Or (c) somebody's decreed that your launcher must have big solids, no
matter how stupid a decision that is, because it's partly a jobs program
and some of the loot has to go to the solids people.
Absolutely, I've said this for decades about the Space Shuttle SRB's and
the Utah solid rocket cartel.
The Russian shuttle had some better fundamental design features over the US
shuttle,i.e. liquid boosters and not putting the liquid engines on the
orbiter itself, thereby allowing more useful payload.
And I wonder why the environmentalists haven't raised hell over the dirty
solid booster exhausts.
Ken
On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 2:18 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 11 Nov 2021, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
"Since we can demonstrably do a TSTO, launch assist only makes any
sense if you are assisting a SSTO vehicle.
disagree - how about the common zeroeth rocket boosters in eg Ariane etc?
There are *many* features of existing launchers that don't make sense :-)
when analyzed from scratch.
Heavy reliance on solid strap-ons says that either (a) your liquid first
stage was undersized from the start, or (b) you goofed and its T/W is too
low for an efficient ascent (probably because you chose to use LH2, which
means heavy tanks and heavy engines -- possibly defensible for upper
stages, very bad choice for first stages). Sometimes both, e.g. Delta IV.
Or (c) somebody's decreed that your launcher must have big solids, no
matter how stupid a decision that is, because it's partly a jobs program
and some of the loot has to go to the solids people. For example, Italy
has long been a strong backer of Ariane, and the main rockety thing
Italian industry does is big solids. (Ultimately a leftover from the
Sixties, when Italy set out to build its own strategic nuclear missiles,
after the US decided that nobody except Britain got to buy Polaris.)
Henry