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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.
“Low Earth orbit”4 pages
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designed, weighed, and performed using the same industrial fabrication capability. The
result was a curve representing each configuration family, as shown in Figure 7. The
three families are represented by the three parallel straight lines.
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SV FAMILY
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Figure 7. Detailed Design Analyses Show the Weight Trends are as Much a Function of Configuration
Family as Lift-to-Drag Ratio
W/W" = K{I +0.090lg_L/D)]
K = 1.000 for the SY Family
K = 0.9297 lorthe FDL Family
K = 0. 7622 for the MRS Family
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This illustrates that the configuration and its individual wetted area to planform area
can vary as much in their spacecraft weight as they can in their L/D ratio. The high
L/D-ratio configurations had weights comparable to same-payload ballistic capsules of:
sv = 1.9 FDL= 1.7 MRS =1.4
So the penalty for having a lifting-body configuration is less than expected if the
configuration characteristics are taken into consideration in the design and weighing of
the spacecraft. In addition, the reason the lifting spacecraft with high performance was
considered was to eliminate the need for sea recovery and therefore the cost of a
recovery fleet and the damage incurred by the spacecraft in a saltwater landing. The
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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.