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.
“Low Earth orbit”4 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,<F9A: 9FFHil.11k WE&i ,n.LY responsibility for space access, that Air Force's focus switched to surveillance, communication, and Global Positioning System satellites. In the late 19SOs, there existed a predisposition-forced by the military competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union-to use rockets derived from military ballistic missiles. That decision curtailed efforts to develop alternatives to chemical rockets together with practical commercial developments. With the orbiting of Sputnik, the aircraft path to space, as represented by the X series of planes, ended with the X-lS. With the X-lS's demise, all efforts to fly aircraft to space ended, replaced by the more familiar (but less practical} strategy of loudly blasting to space with expendable rockets derived from undertested ballistic missile hardware, as documented in early failures. Like their ballistic missile progenitors, current expendable rockets can be launched only once. With the exception of the experimental Delta Clipper developed and operated by William Gaubatz and the late Pete Conrad, no operational launcher has ever successfully aborted. In this context, a reusable launcher is simply an expendable with some parts reused a few times. Thus, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union/Russia has ever realized a truly commercial approach to space travel, although the Soviets came close to taking the first step with the since-terminated Energia/Buran system. Both the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia historically have generated a large number of concepts that could fly directly to space and return on a sustained, frequent, scheduled basis. An all-up air breather such as the NASP was to solve that problem and fly directly to space and return. Developing an operational mach 12 to 14 aircraft with air-breathing propulsion presents a serious design, engineering, and fabrication challenge analogous to the SR-71 Blackbird. vii UNCLASSIFIED//P8"1 8PPU!lit.l! l!l!il! 8111!¥
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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.