Randall Clague wrote: > Lo and behold, it turned out that some of our ideology was misplaced - > we *needed* the operational experience we got from KISS and KISS beta > - and some of it was premature. The silver screens that we know for a > fact are not good enough for PROTO, are more than good enough for > POGO, Spike, and probably even ReSOAR.
Hmmm... the British got "Black Arrow" to orbit on 85% H2O2 and silver wire catalyst screens (and engine designs that were essentially recombinations of the chamber they used 4 of on Black Knight - IIRC, Black Arrow had 2 of 'em on the upper stage and 8 on the lower stage). Oh yeah, wasn't "2-stage vehicles" another of those "things that ERPS didn't do"? (I'm still agnostic on the "staging" issue myself.) I'm not sure it's actually "misplaced ideology" but it may well be premature - staging may make SSTO seem attractively simple, but SSTO has this way of making multi-staging look positively feasible by comparison (at least at our near-term technological level, and with enough payload to be worth the trouble). -dave w _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
