Re: Space funding (was Re: Hillary needs to quit)

On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:54:19 GMT, aemeijers <aemeijers@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>If STS had followed von 
>braun's original horizontal takeoff piggyback concept, rather than being 
>forced by budget cuts to reuse Apollo infrastructure, who knows?

We do. Horizontal take-off brings with it its own huge hurdles,
starting with an absolutely monstrous mother plane to launch an
orbiter with a reasonable payload. That mother****p would have required
a huge number of engines, a landing gear arrangement (to handle all
that weight) unlike anything the world has ever seen, and a runway the
width of the Hudson River. It would make the A380 look like a Piper
Cub. The only alternative, taking oxygen from the air to make the
mother****p (which is most propellant tanks) smaller, would require
some sort of gaseous-to-liquid oxygen converter be carried on the
mother****p, and those are universally big and heavy. Its no surprise
that von Braun quickly abandoned the horizontal launch method, it was
just plain laws of physics at work.

>Maybe 
>it would have been able to make powered returns, and the whole heat 
>****elding thing would be less of an issue.

Actually, vice-versa. Once airborne, the combo would require a vastly
larger and heavier heat ****eld to withstand the air friction of
accellerating to high Mach speeds while still within the atmosphere.
(There's good reason rockets go mostly straight up for the first
couple of minutes... they get up out of the atmosphere as quickly as
they can, before tilting over and doing their accelleration to orbital
velocity in the thin-to-none atmosphere of extremely high altitudes.)

The X-30 National Aerospace Plane program was killed largely by these
two ugly realities.

This isn't to say we can't do better today. The Shuttle has shown us a
lot about what to do, and a lot more not to do. 

Brian