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. Speculation 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, and in the same month from information gathered in a small workshop on advanced propulsion in Brighton, England, 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. Petit wrote about a large and long multipole wall MHD converter on the upper flat surface of the aircraft in contact with the freestream, instead of the linear cross-field Faraday converters located within a channel usually considered. In such a multipole converter, magnetic field is produced by many parallel superconducting thin wires instead of pairs of bigger electromagnets. These wires run below the surface directly in contact with the airflow, their profile following the body of the vehicle. Air is progressively decelerated in the boundary layer in a laminar flow without too much recompression, down to subsonic values as it enters the inlet then the air-breathing jet engines. Such an open wall MHD-controlled inlet will be exposed by two scientists of the Ayaks program in a similar way two years later, although they propose to locate it on the surface of the inclined front ramp underneath the aircraft, to vector the shock wave as a "shock-on-lip" upon the air inlet, whatever the speed and altitude. 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. He then describes a similar multipole MHD accelerator located on the physical surface of the semi-guided ramp nozzle, which accelerates the conductive exhaust gases downstream the jet engines. Ten years before Petit, Dr. Vladimir I. Krementsov, head of the Nizhny Novgorod Research Institute of