Industry Expert's Missile Design Textbook and Training Course

 Fleeman Continues  to Shape Defense Technology Education

Veteran aerospace engineer Eugene Fleeman's comprehensive handbook has become the definitive reference for missile systems, earning widespread acclaim from professionals and academics while competing programs focus on specialized topics

ATLANTA — More than five decades of missile systems expertise has been distilled into what industry professionals are calling "the bible" for missile design education, as Eugene L. Fleeman's work continues to influence defense technology development worldwide.

Fleeman's latest textbook, Missile Design Guide, published in 2022 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, draws from over 50 years of experience in missile system design and development. The handbook features extensive use of simple closed-form, physics-based analytical prediction expressions to provide better insight into primary driving system parameters, with emphasis given to ease of use.

A Career Spanning Defense, Industry, and Academia

Fleeman's career spans government service at the U.S. Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he managed advanced weapons programs and served as senior engineer for missile stability and control technology. He later became deputy director of hypersonic design and applications at Boeing, contributing to projects including the affordable rapid response missile demonstrator and the X-43 Hyper-X Demonstrator.

Currently, Fleeman is an international lecturer on missiles and has authored over 200 publications, including four textbooks.

Hypersonic Missile Coverage

Reflecting the growing importance of high-speed weapons systems, Fleeman's work includes substantial hypersonic content. He offers a specialized course that addresses hypersonic missile design, development, analysis, and system engineering, featuring over 90 videos that illustrate hypersonic missile development activities and performance.

The hypersonic course covers key topics including drivers for hypersonic missile design, conceptual design criteria for hypersonic missiles, hypersonic missile configuration design/sizing, and prediction of aerodynamics, propulsion, weight, and flight performance. It also addresses measures of merit sizing and prediction, including missile seeker alternatives and performance, guidance alternatives and accuracy, warhead alternatives and lethality, observables and observable reduction, and the development process for hypersonic missile systems and technologies.

The Missile Design Guide includes detailed chapters on materials, specifically covering missile airframe material alternatives, missile structure/insulation trades, high temperature insulation materials, missile aerodynamic heating/thermal response prediction, localized aerodynamic heating and thermal stress, and rocket motor case and nozzle material alternatives.

Analytical Philosophy vs. Cutting-Edge Research

Fleeman's approach emphasizes fundamental design principles over recent experimental developments. A reviewer noted that "the trademark of this book is its extensive use of closed-form analytic solutions," contrasting this with "most modern design techniques [that] advocate running a bazillion computer simulations, aggregating the results, and trying to make sense of them".

The materials discuss "typical values of missile parameters and the characteristics of current operational missiles" as well as "the enabling subsystems and technologies for missiles and the current/projected state-of-the-art", though there is no specific mention of recent hypersonic wind tunnel research, cutting-edge CFD methodologies, or latest experimental validation techniques in the available materials.

This makes the work excellent for understanding fundamental design principles and gaining rapid conceptual design capabilities, though readers seeking comprehensive coverage of the latest experimental facilities or contemporary research programs would likely need to supplement with current journal literature.

Widespread Professional Acclaim

The 2022 Missile Design Guide represents an update to Fleeman's 2012 textbook Missile Design and System Engineering. Reader reviews on Amazon describe the earlier edition as serving "as the standard on the subject" and "a must in the professionals library," providing college-level insights on missile design and systems engineering.

One aerospace engineer who studied under Fleeman at Georgia Tech described the work as "a SUBSTANTIAL update with significant new material," noting it took months to digest the nearly 900-page volume and calling it "the critical textbook for education in a discipline that is sadly becoming somewhat of a lost art".

The reviewer praised Fleeman as "the first author to put all this information in one place, and tell the story of the design process to string it all together," highlighting that every step of problems is explained, allowing students and designers to understand trends driving design and justify decisions with actual physics.

Another review noted the book's practical utility, stating that "Most are cleanly presented graphs and charts that depict the key sensitivities in the missile design process. They are useful as 'rules of thumb' for new designs or checking the performance of design simulations or flight tests".

Academic Impact and Citations

The 2012 edition of Missile Design and System Engineering has received 38 academic citations according to Semantic Scholar, with contributions spanning highly influential citations, background citations, and methods citations. The work addresses critical topics including aerodynamic configuration, propulsion system design, guidance and control systems, and launch platform integration.

Ongoing Training Programs

Complementing the textbooks, Fleeman regularly conducts professional education courses through multiple organizations. Every few months he offers a short course based on his textbook Missile Design Guide, plus additional new material, available through the AIAA, ATI, GTRI, AOC, and K2B websites. Since 1999, his short course has been held over 100 times in fifteen countries and five continents.

The three-day in-person course is scheduled for December 9-11 in Atlanta, Georgia, sponsored by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). The course is designed for program managers, marketing personnel, systems analysts, engineers, university professors, and professionals working in missile systems, missile system integration, and missile technology development.

Course content covers key considerations including aerodynamic, propulsion, weight, and flight-performance aspects, along with critical tradeoffs in meeting performance, cost, risk, robustness, lethality, guidance, navigation, control, accuracy, survivability, reliability, and launch platform compatibility requirements.

Fleeman spoke at an AIAA Greater New Orleans Section dinner meeting on March 20, 2025, in Slidell, presenting an "Overview of Missile Design, Development, and System Engineering".

Comparable Courses and How They Differ

Fleeman's work exists within a broader ecosystem of missile-related professional education, with several complementary but distinct offerings available through AIAA and other organizations.

