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Old June 29th 20, 05:56 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Ed Ruf[_2_]
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Posts: 10
Default The Rocket Motor of the Future Breathes Air Like a Jet Engine

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:19:31 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

"The two men arrived at the airfield before dawn to set up the test stand for a
prototype of their air-breathing rocket engine, a new kind of propulsion system
that is a cross between a rocket motor and a jet engine. They call their unholy
creation Fenris, and Davis believes that it’s the only way to make getting to
space cheap enough for the rest of us. While a conventional rocket engine must
carry giant tanks of fuel and oxidizer on its journey to space, an air-breathing
rocket motor pulls most of its oxidizer directly from the atmosphere. This means
that an air-breathing rocket can lift more stuff with less propellant and
drastically lower the cost of space access—at least in theory.

The idea to combine the efficiency of a jet engine with the power of a rocket
motor isn’t new, but historically these systems have only been combined in
stages. Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, for example, use jet aircraft to carry
conventional rockets several miles into the atmosphere before releasing them for
the final leg of the journey to space. In other cases, the order is reversed.
The fastest aircraft ever flown, NASA’s X-43, used a rocket engine to provide an
initial boost before an air-breathing hypersonic jet engine—known as a scramjet—
took over and accelerated the vehicle to 7,300 mph, nearly 10 times the speed of
sound.

But if these staged systems could be rolled up into one engine, the huge
efficiency gains would dramatically lower the cost of getting to space. “The
holy grail is a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle where you just take off from a
runway, fly into space, and come back and reuse the system,” says Christopher
Goyne, director of the University of Virginia’s Aerospace Research Laboratory
and an expert in hypersonic flight."

See:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-rock...-a-jet-engine/


Sounds like another air augmented rocket to me. On NTRS:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=1...atchallpartial

Operationally efficient propulsion system study (OEPSS) data book.
Volume 10; Air Augmented Rocket Afterburning
Document ID: 19980041407
NTRS Full-Text: View Document [PDF Size: 1.3 MB]
Author: Farhangi, Shahram; Trent, Donnie (Editor)
Abstract: A study was directed towards assessing viability and
effectiveness of an air augmented hide
ejector/rocket. Successful thrust augmentation could potentially
reduce a multi-stage vehicle to a single stage-to-orbit vehicle (SSTO)
and, thereby, eliminate the associated ground support facility
infrastructure and ground processing required by the eliminated stage.
The results of this preliminary study indicate that an air augmented
ejector/rocket propulsion system is viable. However, uncertainties
resulting from simplified approach and assumptions must be resolved by
further investigations.
Publication Year: 1992
Document Type: Technical Report
Report/Patent Number: NASA/CR-92-207458, NAS 1.26:207458,
RI/RD90-149-10-VOL-10, CDR-91-099
Date Acquired: May 23, 1998