A lot of discussion on this and other groups orbits around the difficulty is scaling SS1 to an orbital vehicle. There has been a lot of discussion about Mr...

Presuming a reusable spacecraft - Have to avoid armies of technicians to operate/maintain the spacecraft. Thus: - Components must have an appreciable...

Reading about the conventional bundled tube regenerative cooling chamber is made, it sounds laborious, and with so many little parts to get wrong. I was...

http://splitreflection.com/cal/shuttle.png A simple shuttle orbiter concept I've drawn up based on certain princibles. - This would be an upper stage, though...

toby peers wrote: Sometimes people on this group have mentioned mixed liquid monprops like methane and oxygen and that they are very dangerous. What ...

I'm thinking a shape like a sharp edged saucer doing reentry face first and then turning edge on for low speed landing. I expect some concentration of heating...

A week or so ago I saw a rather neat Junkyard Wars episode on pulse-jets. I'm also rather intrigued that it was felt to be a safe enough gadget to build for...

In looking at a ramjet/scramjet diagram, it seems that the burnt gas would want to go in both direction: towards both the inlet and the outlet. Since there is...

Derek Lyons wrote: Peter Fairbrother wrote: Derek Lyons wrote: Peter Fairbrother wrote: ...

Tom wrote: So how big is the impellor going to be in this pump? It doesn't have one. I considered a volute casing Barske-type impellor pump, but it would...

Reading the thread about cryogenic plastics, I thought it might be an idea to use (reinforced? with what?) polythene for the tanks of my LH2/LOX second stage*...

Suppose we want to bring a small sample back from Mars. The Mars rovers mass around 180 kg. If 10% was reserved for the return rocket it would mass 18 kg. We...

Suppose you joined Mars and Venus together with a big elastic band? -- Peter Fairbrother

Jim Davis wrote: Derek Lyons wrote: There was a guy I saw somewhere recently who was seriously proposing to save on booster weight by using a fuel...

Looking at the Mars Rover tracks, I notice that at regular intervals a few feet apart, the treadmarks left in the dust are disturbed for a few inches...

All I could find on Google are countless links which give inclination of eclipses related to Earth equator, or inclination of Earth axis related to...

Is the RL60 a 'done deal' for some variants of the Delta 4 and Atlas 5? If so what effects will it have on payloads - presumably to GTO but also on...

Take 2 Shuttle SRBs, possibly the 5 segment ones that were just tested. Hang a Delta 4 core between them (gonna look odd, but no odder than a Titan 4). ...

Looking at the planned vehicles for the return to the moon, the article(s) seemed to emphasize leverage of shuttle technology. For example the use of SSMEs and...

Bono's aerospike designs from the 60s feature toroidal comubstion chambers, whereas recent designs like the X-33's linear aerospike usually have several small,...