SEI Quicksat booster

This is a really interesting design for a two-stage-to-orbit reusable
light satellite booster/transatmospheric hypersonic attack aircraft.
At only 123 feet in length and capable of reaching Mach 9-10, the
flyback booster packs a lot of performance into a small vehicle.
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...-2004-5950.pdf
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...50_present.pdf

Pat

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
This is a really interesting design for a two-stage-to-orbit reusable
light satellite booster/transatmospheric hypersonic attack aircraft.
At only 123 feet in length and capable of reaching Mach 9-10, the
flyback booster packs a lot of performance into a small vehicle.
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...-2004-5950.pdf
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...50_present.pdf

This is a wet dream for many aerospace engineers. Air breathing, horizontal
takeoff hypersonic first stage coupled with a horizontal landing space
maneuvering vehicle. And how do you make the numbers work? Expendable
tankage for the upper stage.

No thanks. This has turkey written all over it.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

Pat Flannery wrote:
This is a really interesting design for a two-stage-to-orbit reusable
light satellite booster/transatmospheric hypersonic attack aircraft.
At only 123 feet in length and capable of reaching Mach 9-10, the
flyback booster packs a lot of performance into a small vehicle.
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...-2004-5950.pdf
http://www.sei.aero/library/paper_ar...50_present.pdf

That's not a serious design - it's an effort by the company to show off
/ demonstrate their optimization and analysis software and abilities.

It's also an excellent demonstration of why you don't want to use
airbreathing propulsion for large chunks of your space launch
acceleration - to get to the 9k fps staging point they incur nearly
twice that in drag losses and need about five times as much propulsion
hardware.

If you've got spare time, try putting together an excel spreadsheet,
dumping the scramjet hardware retaining only enough turbojet thrust for
flyback, and using their rocket engines for ascent. Not only does dry
weight go down, but it looks like gross weight does as well.

Of course, if you spend all of your time trying to complicate your
designs so you can get more analysis contracts, it can be difficult to
switch mental gears to "cheap, not cool" when you actually get the
opportunity to build something.

-jake

"Jeff Findley" wrote:

This is a wet dream for many aerospace engineers. Air breathing, horizontal
takeoff hypersonic first stage coupled with a horizontal landing space
maneuvering vehicle. And how do you make the numbers work?

I keep asking: if the large and long-proven demand for point-to-point
transport on earth hasn't yet paid for an air-breathing hypersonic
aircraft, how the hell is the much smaller demand for LEO supposed to
do so?

But that doesn't matter to the wet-dreamers, because It's For Space.