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 8PPll!ltllt ~81!! 8HLY The Russian design bureaus are to thank for arriving at a concept that eliminated the noisy and hazardous air-breather takeoff and for increasing the operational flexibility of the British HOTOL concept. Glebe Lozino-Lozinski had a concept for a spacecraft with a ?-metric-ton payload carried atop an Antonov An-225, with a second An-225 carrying the liquid hydrogen and launch facilities and staff. 3 The An-225 was in fact a mobile launch facility; it could literally launch a satellite for any facility that could accommodate a B-747 or an MDC-11. With Rolls Royce or General Electric engines, the An-225 becomes a more easily maintained vehicle with better altitude performance. The An-225's empennage is modified from the An-124's single vertical and horizontal empennage to an 'H' configuration. This permits the powered hypersonic glider to easily lift off the top of the vehicle, as the MBB Sanger wind tunnel test demonstrated. Most commercial transport aircraft larger than ERJ 170 are potential mobile launch platforms for space tourism, point-to-point cargo, or orbital facilities support. Most of the commercial passenger equipment can be removed, with just enough equipment remaining for a launch crew. The fuselage is strengthened and fitted with external mountings for the hypersonic glider. The landing gear need not be modified, as the same maximum weight as the commercial transport will be maintained. The flight control system would be adapted to automatically maintain the correct launch trajectory until separation. A second modified transport would be modified to carry the liquid hydrogen and liquid air to fuel the hypersonic vehicle, along with maintenance and support crew. The intent is to use the automatic launch checkout the author witnessed at Baikanour in 1988, wherein a Soyuz that arrived on its train carrier at 0500 hours launched carrying a Progress capsule at 1715 hours the same day. That should make a local launch possible within hours of arriving at the specified airport launch departure site. These two elements can provide a commercial space launch facility that requires no special or dedicated operational base. Hypersonic Configuration Concepts The configuration and the propulsion system are linked through aerothermopropulsion integration. This approach is not new, as a wide spectrum of configurations and concepts existed in the 1960s. One such McDonnell Aircraft Company concept is shown in Figure 3. This potential operational mach 12 cruise vehicle was developed for the U.S. government as a strike reconnaissance vehicle taking off from a U.S. Air Force base. The concept was to provide on-demand reconnaissance in force operations. However, as was the case with all such efforts in the 1960s, none of the aircraft derived from the "flight-to-space" efforts reached a hardware stage. Individuals working on these projects were convinced that the industrial capability existed to design and fabricate these vehicles, and that such vehicles were technically feasible. The concepts varied widely among different nations, but all had as their goal a transportation system to space that had commercial potential. This discussion is provided to discriminate between rocket-powered hypersonic gliders and hypersonic cruisers with an air- breathing propulsion system. 2 UNCLASSIFIED/,'f81il 8ffl@Itllt "31!! SHEi
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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.