Paul Zarchan's Guidance-Focused Courses

Paul Zarchan, who has more than 40 years of experience designing, analyzing, and evaluating missile guidance systems and currently works as a Member of the Technical Staff for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, offers "Fundamentals of Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance" through AIAA.

Zarchan's course focuses specifically on guidance systems, covering topics including proportional navigation, adjoints and the homing loop, noise analysis, digital noise filters, advanced guidance laws, Kalman filters, ballistic targets, strategic intercepts, and theater missile defense. His accompanying textbook, now in its seventh edition, has been a best-seller and uses MATLAB code rather than FORTRAN, with over 1,000 pages of content.

Key Distinction: While Fleeman provides comprehensive, system-level missile design covering all subsystems using analytical expressions, Zarchan specializes deeply in guidance and control with extensive mathematical treatment and simulation approaches.

Launch Vehicle Design: Edberg and Costa

One reviewer comparing textbooks noted: "Compare it with 'Design of Rockets and Space Launch Vehicles' by Edberg and Costa. That is a book that achieves near perfection in my opinion. Totally different focus".

Don Edberg, an AIAA Associate Fellow teaching at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Willie Costa authored Design of Rockets and Space Launch Vehicles, now in its second edition with over 1,070 pages. The second edition includes discussions of hybrid and quasi-hybrid rockets, complete equation sets for payload and propellant mass calculations, information on ridesharing and piggybacking, and new sections on recovery and reuse including physics, energy, and mass requirements.

Key Distinction: Edberg and Costa focus on space launch vehicles and orbital systems, while Fleeman concentrates on tactical and strategic missiles with different mission profiles, trajectories, and design constraints. A reviewer noted contrasting presentation styles, with one criticizing Fleeman's use of US customary units and numerical calculations in body text while praising Edberg and Costa's presentation.

AIAA's Specialized Offerings

AIAA offers Fleeman's own "Missile Design and System Engineering" as a short course providing system-level, integrated methods for missile configuration design and analysis, with 66 videos illustrating missile development activities and performance.

The organization also provides numerous related specialized courses including "A Practical Approach to Flight Dynamics and Control of Aircraft, Missiles, and Hypersonic Vehicles," "Advanced Flight Dynamics and Control of Aircraft, Missiles, and Hypersonic Vehicles," and "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics for Space Missile Defense."

Market Position: Fleeman's comprehensive, end-to-end missile design approach appears unique in its breadth. Other courses either specialize more deeply in specific subsystems (guidance, propulsion) or address different vehicle types (launch vehicles). As one reviewer put it: "'Missile Design and Systems Engineering' is the new one-stop shop for missile engineering".

Filling a Critical Knowledge Gap

The textbook consists of full-color figures with self-standing graphs, tables, charts, and diagrams, aimed toward missile engineers, system engineers, system analysts, program managers, aerospace engineering students, and professors. It provides readers with a quick reference for missile design, missile technologies, launch platform integration, targeting, fire control integration, missile system measures of merit, and the missile system development process.

As one reviewer observed, the work addresses education needs "in a discipline that is sadly becoming somewhat of a lost art as the engineers who gave us the Sparrow, AMRAAM, Tomahawk, Polaris, and other great missiles retire".

The comprehensive nature of Fleeman's work—combining practical experience from government, industry, and academic settings with accessible teaching methods—has established it as an essential resource for current and future generations of missile systems engineers. Unlike more specialized alternatives, it offers a unified framework for understanding the entire missile design process from concept through development.

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Sources

1. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). (2022). Missile Design Guide | AIAA Education Series. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/4.106347

2. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). (n.d.). Missile Design and System Engineering - AIAA. https://aiaa.org/courses/missile-design-and-system-engineering/

3. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). (n.d.). Fundamentals of Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance - AIAA. https://aiaa.org/courses/fundamentals-of-tactical-and-strategic-missile-guidance/

4. Amazon.com. (n.d.). Missile Design and System Engineering (AIAA Education): Eugene L. Fleeman. https://www.amazon.com/Missile-Design-System-Engineering-Education/dp/1600869084

5. Edberg, D., & Costa, W. (2022). Design of Rockets and Space Launch Vehicles, Second Edition | AIAA Education Series. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/4.106422

6. Fleeman, E. (n.d.). Eugene Fleeman - Missile Design, Development, and System Engineering. https://sites.google.com/site/eugenefleeman/home

7. Fleeman, E. (n.d.). Course Description. https://sites.google.com/site/eugenefleeman/home/course-description

8. Georgia Tech Professional Education. (n.d.). Missile Design and System Engineering. https://pe.gatech.edu/courses/missile-design-and-system-engineering

9. Semantic Scholar. (2013). Missile Design and System Engineering. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Missile-Design-and-System-Engineering-Fleeman/5a4eb34ac4637f217cfb24af5c2fabc49a6586f1

10. University of Alabama in Huntsville, Office of Professional and Continuing Education. (n.d.). Eugene L Fleeman, PE. https://www.uah.edu/opce/subject-matter-experts/eugene-fleeman

11. AIAA Greater New Orleans Section. (2025). Home - Greater New Orleans Section. https://engage.aiaa.org/greaterneworleans/home

12. University of Southern Indiana Library. (n.d.). Missile Design Guide. https://library.usi.edu/record/1485968

13. Zarchan, P. (2019). Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance, Seventh Edition | Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/4.105845