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.
“Gemini 4”2 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//F811. 8FFll!l*le lall!! 8111!1/ goal was to be able to recover the spacecraft at any airport in CONUS, to eliminate the need for an overseas recovery site, and to eliminate the waiting required until a lower L/D ratio could land in CONUS (up to 14 orbits for the Apollo capsule, or 21 hours). In an emergency, that may be too long. The AFFDL's goal for the spacecraft to support the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was no waiting but to be able to reach CON US from any arbitrary MOL position in its orbit. This was considered possible in the 1964-65 briefs to the government with respect to MOL, specifically the Model 176 configuration the MDC proposed for the MOL support in 1964. The hypersonic glider based on the FDL-7C and the hypersonic air-breathing aircralt in Figure 8 both have hypersonic L/D ratios in excess of 2.7. In very practical terms, that means unpowered cross ranges in excess of 4,500 nautical miles and down ranges on the order of the Earth's circumference. So these two cralt can depart from any location of a low-altitude orbit and land in CON US or in continental Europe. Both are dynamically stable over the entire glide regime. FDL-7 C/D Hypersonic Glider Blended Body Hypersonic Cruiser Figure 8. High-Performance Hypersonic Glide Aircraft. Rocket boost-glide and air-breather cruiser. The wing-body, cylindrical fuselage advocates have strongly criticized the lilting bodies, contending that they are poorer configurations and much more complicated than the conventional-wisdom wing-body configurations (see Figure 9). However, that is far from the truth. The structural specialist sees this configuration as a lightweight propellant tank and assumes it is this consideration that drives the design. Rather, that observation introduces problems for all other technical disciplines that are far more difficult to rectify than a noncylindrical tank or a cylindrical tank in a nonsymmetrical cross section. The lone lilting surface with trailing edge controls introduces control issues just as it did for the space shuttle. 10 UNCLASSIFIED/ ;«F81it 8FFIIIAI!: 1!181! &••LY
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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.