"Death Swoop" was coined by Larry Niven at an early Space Access
conference. From the smirk on Larry's face, he did it just to yank Bill
Gaubatz's chain. Bill took it well.
(This was within a few minutes of a Lockheed guy complaining to Larry, "How
did you know that? I'm the Deputy Program Manager, and I only learned that
this morning." "When you're Larry Niven, there are people who see to it
that you know things.")
-R
On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 1:58 PM Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
So, nose-first reentry, probably high AOA.
At a WAG, once in a subsonic low AOA glide, fly through a high AOA stall
(analogous to the airshow "cobra maneuver" carried through to
tail-first)(possibly with RCS post-stall stabilization) into the
tail-first landing attitude. (What got labelled "the Death Swoop" back
in DC-X days, presumably by someone with no concern for marketing...)
Could be a higher faster earlier transition to tail-first flight, more
analogous to F9R, of course.
What TPS to provide the extremely high reusability to meet
point-to-point economics?
My take on this particular publicity push: It's more about creating
investor perceptions of a huge potential long-term market than it is
about realistic medium-term BFR technical objectives.
Because developing BFR is going to take a significant chunk of investment.
And the initial BFR flight version is likely to require a great deal of
iterative detail improvement to approach the level of reusability
implicit in point-to-point travel market economics.
Not that the point-to-point potential isn't real. (And extremely
personally attractive to exactly the people who'd be signing the checks
to develop BFR.) Nor that SpaceX hasn't proved themselves extremely able
to implement such iterative detail improvements, F9R a case in point.
But point-to-point is likely to happen only some considerable time after
BFR first enters orbital transport service.
Henry
On 10/9/2017 3:49 AM, Aplin Alexander T (Redacted sender ATAPLIN for
DMARC) wrote:
second stages?
Have they said anything specific about how they'll recover the BFR
landing:
It appears that the second stage is the passenger vehicle, so vertical
https://youtu.be/zqE-ultsWt0
In case link gets corrupted:
youtu[dot]be/zqE-ultsWt0
Alex Aplin
