On Sunday, February 8, 2004, at 02:38 PM, David Weinshenker wrote:
Randall Clague wrote:One wonders, then, about his titular identification of RLVs as SSTOs. A book published in November 2003 should reflect the current consensus among hardware developers that SSTO, while technically interesting, is not on the road to commercial success.
Hmmm.... SSTO is, so far, what seems to get all the attention when folks think of reusable... staging tends to get equated with "throwing parts away"; multistage to orbit with retrievable stages has (so far at least; as you suggest, that may now be changing) not seen as much interest.
The original Kistler proposal (before the "improvements") was a quite nice TSTO with a dumb Launch Assist Platform that lifted the upper stage clear of the atmosphere straight up. The upper stage separated and the LAP dropped straight back down to the launch site. Basically the LAP ate the gravity losses and aero drag losses and the upper stage provided all of the orbital velocity. I've always rather liked this idea (though their landing system wasn't very practical, IMO).
......Andrew
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