Re: Book, Single Stage to Orbit

On Sunday, February 8, 2004, at 02:38 PM, David Weinshenker wrote:

> Randall Clague wrote:
>> One wonders, then, about his titular identification of RLVs as
>> SSTOs.  A book published in November 2003 should reflect the current
>> consensus among hardware developers that SSTO, while technically
>> interesting, is not on the road to commercial success.
>
> Hmmm.... SSTO is, so far, what seems to get all the attention
> when folks think of reusable... staging tends to get equated
> with "throwing parts away"; multistage to orbit with retrievable
> stages has (so far at least; as you suggest, that may now be
> changing) not seen as much interest.

The original Kistler proposal (before the "improvements") was a quite 
nice TSTO with a dumb Launch Assist Platform that lifted the upper 
stage clear of the atmosphere straight up.  The upper stage separated 
and the LAP dropped straight back down to the launch site.  Basically 
the LAP ate the gravity losses and aero drag losses and the upper stage 
provided all of the orbital velocity.  I've always rather liked this 
idea (though their landing system wasn't very practical, IMO).

......Andrew