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Launching Spacecraft From Aircraft
Embedded Geek writes: "New Scientist has an article on a proposed launch scheme named 'Bladerunner' (presumably, someone is a P.K. Dick fan) that would
use a pneumatic launcher to shove a launch vehicle out the back of a military transport aircraft at high altitude (40,000 feet/12,000 meters). As with all the new systems (such as this one) the goal is to reduce launch costs to more reasonable levels (to about $6K/kilo from today's $11-44K). An existing Pegasus system uses dedicated B-52s with the vehicle slung underneath, but Bladerunner would be an improvement by not requiring dedicated planes (the launcher could be set up on a transport in 24 hours) and also could accomodate larger vehicles (since it wouldn't be slung underneath)."
At least a peacefull use of those aircrafts.
...but this won't work with larger spacecrafts ?
I can see them using this for smaller satellites
but they'll have a hard time to fit a shuttle into a military transport (ok, they might saw off the wings)
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I'm all for it, as long as it advanced mankind.
I was watching a program about the first man in 'space'. In 1960 this American chap went to 115000 ft (~20miles?) in a balloon. He then did the longest freefall parachute jump. Amazingly for the first 4 minutes, he felt nothing (no 'air' to provide turbulence) !!
Anyway, why can't spacecraft be taken to great heights by disposable ballons then launched from there?
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
According to the Pegasus link in the submission, the Pegasus system uses a modified Lockheed L-1011 airliner jet named Stargazer, not B-52s. Methinks someone has overdosed on CNN again...
Money for nothing, pix for free
Instead of on massive boondoggles like the ISS. What people don't seem to get is that it all comes down to price per kilo to orbit - if we can't get that price down we are never going to have a sustainable presence in space.
NASA has absolutely no incentive to reasearch alternative (and cheaper) launch methodologies because they are politically committed to the space shuttle (another massive boondoggle).
I say we tell NASA they can keep the ISS, if and only if they can produce a launch vehicle which is capable of sending a thousand pound payload into orbit for 1/10th the current cost. Then we might see some progress on this front.
IIRC, airships are much cheaper per kilo than other aircraft, so surely they would be more suitable for slinging great big pneumatic guns on if you're going for the ultimate cheap solution? Of course, airships are quite slow, but they can carry heavy loads - e.g. the CargoLifter, mentioned here.
Of course, a space-lift would be both much cooler, and much cheaper (ISTR figures of $210 per human for an up-trip, or $40 for a round trip, as on the way down your delta-GPE could be converted back into electricity; presumably this is ignoring R&D and build costs). NASA was mumbling about this about a year ago, but surely such a project would cost billions (and with the US governmental system, it probably won't happen unless a forthcoming, insightful (gasp!) President decides it's important for the future of the US, and can convert/convince a whole lot of people...
James F.
With what we've been reading about research into ScramJet vehicles, recently, it seems like this may be a good way to launch them. Taking off is a challenge, as you need significant airspeed to use the engine, but if you could start at 40K feet, you could trade some altitude for airspeed and possibly start the engine that way, instead of having to have a secondary form of propulsion to get started...
The term "Bladerunner" is imho not a P.K.Dick-Term. The Story is entitled "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep", the title "Bladerunner" was first used in the movie by R. Scott.
Can anyboy enlighten me where it is from?
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Could be worse. Could be raining.
Just flying up and dropping the test craft always seemed kinda crude to me.
How does the pilot of the launching aircraft deal with the huge changes in the center-of-gravity when a large missile (Pegasus XL weighs about 50,000 lbs) is ejected from the rear of the aircraft.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Because they used all base 11 numbers for cost statistics. Which means some engineer just did an off the cuff calculation. Which means the bean counters have not thrown in their 600% markup for administrative costs. And the congressmen have not thrown their 50 state's billion dollar pet rocks aboard "for safety" and doubled the cost again.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The US Military (who else?) tried this in the '60s with Minuteman ICBMs. Except they used a C5 Galaxy transport and a parachute. I believe the few tests worked well enough, but it was never adopted as an operational launch method: to be effective for nuclear deterrent would have required a fleet of C5s (only ~50 were built and they were built for heavy airlift), continuously airborne. Turns out to be cheaper to stick the Minutemans on the back of a train and drive it around the country (who'd a thunk?).
Anyway, as a commercial enterprise for smallsat launches, this would appear to be a workable solution - use a ram instead of expensive parachutes, and fly the transport down to the equator before launch (same trick that SeaLaunch uses). I just hope the launch vehicle is a bit more reliable than the competitor - Pegasus. They've had a bit of a run of bad luck recently...
