X-20 Dynasoar
Posted on 02/04/2011 6:56:13 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Private industry could be prepared to go where NASA fears to tread and develop a spaceplane to replace the space shuttle and ferry crews to and from the International Space Station. But if industry succeeds, it will be thanks to decades of work by the space agency on lifting-body reentry vehicles.
While its plans for replacing the shuttle are in flux, NASA has a small program underway intended to stimulate private-sector efforts to develop commercial human spaceflight services. While most of those involved are pursuing Apollo-style capsules similar to NASA’s Orion crew vehicle, one is designing a spaceplane.
The Dream Chaser, developed by Sierra Nevada Corp. subsidiary SpaceDev, is based on NASA’s HL-20 lifting-body design, which reached the stage of a full-scale research model before work was discontinued in the early 1990s. With NASA now considering bids for a second round of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, another spaceplane contender has emerged.
The “blended lifting-body” vehicle proposed by Orbital Sciences Corp. for CCDev 2 is based on the larger Orbital Space Plane (OSP) the company designed in the early 2000s under NASA’s Space Launch Initiative, a previous but abortive effort to develop a next-generation reusable launch system to replace the shuttle.
(Excerpt) Read more at aviationweek.com ...
Ping.
haven’t we been down the space plane road before and got canceled?
Why doesn’t NASA simply offer prizes for this breakthrough, via:
? Monopolies don’t like competition; that’s why.
Since the early 1990s, I have been stating that I thought the development of a heavy load space plane was so important that we should launch a Manhattan Project level operation to accomplish the design and development.
Fly it off the ground. Fly it into space. Return to the same or another landing strip for another flight within hours.
The crickets have been continually delivering my only response to date, and are still rubbing their hind legs at the prospect.
GO Crickets, some of the few people ‘in the know’ who still communicate with me. ;^)
There must be some sort of financial incentive.Its very expensive to build some of these planes. Have a $10 million dollar prize and a contract from NASA
For decades I have thought that the heavy lifting should be done by unmanned rockets and the astronauts taken up in much smaller spacecraft.
Something Sanger’s proposed spaceplane?
I like the idea it could return to the U. S. from any orbit location. That’s an interesting aspect.
Just don’t let that NASA union Teamster govt worker scum touch it.
Yeah that’s gonna work.
That was just one design. There was another one that could use a runway.
I know about this I have a DVD and book on this. The Sanger rocket was launched on a track powered by V-2 rockets
Yup...its called the SR21 Blackbird....
Not including knowing the guy who has written on this subject
I was tinking of the Sanger II project that started in the 1980s.
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