The need for an efficient supersonic decelerator arises first for use in aero-braking planetary landers, but may also have other uses such as spacecraft crew escape and aerocapture of orbital planetary probes. Hypercone is a
concept currently under investigation for use in such applications. The paper, Hypercone Inflatable Supersonic Decelerator was authored by: Glen J. Brown, Vertigo, Inc; Chirold Epp, Claude Graves, NASA Johnson Spaceflight Center; Steve Lingard and Matt Darley, Vorticity Ltd; and Keith Jordan, Computational Fluid Dynamics Research Corp.
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