Way off topic but I found this fascinating.The Stratolaunch Will Soon Be the Lar

Damn, that is neat!

Cool video, shadowcat. It will be interesting to see if the rocket launch capability is perfected. I would love to see it take off and land.

I once saw the current largest plane in the world, Antonov 225 at Edmonton Int'l. It was delivering 2 monster pressure vessels for an oil sands operation at Fort Mac. That was an impressive sight.

Yes, I'd followed this, 6x 747 engines. But is it likely to go the way of the Spruce Goose and only be flown once or twice?

Also, all this gets is a little bit of speed and altitude before their non-reusable non-airbreathing space rocket has to ignite. Is it worth it to use this X-15 style approach?

A rocket fuel first stage could get their vehicle the same speed and altitude, and though not reusable, might it be cheaper?

The NASA Space Shuttle was bullshit when it was still on paper. The problem with it always was that, it's design going back to the height of the cold war, it was designed to carry nuclear weapons. Just as was being done with B-52's, they planned to send up loads of weapons and keep them up there, and then launch another before the first came down. Then even after that was prohibited by treaty, they still figured that in times of great tension they could send up a load.

So this is why the orbiter is so big and so heavy, as it needs to be able to take large loads back down from orbit. And from this all the other design problems arise. So the launch system is as such so scaled up. And the there is the high wing loading and stall speed, and the need to supplement the liquid fuel with solid fuel, and then the heat problem on the re-entry tiles.

So with fighter plane like stall speed, I believe 200 mph, it was always really difficult to find tires for it. The pressures are higher than on the Concord, and even those are dangerous. Tire blowouts were a problem on the runway too.

The earliest reliability estimates where that it would be just like a solid fuel ICBM, 1 in 25 would explode on launch.

Then there was Morton Thiokol and it's refusal to do upright testing, and then those special section O-Rings.

I believe that once only was the return payload from orbit capability demonstrated. It was a telecom satellite, and yes they did retrofit it and then relaunch it. But this was just once, and seemingly just to prove they could really to it.

The only payload worth the cost of returning from orbit is a human life. Otherwise, just collect it together up there. Some day we will figure out how to melt it down and make star ships out of it.

Shortly after the shuttle debuted, Scientific American published the "Big Dumb Booster". Disposable rockets are cheaper!! They aren't much more than aluminum cans anyway.

So for safety you could launch from a floating platform, of course facing East in equatorial waters. You could prepare your liquid Hydrogen and liquid Oxygen out there too.

Now for re-entry, yes being able to make a controlled landing on the ground is nicer than having to have the Navy fish you out of the Pacific Ocean. So a winged re-entry vehicle is nice. But the technical problems involved in this would be far less than with NASA's bogus shuttle project, just because of the lower size and weight.

So the most recent NASA proposal, Aries, is just this way. Big dumb disposable boosters for building space stations or going to Mars. And then a small winged re-entry vehicle. Much better all around than the shuttle.

As far as Space-X and their X-15 like system, we will see.

SJG sites.google.com

Peter Frampton youtube.com

The current Aviation Week, Aug 3 -16, has an entire section on these private space initiatives.

It talks about Stratolift, and shows their facility in Mohave, CA

They say that what this gets them is 35,000ft and some subsonic speed. They say that the NASA shuttle used 25% of it's fuel to get this.

They talk about Space X, having demonstrated reusability of rockets. With many of these programs now they are talking about boosters with wings which pop put and then computers fly them back down. Sometimes they still need to be fished out of the ocean, but as it is a controlled descent, it can be coastal waters.

Virgin Galactic has a contract to launch 39 satellites and then probably 100 more. This makes lots of sense, modernized compact and light weight telcom satellites, for about $10 Meg per launch.

They will be using the earlier Rutan design, White Knight, for horizontal air breathing take off.

Then there are ideas about rocket engines which use a heat exchanger. Then the farthest out is a winged orbiter which takes off and lands horizontal. It is propelled by an exhaust of hydrogen or helium, but the actual power is ground based microwaves beamed at it.

SJG sites.google.com

Gin Blossoms youtube.com