[AR] Re: Ozone layer was Re: Removing Coking Deposits
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 23:39:58 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 20 Sep 2016, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
...That takes around a million flights per year. While the vehicles
don't generate a lot of ozone distorying NOx on the way up, they do
during reentry...
No-brainer solution - limit re-entry.
In practice, anybody who's ramping up to fly *anything* a million times a
year should be thinking really hard about non-rocket alternatives like
space elevators or launch loops or orbital catchers. (We still lack the
structural materials needed for a classic geostationary elevator, but
there are less-demanding alternative designs.) That's the sort of volume
where it really pays to spend more up front, building a pipeline rather
than an armada of pickup trucks. And many of the "pipeline" approaches
have ways to bypass classical aerobraking reentry.
I like wings wheels and jets for the first stage, but if you prefer a
SpaceX/Blue Origin style vertical landing that's OK. WWJ gets you back
in the air much quicker though.
That last is an assumption, not a self-evident fact. Nobody's yet built a
VTVL rocket that can do really fast turnaround, but then, nobody's yet
built a 100km Mach 6 airplane that can do that either. All too plausibly,
it could end up being less like a 747 and more like a B-58 (the plane
whose operating costs were too high, and dispatch reliability too low, for
even the USAF). "This *isn't* just like an airplane." -- Jeff Greason.
Henry
Other related posts:
