Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency and dated 8 March 2010, was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It gives a historical and technical review of how to reach space and return. It covers hypersonic gliders, air-breathing and rocket propulsion, thermodynamics and materials, and launch options. It argues that reliable, schedulable access to low Earth orbit is mainly a hardware and propulsion problem rather than a technology one.
“The Advance”12 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ /f81il 8ffllilsl1k WE&i Si'llk>C Whatever goes into orbit must enter the atmosphere many times if it is to be a sustained-use vehicle. If it is to be a commercial vehicle, then the flexibility to land wherever the commercial customers are is essential. Consider how successful FedEx, UPS, or DHL would be if there were only two pickup and delivery sites in the United States and a few more elsewhere in the world. A ballistic capsule has even fewer landing options, and a saltwater landing and recovery is too costly to be commercially feasible. What is needed is a hypersonic glider with the flexibility to enter when necessary, without waiting, and to land at different operational bases, just as a transport might. There were three serious competitors in the United States with respect to hypersonic glider configurations: the AFFDL at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation (MDC), and the Lockheed Corporation. NASA Ames and NASA Langley were also generating hypersonic configurations, but NASA's views on hypersonic gliders (fundamentally research and development projects) and their glide range requirements differed from those of the three organizations listed above. That difference is clearly exemplified by the difference between the operational requirements of an experimental aircraft (such as X-1, X-2, X-10, X-15, or X-20) that flies infrequently and at the convenience of the research organization and those of an operational Air Force or Navy aircraft that must be able to fly on any day in almost any weather when needed (also a Russian spacecraft operational rule). From the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s, the U.S. Air Force and NASA had disagreements over the operational capability of these aircraft and their requirements. As a result, each went its own development direction, and much of the originality and practicality of the AFFDL concepts has not been reflected in the space access configurations developed by NASA. There was a final attempt to apply the AFFDL's philosophy of a high lift-to-drag (L/D) ratio delta planform configuration to the NASA space shuttle, as detailed in the article "A Delta Shuttle Orbiter" in the January 1971 issue of Astronautics and Aeronautics.7 Figure 5 shows the array of delta planform configurations the AFFDL considered during the 1958-68 timeframe. 3 / Figure 5. Delta-Lifting Body Designs. Array of delta-lifting body designs shows configuration is not limited to high hypersonic lift-to-drag ratios, high cross range, and large size. 8 5 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,UiSi'At Si'FFIQlsltk Wlili &••LY
Not linked to a story yet.
Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 56 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.