Abstract: The effects ofviscous interference, real gas and rare gas at high altitude areof fundamental significance in the design of tomorrow high speedvehicles, such as safe flying, precision control and guidance ofvehicles. The present paper summarizes several research works ofthe author's group in the fields of computational method, flowtopology analysis, investigation from continuum flows to rarefiedgas and their applications to the studies on aerodynamiccharacteristics of typical high speed vehicles.