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I guess the extra 700 kph helps (cruising speed of the cargo lifter is 90kph say it can go flat out at 130?) The article says the transport would be flying at near the speed of sound (say 835 kph for the Globemaster III).
Not sure how much difference the additional velocity would make but it must help a bit.
The space shuttle originally was supposed to operate this way, with one plane carrying the spacecraft part to high altitude and then rocketing from there. It was rejected because it required developing a big plane as well as the shuttle. This method may be an improvement over that proposal.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Price per kilo to orbit is NOT the only hurdle! I can see three major obstacles off the top of my head:
No Funding: Who in this age of recession is foolhardy enough to finance such a venture after all the venture capital firms got burned in last years crash?
Payload design: Modern satellites are custom designed to match their launchers. Diameter, mass, etc are optimized during the design stages to the specifications of the intended launcher. Who exactly is going to redesign their multi-million dollar satellites for the unique constraints used in this design?
Market: Who will be buying? Any air lauched design is going to be limited by the launch aircraft, in Pegasus's (L1011) case by aircraft's undercarriage, and in Bladerunner's (Which aircraft? C131/C5/C17's? Good luck in convincing the USAF to lend you one, they are waaay overtasked already.) by cargo bay weight constraints. Since Iridium chapter 11'ed the market for lightweight sats in LEO has almost completely evaporated.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Besides the wonderful loss of mass from dumping the payload - which I believe should not be a major issue, the article fails to tell how this pneumatic expulsion of the rocket will affect the launching aircraft.
.. un uh... no way
Wouldn't this put a lot of stress on the launch craft? Let alone the requirement of moving near the speed of sound (I would think 500+) would also be an issue for the plane.... I cannot imagine what happens to the plane if something if the pneumatic process goes awry...
IOW - I would not fly with it
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There was only one test. Even though it was successful, Air launched ICBM's were never pursued as that wasn't the main objective of the program for the USAF. The REAL objective was to get the Navy to stop telling congressmen that the bomber leg of the nuclear triad (Bombers/Sub lauched Ballistic Missles/ICBMS) were obsolete as they would probably be shot down before reaching their objectives. The Navy had been trying to Hijack the USAF's bomber budget to build more Tridents but when faced with the threat of air launched ICBM's, they quietly backed off...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
For an orbit at 200km, the required energy to raise the satellite is 2MJ/kg. The required energy to accelerate the satellite from zero to the orbital velocity is 28MJ/kg, or only 24.5 MJ/kg for an earth-rotation assist from cape canaveral.
In any case the energy savings by lifting the payload to 20km are minimal at best. Most of the advantage comes from being weather independant, due to being above the clouds.
It's pretty clear why there's no great energy being directed at these systems.
The test firing (it was about this time last year I think) must have been important because all sorts of VIPs from NASA and the Air Force showed up, which didn't normally happen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Test firings are cool! The shockwave hitting you is really a unique experience.
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I wonder what they patented. Maybe they patented their pneumatic launcher, rather than using the military's launch method of tossing the parachute out the rear cargo door.
Pegasus uses a dedicated L1011 not a B-52 (check the picture and text on the link)
Another idea along this line is the joint MIT / US Air Force project called Black Horse. The key idea behind the Black Horse is that it can be aerially `refueled' from a tanker such as the USAF KC-135. This has caused some people to describe it as `stage-and-a-half' rather than a true SSTO vehicle. It will take off and land horizontally from a runway, and will be piloted by human pilots. Two demonstration vehicles were planned as stepping stones to the Black Horse, called the Black Foal and the Black Colt. The Foal would demonstrate aspects of the technology and provide proof of concept. The Colt would fly to half orbital velocity and utilize an off-the-shelf `kick-stage' to put satellites in orbit.
The task of getting it into orbit is likely somewhat trivial. As a cost cutting measure, I can see not having to use a booster stage.
but then you would not have all of those fancy PR events for Nasa to toot its' horn
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Of course, a space-lift would be both much cooler, and much cheaper (ISTR figures of $210 per human for an up-trip, or $40 for a round trip, as on the way down your delta-GPE could be converted back into electricity; presumably this is ignoring R&D and build costs). NASA was mumbling about this about a year ago, but surely such a project would cost billions...
