Abstract: A review is made of the existing information concerning boundary-layer characteristics: the temperature recovery, the skin-friction coefficients, the heat-transfer coefficients of both the laminar and turbulent boundary layers and the position of the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. Comparison is made between existing flight data and results computed by the boundary-layer momentum-integral method in a preliminary attempt to establish some rational way of approaching the design of a missile whose Mach number range and body geometry are markedly different from those of existing data.