On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Ian Woollard wrote: > The optimised trajectory is interesting though- it goes subsonic, and > very nearly vertical up to about 30km and then separates and the second > stage burns briefly for a lob up to about 200km and then it restarts its > engines and does its orbital insertion burn. I figure the first stage > could land back at the takeoff site with hardly much fiddling- DC-X > style; so it looked about as good as a TSTO is ever going to be. Using > HTP for this might be good, because then the engines restart easily.
Early plans for Kistler called for a TSTO using a dumb first stage to lob the second stage clear of the atmosphere (vertical trajectory, return to launch site for recovery). The second stage was a mass-optimized near-SSTO using LOX/H2. The virtue of this idea is that you don't need altitude compensation on the engines, and you don't need heavy landing gear, since the vehicle only supports its own weight while empty. In fact they also used tricks to get rid of the landing gear on landing, too (land on the heat sheild in a big net). ......Andrew -- Andrew Case | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