If you mean a space elevator as in "Red Mars" or that Arthur C. Clarke book, it'd cost a lot more than "billions", unless you mean "1000's of billions" by that. I don't think there's any material yet developed that could accomodate the engineering demands of such a project, and is available in such massive quantities. Plus all the orbital infrastructure needed to build the sucker, and all the spacecraft needed to transport things to orbit, and/or mine asteroids for raw materials. A vast undertaking, to say the least. Needless to say, it WOULD be the most economical way to reach orbit, on a per-kilo basis. Human society would be revolutionized - I hope to see such a project given serious consideration within my lifetime, but I suspect the political will to do so is lacking.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Half true. The shuttle is a huge political stone around NASA's neck, but there is still a strong desire in most of the agency to get launch costs down and reliability up.
The simple reality of the situation is that rocketry is hard. Here's a partial list of commercial enterprises trying to get in on it:
And of course the big boys like Boeing, Lock-Mart, and all the various non-Amurrican folks like Russia, China, Japan, and the EU.
Any of these enterprises would be, er, on top of the world if they could develop a low cost launch vehicle. It's much easier to grumble about how expensive access to space is than it is to actually do something about it. Whether NASA is going about it in a sensible way is a separate question, but it's not like all they're just sitting on their duffs waiting for the right incentive.
the potential to slash satellite launch costs from the $11,000 to $44,000 per kilogram it costs today to under $6600 per kilogram.
I don't get it. How do you cut the price in half just by getting the first 40,000 feet out of 200 miles free? Do the special nozzles make up half the cost of traditional flights?
Who do you think buys the majority of Pegasus launches? NASA.
I worked a couple of summers at Orbital on the SeaWIFS satellite, to be lauched on a Pegasus XL (bigger launch vehicle). That satellite, along with the majority of other satellites we were working on, were being launched for NASA.
Wouldn't the momentum of slinging a rocketship forward at several km/s totally reverse the path of the B-52? Seriously.
-Rob
terpmotors.com
Yes, sorry, I meant English billions (i.e. units of 1e12 dollars).
James F.
might be a Ukrainian-built An-225 "Mriya". It has a larger payload capacity and might be more suited for the purpose, having been used to transport the Russian shuttle in the past.
Here is one of the photos.
Why use an airplane for this sort of job? Why not use a tethered helium balloon instead? Balloons have great lifting capabilities, can go much higher than a conventional airplane, and would be much cheaper to operate. Have a balloon hoist the rocket up to 100K feet and shoot it out from there.
If this works, the price of marijuana on the international space station should finally be dropped to manageable levels. At long last I will have clients again!
What run of bad luck are you referring to?
according to orbitals website:
"30 missions conducted; flawless record since late 1996"
Either their website is not up to date or their record is phenomenol.
If wonder space tourists will also one day be charged per kilo
Guess I'll have to start dieting , just in case...
siener's youtube channel
I seem to recall that DoD experimented with a similar idea in the '60s. A Polaris-like missile was pulled from the back of a cargo aircraft (C-130 or C-141) and, once hanging suspended, fired. The idea was dropped for several reasons, one of which was that it was not possible the accurately position the missile (vagaries of wind, chutes, etc.) accurately enough for accurate targeting. Perhaps modern computers can compensate for this.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The Dale Brown Book "Sky Masters" (http://www.megafortress.com) refers to this launch system for a fictional sat system called NiRTS (Need it Right This Second) Sats. Similar concept except the author writes about a moveable counter weight in the plane to counter act the change in th center of gravity. Dale was a B-52 Radar/Nav in the USAF so he might be writing from experience
The Russians have some huge ex-military transport planes that they rent out for large payloads.
I think that the shuttle needs to be privatised. But who would take it?
The way you sell it is to give a guaranteed launch contract i.e. all the dough the government would have paid out anyway for the next few years as a sweetner.
After the contract has run out, then the company will either have made the shuttle cheap enough to continue to fly, or THEY will shut the shuttle down. Either way the government has clean hands... and their favourite boondoggle the ISS can continue on and give something to launch TO.
It also gets the government out of the launch platform business- which is deeply unprofitable right now anyway for them; but that's Ok, the current contractors in the US can keep on launching fine; they're growing atleast.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"A russian company, Airlaunch, is developing a system to launch LEO sats by dropping them out the back of an AN-124 cargo aircraft. From the site: "The Antonov An-124-AL Ruslan heavy-lift aircraft will carry a two-stage launch vehicle (LV) internally to a specified ocean or land area and eject it at an altitude of approximately 11,000 m."
