[AR] Re: SSTO
- From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 12:11:49 -0700
On 2/10/2018 10:01 AM, William Claybaugh wrote:
Dr. Shilling’s comments on SSTO got me thinking about Have Region, DC-X,
and X-33.
Technology is now about 20 years further down the road; is chemical
rocket reusable SSTO now achievable?
What is different?
That's a two-part question, actually.
The available technology has certainly gotten better. FWIW, my take on
that technological/engineering aspect:
- A rocket SSTO research X-demonstrator with relatively high
maintenance, limited or no payload, and a limited operating life was
almost certainly doable then, even more certainly so now.
- A rocket SSTO orbital transport with useful payload and practical
support requirements/operating lifetime might or might not have been
doable then. (Whatever the odds were, they're significantly improved
now.) We never found out, since we didn't come close to flying the
X-demonstrator research vehicles that would have provided the required
high-speed operations data.
BUT. The other part of that question is organizational/political.
The chief reason we never properly tried to answer the tech aspect of
the question back then was dysfunctional entrenched government organization.
An attempt was made to bypass those problems in going to SDIO. That
attempt was politically roadblocked in the limiting of SDIO DC-X/DC-Y to
DC-X only, then entirely negated by assignment of the followon X-33
program to NASA. (Which then proceeded to demonstrate exactly why we'd
tried to bypass them - among others - in the first place, wasting most
of a decade and a couple billion in the process.)
Those organizational/political problems have evolved, in some cases for
the better, in some cases worse, but have not gone away. Any renewed
attempt to demonstrate SSTO in the government must either effectively
address these problems or fail, regardless of improved technology.
Henry V
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