By 
November 13th, 2025
Nicholaus Parziale (right) and his students are preparing for a wind tunnel experiment.
Image credit: Stevens Institute of Technology
A study suggests that building hypersonic planes may not require a significantly different design approach – a finding that could also alter future space transportation concepts.
Revolutionizing global travel could mean transforming day-long international flights into brief commutes no longer than a feature length movie. How about cutting the duration of a hop between Sydney to Los Angeles from 15 hours to just one?
“It really shrinks the planet,” says Nicholaus Parziale, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. “It will make travel faster, easier and more enjoyable.”
Turbulence and heat
Parziale explains that what’s standing in the way of such ultra-fast planes becoming reality is the turbulence and heat they generate as they fly.
To build hypersonic planes requires understanding how airflow works at greater Mach numbers — like five or ten times the speed of sound.
Enter the Morkovin’s hypothesis.
Nicholaus Parziale: “I’d suggest that everything seems impossible until it isn’t.”
Image credit: Stevens Institute of Technology
Formulated by Mark Morkovin in mid-20th century, the hypothesis postulates that when air moves at Mach 5 or Mach 6, the turbulence behavior doesn’t change all that much from slower speeds.
Go with the flow
Although air density and temperature change more in faster flows, the hypothesis states that the basic “choppy” motion of turbulence stays mostly the same.
“Basically, the Morkovin’s hypothesis means that the way the turbulent air moves at low and high speeds isn’t that different,” says Parziale.
“If the hypothesis is correct,” Parziale adds, “it means that we don’t need a whole new way to understand turbulence at these higher speeds. We can use the same concepts we use for the slower flows.”
Therefore, hypersonic planes don’t need a significantly different design approach.
Wind tunnel testing
In the study, Parziale’s team used lasers to ionize a gas called krypton which is seeded into the air flowing inside a wind tunnel. That temporarily made krypton atoms form an initially-straight, glowing line.
Then researchers used ultra high-resolution cameras to take pictures of how that fluorescent krypton line moves, bends, and twists through the wind tunnel’s air — akin to how a leaf swirls through the little eddies in a river, explains a Stevens Institute of Technology media statement.
“As that line moves with the gas, you can see crinkles and structure in the flow, and from that, we can learn a lot about turbulence,” says Parziale, adding that he spent 11 years building that clever setup. “And what we found was that at Mach 6, the turbulence behavior is pretty close to the incompressible flow,” he states.
Artist’s view of Space Launch System/Orion spacecraft on the launch pad.
Credit: NASA
Space transportation
The study findings also hold promise for changing how space transportation is done, Parziale explains.
“If we can build planes that fly at hypersonic speed, we can also fly them into space, rather than launching rockets, which would make transportation to and from low Earth orbit easier,” Parziale says. “It will be a game-changer for transportation not only on earth, but also in low orbit.”
Parziale’s bottom line: “I’d suggest that everything seems impossible until it isn’t.”
To go to the study – “Hypersonic turbulent quantities in support of Morkovin’s hypothesis” — published in Nature Communications, go to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65398-4
Also, go to this video at:
Posted in Space News