A Pegasus is carried under one wing, where it presents an asymmetrical load. There is only so much that an aircraft can carry that way. Its drag is also asymmetrical, and there are ground-clearance and interference drag issues. This limits how fast the carrier aircraft can fly, how high it can go before launch, and even if it can get off the ground with a heavier load (if it can't rotate to takeoff attitude without scraping the rocket's tail on the ground, you can't take off).
Putting the rocket inside the aircraft creates one problem, which is a mechanism to extend the wing; there may also be some issues with drag from the modified cargo doors. Other than that it's all positive:
- The weight is carried in the center, where it is symmetrical.
- Nothing extends beyond the aircraft; there are no new difficulties with ground clearance.
- Drag isn't changed much, so the aircraft can launch the spacecraft from a greater speed and altitude. This improves the spacecraft's performance and carrying capacity to orbit.
While the price drop probably isn't enough to create much new market for launch services, it's a good start.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It's been done many times; it's called a "rockoon". It doesn't work so well for heavier rockets, though; high-altitude balloons can't support very much weight per unit volume. Launching the balloons can be a real challenge too.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The change in CG is temporary. If the rocket is ejected by compressed air at 1 G, it will be 145 feet behind its starting point in 3 seconds. The pilot can apply down-elevator to compensate for this, but it's probably not necessary. It may not even be desirable, as you want the rocket sliding out the back of the aircraft smoothly and not hanging up due to torque forces. For that scenario you could begin by flying a small arc with the nose pitching downward just as ejection begins, reverse the pitch change during ejection, and then pitch down again after ejection. Really figuring this out needs a bunch of aircraft experts with a good computer simulation, not a single-engine-land guy with a physics habit doing hand-waving on Slashdot.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Actually that would be "a William S. Burroughs fan." Burroughs came up with the name "Bladerunner". If they were Philip K. Dick fans, they would have called it, "Electric Sheep". Which would also be a cool name. But harder to get funding for, I bet.
- Civilian planes don't have military power; a likely aircraft for this would be an older Boeing 7x7.
- The article said that the rocket would be ejected by compressed air. This means that gravity doesn't have to do the job, and the spacecraft and carrier plane will have what is known as "positive separation".
- A shift in attitude at such altitudes wouldn't be a big deal; there is plenty of airspeed and time to recover even if the wing is stalled. The two things that have to be respected are maneuvering speed (the indicated airspeed below which the wing will stall before the airframe is overloaded), and that the worst-case upset doesn't move the aircraft to an attitude from which it cannot be recovered.
- Ejecting a center-mounted load directly rearward isn't going to apply a yaw torque, so a spin is extremely unlikely (a spin requires an asymmetrical stall condition in the first place).
Just some questionable wisdom from a pleasure pilot.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Slashdot has reported on the Canadian entry into the XPrize contest. The DeVinci project intends to raise there rocket to high altitudes via baloon and launch from there. Perfect example of the KISS principle well applied.
Good Luck to them.
- When a rocket takes off from the ground, it is throwing away gas at many times the speed of sound while it's moving very slowly. If you calculate the amount of energy which actually accrues to the rocket versus what disappears as heat and noise with the exhaust gas, the efficiency is dismal. Launching from an aircraft allows the rocket to begin operating at a much higher efficiency; indeed, the air-launched rocket starts at a speed and altitude that the ground-launched rocket may have to burn half of its mass to reach.
- Nozzles cost about the same, but a nozzle with a bigger bell can expand the gases more and get more thrust out of them. More thrust for the same fuel means more payload to orbit, and costs go down. You can't use a large-bell nozzle on a launch from the ground because the gases would be over-expanded, separate from the nozzle walls and cost you badly in efficiency and thrust. This means that the rocket launching from high altitude has an advantage which goes well beyond starting a bit higher.
- The payload at the end of a rocket burn is an exponential function of the delta-V (the more speed you have to put on, the more of your vehicle has to be fuel and the less is payload); getting a 550-600 MPH or so head-start helps a lot. So does the aerodynamic lift of the wing, which is effectively "vertical thrust" that comes for a fraction of the fuel required to produce the same with rocket fuel.
Hope that helped.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
...that would use a pneumatic launcher to shove a launch vehicle out the back of a military transport aircraft at high altitude (40,000 feet/12,000 meters).
Shoving is the answer!
Shoving will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Do not trust the pusher robot.
- insert witty sig here
Now, that's what I want under the tree this Christmas!!
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
This is real old. Perhaps too old.
d te xt/sujet2.html
http://www.arte-tv.com/hebdo/archimed/20010522/
Sorry only in german, but you find surely something about the Sänger-Project in english (if you have an ä in your browser 8-) )
bye
Thanks for not toasting me, Cleaner.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Funding: there's ways of developing it that don't cost too much money. They're slow, and they require volunteer time from engineers (which can be obtained for working on a cool project, so long as there's not too much pressure from management), but they can be done.
Payload design: ok, so build your launcher to the same specifications as existing ones, and treat them as de facto standards. That's what standards are for: to allow people to build to then instead of vendor-specific specifications.
Market: this is the most significant of these three challenges, though there are solutions even here. Space tourism, for instance, though you need to really get launch costs down (to below $100/lb) before this becomes viable. And if you've designed to, say, NASA"s specs and can outperform NASA, there may well be some US gov't contracts who wouldn't mind not dealing with another beauracracy - so long as you can put up with their beauracracy, of course.
I seem to recall this sort of system being considered for use with the Avro Arrow - at least during the CBC 'Arrow' docu-movie, mention was made of it. At 70,000 feet, though!
Does anyone remember the Avro Arrow?
I seem to remember that these guys toyed with the launch vehicle concept back in the 1950's. The Arrow had a huge internal missile bay, larger than that of a B-29.
Yes, it was scrapped, and the people there mustn't have had much talent. After all they did end up contributing to the Concorde, Mercury program, Gemini spacecraft, Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), lunar module, Apollo program, and Mission Control.
Learn all about what almost was... courtesy of your neighbors to the north:
http://www.exn.ca/FlightDeck/Arrow/
Well, it's a run of two:
- X-34 failure due to a separated stabilizer fin
- OrbView 4 / QuickTOMS failure still under investigation
I worked for their sensor systems division on both the OrbView and TOMS instruments. (Past tense 'cause they just sold us to UTC.) To lose both on one shot was quite unpleasant to witness.
I can see the fnords!
The problems for NASA in funding something like this are incredible. I worked on a low cost launch vehicle program for NASA which was later cancelled. It was cancelled not because there was no demand. There is currently a waiting list of payloads in the very small weight class which are willing to pay multiple millions of dollars to piggyback on a Pegasus launch. They would be delighted to have their own launcher, and it could be more cost effective. Costs were not the problem. We were working to a cost goal of a million dollars per launch. This may have been unrealistic, but 2 million or thereabouts seemed acheivable.
The problem was--POLITICAL!!! The powers that be in the Agency were convinced that what is needed is reusable vehicles, and the best cost figure for a reusable launch vehicle was running near 12 million. NASA is a government agency. Politics is king. The other NASA tactic is to keep the little guys out of the game. If a private company wants to build a launch vehicle NASA will fund what they (NASA) are interested in, and funnel payloads to their favored builders. When innovative private initiatives have been announced NASA has avoided funneling anything toward them, and in some cases announced competing programs, driving the innovater out of the game. I must admit to being somewhat cynical after 12 years around NASA, but if you expect anything creative to come from a government agency you are sadly mistaken.
I believe it was 99 C-5's that were build in both A & B variants. Most of the A Variants at this point have been upgraded to the B's as well.
The MX-Missile's steam cannon launch already works economically and reliably. Scaling it up should be relatively straight-forward, as long as you avoid the fate of Gerald Bull.
Seastead this.
What are they going to launch into orbit? Small egg capsules, like what silly putty comes in?
I wonder how they are going to achieve orbital velocity with such little fuel? I mean they have to get up to 200+km/s at least to get into a low orbit, (below a geostationary orbit). Seems far off to me until they find another fuel source.
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Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
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Of course, it's not without risk: the day before the demo I saw a C-130 took an excursion into the woods when they did it. Killed everyone on board. Then again, you're doing major CG shifts 50 feet off the ground...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
To reach orbital velocity of several times your exhaust velocity, about 80 percent of your rocket needs to be fuel (and you need high specific impulse fuel to boot). Engineers build rockets that are 20 percent structure and 80 percent fuel, but you have to launch 'em verticaly because you can't lay 'em on their sides. And you have no payload.
So you stage two 80 percent mass-fraction rockets, the second stage being itself 20 percent of the first stage, and the payload being 20 percent of the second stage. Your payload is about 4 percent of the whole shebang, but at least you get a payload. Your payloaded mass fraction is down to 66 percent for each stage, and taking inefficiency of the vertical launch and less-than-ideal specific impulse, you reach orbit.
