X-43a Research Paper

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The X-43A aircraft was a small unpiloted test vehicle with a length of 3.7 m. The vehicle had a lifting body design i.e. the aircraft body could generate a significant amount of lift, instead of being dependent on wings. The weight of the aircraft was approximately 3,000 pounds (about 1,300 kilograms). The X-43A was designed so that it could be fully controlled in high-speed flight, even while it is in the glide phase without any thrust generation. However, the aircraft was not designed for the landing phase. The test vehicles crashed into the Pacific Ocean when the test was over and nothing could be salvaged.
While traveling at very high Mach numbers, there is a lot of heat generation due to the compression shock waves involved in supersonic

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