[AR] Re: Skylon and related (was Re: SSTO)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 18:26:15 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 13 Feb 2018, Randall Clague wrote:
"There's nothing magic about rubber wheels rolling on a runway
that's gonna make it cheap to operate." (Mitch Burnside Clapp).
Depends on what you're trying to do. EZ-Rocket and X-Racer operations
costs were negligible by Big Iron standards.
And so were ops costs of DC-X and Pixel. No correlation with whether
there were rubber wheels on runway or not. The VTVLs may need a little
bit more help being moved around on the ground, but done right, it's not a
serious cost driver.
Skylon might be the next EZ-Rocket, or it might be the next B-58 or HiMAT.
(The B-58 was the aircraft whose costs and dispatch (un)reliability were
too much even for SAC, and HiMAT's "MTBF was shorter than the preflight".)
Assuming that Skylon ops would resemble a 737 rather than a B-58, and VTVL
ops would resemble a Titan IV rather than DC-X, tends to kind of bias the
comparison. :-)
Henry
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