Ayaks

[1][2][3] Ayaks was initially a classified Soviet spaceplane project aimed to design a new kind of global range hypersonic cruise vehicle capable of flying and conducting a variety of military missions in the mesosphere.

In the late 1970s, Soviet scientists began to explore a novel type of hypersonic propulsion system concept, exposed for the first time in a Russian newspaper with a short interview of Ayaks' inventor, Pr.

At that time, the whole concept was unknown to the West, although early developments involved the cooperation of Soviet industrial enterprises, technical institutes, the Military-Industrial Commission of the USSR (VPK) and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1994 Novichkov revealed that the Russian Federation was ready to fund the Ayaks program for eight years and that a reusable small-scale flight test module had been built by the Arsenal Design Bureau.

In September 1996, as part of the Capstone Design Course and the Hypersonic Aero-Propulsion Integration Course at Parks College, Czysz assigned his students to analyze the information gathered, as the ODYSSEUS project.

[12] With such information, long-time ANSER main expert Ramon L. Chase reviewed his former position and assembled a team to evaluate and develop American versions of Ayaks technologies within the HRST program.

He recruited H. David Froning Jr., CEO of Flight Unlimited; Leon E. McKinney, world expert in fluid dynamics; Paul A. Czysz; Mark J. Lewis, aerodynamicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, specialist of waveriders and airflows around leading edges and director of the NASA-sponsored Maryland Center for Hypersonic Education and Research; Dr. Robert Boyd of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works able to build real working prototypes with allocated budgets from black projects, whose contractor General Atomics is a world leader in superconducting magnets (that Ayaks uses); and Dr. Daniel Swallow from Textron Systems, one of the few firms still possessing expertise in magnetohydrodynamic converters, which Ayaks extensively uses.

At hypersonic speeds, the heat flux from shock waves and air friction on the body of an aircraft, especially at the nose and leading edges, becomes considerable, as the temperature is proportional to the square of the Mach number.

[32] In subsequent literature, the accent has been put more on magnetohydrodynamics than on the chemical part of these engines, which are now simply referred to as a scramjet with MHD bypass as these concepts intimately require each other to work efficiently.

These issues do not arise in the Ayaks concept as the plasma funnel virtually increases the cross-section of the air inlet while maintaining its limited physical size, and additional energy is taken from the flow itself.

Such a plasma cushion in front and around the aircraft is said to offer several advantages:[2][35][36] According to the data presented at the 2001 MAKS Airshow, the specifications of the Ayaks are: Later publications cite even more impressive numbers, with expected performance of service ceiling of 60 km and cruising speed of Mach 10–20, and the ability to reach the orbital speed of 28,440 km/h with the addition of booster rockets, the spaceplane then flying in boost-glide trajectories (successive rebounds or "skips" on the upper layers of the atmosphere, alternating unpowered gliding and powered modes) similarly to the US hypersonic waverider project HyperSoar with a high glide ratio of 40:1.

[15][39][40] In 2003, French engineer Jean-Pierre Petit's study was based on a paper published in January 2001 in the French magazine Air et Cosmos by Alexandre-David Szamès,[15] and in the same month from information gathered in a small workshop on advanced propulsion in Brighton, England,[41] especially after discussions with David Froning Jr. from Flight Unlimited about his prior work involving electric and electromagnetic discharges in hypersonic flows, presented during the workshop.

[42] As subsonic velocities can be achieved internally while the external flow is still hypersonic, Petit proposes that such platform could use almost conventional turbojets and ramjets instead of scramjets more difficult to control, and such plane would not need vertical stabilizers nor fins anymore, as it would maneuver through locally increasing or reducing drag on particular regions of the wetted area with electromagnetic forces.

Ten years before Petit, Dr. Vladimir I. Krementsov, head of the Nizhny Novgorod Research Institute of Radio Engineering (NIIRT), and Dr Anatoly Klimov, chief of the Moscow Radiotechnical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (MRTI RAS), exposed to William Kaufmann that the MHD bypass system of the Ayaks concept would have been already built in the rumored Aurora secret spaceplane, successor of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.