I don’t think that vertical takeoff, horizontal landing is the best way to go. Anyway, I’ll believe it when I see it.
[Update a while later]
Bad link is fixed now, sorry.
6 thoughts on “A New Suborbital Vehicle”
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I don’t think that vertical takeoff, horizontal landing is the best way to go. Anyway, I’ll believe it when I see it.
[Update a while later]
Bad link is fixed now, sorry.
Comments are closed.
Looks like a bad link.
Busted link, Rand.
Is this it?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2107802-china-plans-worlds-biggest-spaceplane-to-carry-20-tourists/
What I don’t understand is how much energy loss would there be from starting horizontal and immediately going vertical?
As for being doable, it’s suborbital so why not?
Well from what I understand if you start a rocket vertical you have several advantages. It’s easier to construct the fuel tanks, as the vehicle is designed to handle large g-loads in the vertical axis to begin with. Then there’s the fact you don’t need a running landing gear that can handle the weight of the whole fueled vehicle (it’s harder to design a landing gear than people think) neither to carry the weight of the rugged landing gear.
Most HTHL designs I have seen either launch the vehicle mostly empty and refuel it in flight (e.g. Black Horse), or use a rocket sled to boost the vehicle into flight to avoid the landing gear issue.
Smells like BS. A craft which doesn’t even have an engine…
We know the Chinese have been working on a military space plane of some sort for years now. This seems like an academic side project with little hope of getting to fly. The “ground tests” probably only were done on the aerodynamics of the thing.