Of course - I’m thinking of, for example, why it was never touched upon in
the 1990s-2000s for XPRIZE proposals. Or why some startup hasn’t put
forward a straight-wing spaceplane.
Rocketplane kind of counts towards that, possibly, but as far as I know
that was intended to be built out of a bizjet.
On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 11:36 PM William Claybaugh <wclaybaugh2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Matthew:
Money.
Bill
On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 9:15 PM Matthew JL <prmattjl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bill,
It’s certainly clever, just wonder why nobody’s touched it since.
On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 11:11 PM William Claybaugh <wclaybaugh2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Matthew:
I spoke w/ Max about this. Short version is that he was combining the
X-15 w/ the reentry body experience.
Bill
On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 9:05 PM Matthew JL <prmattjl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Something that’s intrigued me lately (as it always has) is Max Faget’s
1968 Shuttle concept, where the Orbiter (and first stage) would have
straight wings and reenter nose-high with a bottom mold line meant to mimic
the curvature of a capsule. Idea being it was the best of both worlds - a
high aspect ratio for subsonic flight and a blunt body ideal for reentry.
I have never seen this train of thought revisited. Faget wasn’t a dumb
guy, so I have to wonder why this is the case. At the time, the concerns
for high crossrange and flying near stall when transitioning from the
reentry orientation to gliding flight were seen as issues, but we have
excellent fly-by-wire technology even at the consumer grade level and no
requirements to come back to the launch site after one orbit.
So I open this off-topic combo to the minds and experience of ARocket,
and leave with a video of high-Mach wind tunnel testing of various Orbiter
geometries including the “DC-3”:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ebpz38RCTVU