Since the rocket equation is logarithmic and since each ''payload'' is in the same ratio to the stage underneath, your booster stage (fuel, structure, and motor) is about 80 percent of the whole stack. Owing to the inefficiency of the vertical launch and air resistance in the lower atmosphere (which you are climbing like a bat-out-of-you-know-where to get through with as little loss as possible), the first stage does not take you to quite half of orbital velocity, but it takes you well out of the atmosphere and at many multiples of the speed of sound. This is well beyond the performance of any jet plane.
In fact, the early 2-stage Shuttle proposals followed this ratio of stages quite closely. The consequence was that the first stage was this behemoth -- roughly the outlines of a 747 but much heavier when loaded with fuel -- that had to fly an exoatmospheric and hypersonic flight profile much like the X-15. The real show stopper on the 2-stage Shuttle was not ol' Dick Nixon's parsimony and hatred for Kennedy-Johnson lead space programs. It was that no one built something with the performance of the X-15 (and with comparable reentry thermal requirements) that was several times heavier than the biggest aircraft ever built.
When they built the current Shuttle, they went with solid rocket boosters with not nearly a typical first stage performance, but they had to go with a disposable tank and with really stressed rocket engines to essentially make a single-stage to orbit, with the SRB's giving the rocket thrust to lift the thing off the ground. Even so, those SRB's are a larger mass fraction than you think because they are denser than liquid fuel rockets, and they take the Shuttle well past the flight envelope of that plane we are talking about.
When you are talking single-stage air-launch, you are really talking single-stage to orbit with a little help from the air launch, and you have to achieve 80 percent fuel mass fraction with a vehicle that has to be carried on an airplane.
If you are interested in the space-launch problem check out http://www.ghg.net/redflame/launch.htm. If you are interested in a much more practical solution see
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.ht
P.K. Dick?
Psycho Kinetic??
Player Kill????
Can I upgrade?????
http://www.crc.com/aerospace/airlaunch%20images.ht m
Link to Coleman Aerospace. They have successfully launched from a pallet loaded inside a C-130. The pallet is pulled out and inverts with parachutes, acting as a launch tower. Newer, larger versions in development for BMDO.
And the buggers had the gall to patent this? Dale Brown should sue.
Sounds like something out of a Dale Brown novel-only he used a Boeing.
look at the pic; it's got 2 wings of equal area
:.
it's a biplane
LOL!
it's not about b52's.
This is about C17's and other heavy transports.
the b52 pegasus launches are old news
And for all Galaxy and Starlifters carry troops around you'll find that across their lives they've done far more disaster relief around the world.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Actualy there were about 120 C5A's built. I think 2 have been destroyed in operations over the years.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I'd have to dispure that, because with a minimum speed needed for orbit of 17,000mph the difference of a few hundred mph isn't going to save you so much.
One of the big saveings is being able to start you trip where the air is thin. I'd like to see somebody try this with weather ballons.
The idea was that aircraft would be always in the air over the US and so be virtually impossible to knock out in a Soviet first strike. Thankfully it was dropped.
Launching satellites from aircraft has been looked at many times over the years. The advantages aren't really the speed and height boost from the plane, but rather the fact you don't need and expensive launch pad and you can launch from a point on the Earth that's optimal for the orbit you're aiming at. Also rocket engine efficiency suffers quite a bit if the air pressure is much different to the pressure the engine is designed to operate in. By launching from an aircraft, you can use engines optimised to work in low-pressure/vacuum and not worry about them chugging in the thick, lower atmosphere.
Until now, only the Pegasus people have got it to work, their problem is that the size of the aircraft limits the size of the rocket which in turn means they can only carry small satellites.
Somehow I think that a company which is using solid-fuel rockets (because they're reliable and rugged?) isn't going to spend the money to build a booster using exotic, corrosive mixtures which also present a toxic hazard to both flight and ground crew. The Black Horse people claim a specific impulse of 330 seconds for H2O2/JP-5 (see Black Horse: One Stop to Orbit), which is considerably better than solids too and all but certainly far cheaper to develop than an exotic. The optimum for cheapness might be something as mundane as sub-cooled propane and LOX.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Can't remember if the energy saved from the gain in altitude was enough to offset the other problems.
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the rollout of the first B-52 prototype at the Boeing plant in Seattle.m l
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,39681,00.ht