are wingless lifting bodies. Two different types of lifting bodies are compared: a sharp and a blunt body. The chosen blunt bicone is one of the Reusability Flight Experiment geometries, which were designed in the frame of the DLR, German Aerospace Center vehicle concept study of Reusability Flight Experiment. The sharp configuration is one of the DLR, German Aerospace Center Sharp Edge Flight Experiment configurations, which are a faceted body with sharp leading edge. The focus of the present study is the discussion of advantages and drawbacks of both concepts with respect to structure and aerodynamics.