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Boeing Will Make the Military's New Hypersonic Spaceplane (theverge.com)
The Department of Defense has selected Boeing to make a new hypersonic spaceplane that can be reused frequently over a short period of time to deliver multiple satellites into orbit. "DARPA, the agency that tests new advanced technologies for the military, has picked Boeing's design concept, called the Phantom Express, to move forward as part of the agency's Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program," reports The Verge. From the report: The goal of DARPA's XS-1 program is to create a spacecraft that's something of a hybrid between an airplane and a traditional vertical rocket. The spaceplane is meant to take off vertically and fly uncrewed to high altitudes above Earth. From there, the vehicle will release a mini-rocket -- a booster with an engine that can propel a satellite weighing up to 3,000 pounds into orbit. As the booster deploys the satellite, the spaceplane will then land back on Earth horizontally just like a normal airplane -- and then be fueled up for its next mission. DARPA wants the turnaround time between flights to last just a few hours. But perhaps the most audacious goal is the price DARPA wants for each flight. The agency is aiming for the spaceplane to cost $5 million per mission, a significant bargain considering most orbital rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. And Boeing says it's up to the task. "Phantom Express is designed to disrupt and transform the satellite launch process as we know it today, creating a new, on-demand space-launch capability that can be achieved more affordably and with less risk," Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, said in a statement.
Sounds like you read about the General Electric MOOSE and the Douglas Paracone.
http://www.astronautix.com/m/m...
http://www.astronautix.com/p/p...
The turnaround time for a plane is far less then for a reusable rocket. My speculation is that the Air force wants this technology in case of all out war with a nation with advanced rocket technology (Russia or China) that would target and wipe out large chunks of its satellite systems. There is little that can be done to protect satellites in orbit, my belief is that the air-force solution is to put them up faster then they can shoot them down. Some of the "satellites" can even be dummies for the simple purpose of depleting enemy anti-satellite ordinance
I have no idea how much it affects the figures, but remember that with *every* launch, the Shuttle was lifting a fuckton load of structure, whether or not that structure supported the payloads mission or not.
Of course I'm talking about the crew compartment and supporting systems. They weighed a *lot*. Add to that the payload bay, which itself was a significant structure.
Think about it this way - each payload bay door on the Shuttle weighed 3/4 of the weight of the payload that the XS-1 is intended to launch.
Get rid of the systems required to keep a crew alive, put the fuel in the payload bay area, and you can cut down the weight of the shuttle fairly dramatically - add to that the fact that you can get a *lot* of weight saving from use of modern materials (the Shuttle was traditional aluminium, you could easily drop a third of that weight by moving to composites).