A piece of NASA-Langley artwork describing the future of aeropropulsion… the scramjet engine. The provenance on the art is hazy at best… found in the uncatalogued collection of a former Langley engineer, it probably dates to the mid 1960’s. The aircraft illustrated here has been seen from the early 1960s up into the late 1980s, so that at best brackets the art. The aircraft has been used as a hypersonic transport and as the first stage of a space launch system. As shown here, the model used was *probably* a wind tunnel model repainted and repurposed as a display model… none of the diagrams I’ve seen of it have included the “hump” on the underside of the aft expansion ramp. Most likely that’s the connection point for the support “sting” for tunnel use. Alternatively, it *could* represent a fairing for a rather sizable rocket engine, though that seems unlikely… during scramjet operation the hump would not only mess with exhaust flowfields, it would also be subjected toa whole lot of thermal unpleasantness.
