Is single stage to orbit, now dead?

I just wondered with all the talk of a new vehicle for taking people into
space, whether the SSTO ideas have all been shelved in favour of good old
multi stage conventional boosters?

Brian

--

Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________

"Brian Gaff" wrote in
. uk:

I just wondered with all the talk of a new vehicle for taking people
into space, whether the SSTO ideas have all been shelved in favour of
good old multi stage conventional boosters?

Seems that way, without some serious developments in propulsion
and structural technology. A fully reusable two-stager ought to
be relatively easy; work on the SSTO later on when the money's
flowing.

--Damon

Conventional fuels (whatever that may be) are the only propellants that have
a stop start button. Solids only have a start button. Gee I wish I had
studied engineering.



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The military industrial
complex --------------------------------------------------------------------
------------

Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

My fellow Americans:

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I
shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn
ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and
to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor
with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace
and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential
agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will
better shape the future of the Nation.

My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous
basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point,
have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war
period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight
years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on
most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than
mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation
should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a
feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much
together.

II.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed
four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own
country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most
influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of
this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige
depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military
strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and
human betterment.

III.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have
been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to
enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To
strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any
failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to
sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict
now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very
beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in
character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the
danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it
successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory
sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward
steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and
complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain,
despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and
human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or
domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some
spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all
current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense;
development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a
dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other
possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the
only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration:
the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance
between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped
for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably
desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the
duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of
the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks
balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their
government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to
them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or
degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms
must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may
be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any
of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War
II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments
industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required,
make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation
of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men
and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually
spend on military security more than the net income of all United States
corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic,
political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every
office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this
development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our
toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of
our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or
democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial
and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so
that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our
industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during
recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more
formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted
for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed
by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same
fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas
and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of
research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract
becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old
blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment,
project allocations, and the power of money is ever present

and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should,
we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy
could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these
and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic
system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

V.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we
peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must
avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and
convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the
material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their
political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all
generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this
world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of
dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual
trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the
conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by
our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by
many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the
battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.
Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with
intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I
confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a
definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and
the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could
utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully
built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting
peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our
ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private
citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world
advance along that road.

VII.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for
the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and
peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the
rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all
nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be
ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power,
diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's
prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their
great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to
enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its
spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its
heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others
will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will
be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all
peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding
force of mutual respect and love.



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On Thu, 12 May 2005 08:56:25 +0000, Brian Gaff wrote:

I just wondered with all the talk of a new vehicle for taking people into
space, whether the SSTO ideas have all been shelved in favour of good old
multi stage conventional boosters?


No, just delayed.

--
Craig Fink
Courtesy E-Mail Welcome @

In article ,
Brian Gaff wrote:
I just wondered with all the talk of a new vehicle for taking people into
space, whether the SSTO ideas have all been shelved in favour of good old
multi stage conventional boosters?

Marshall Space Flight Center -- NASA's launcher-development people -- have
shelved the idea, because since their X-33 project was a failure, that
must mean the technology is not mature enough. It's unthinkable (to them)
that X-33 might have been a fundamentally flawed project which failed
through gross mismanagement.

The other branch of the "usual suspects" -- the big aerospace contractors --
were never very keen on the idea in the first place, since it might hurt
their existing launch businesses. (Mistake #1 of X-33 was to assume that
contractors would enthusiastically put their best efforts, and significant
amounts of their own money, into something whose objective was to destroy
one of their existing businesses.)

Not everyone has given up on the idea. But doing something that has never
been done before is always a hard sell to investors. There's no question
that using two stages is a more conservative approach which is easier to
sell, especially if you're trying to sell another novelty -- like reusable
rockets -- at the same time.

Some of the bolder reusable TSTO designs *approach* SSTO, using a reusable
but low-performance first stage (which, among other virtues, is a lot
easier to recover than a hotter one) to basically just get the second
stage out of the atmosphere.

SSTO will retain its reputation for being almost impossibly hard until
somebody demonstrates that it's not, at which point there will be a moment
of embarrassed silence, followed by firm statements that it must have been
enabled by the latest new technology and couldn't possibly have been done
decades earlier.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Brian Gaff wrote:
I just wondered with all the talk of a new vehicle for taking people
into
space, whether the SSTO ideas have all been shelved in favour of
good old
multi stage conventional boosters?

The other branch of the "usual suspects" -- the big aerospace
contractors --
were never very keen on the idea in the first place, since it might
hurt
their existing launch businesses.

Their existing launch business is already hurting.
Boeing's launch and satellite unit has lost more than
$2 billion during the past two years. Lockheed's space
division is profitable, but mostly due to satellite
and ballistic missile defense work (sales of launch
vehicles declined last year). How unprofitable is the
launch work? Lockheed's profit actually increased when
a commercial customer *cancelled* a launch contract
last year. Much of the launch services "profit"
increase last year was due to "U.S. Government
support of the Atlas program" during a year when no
government Atlas V launches occurred.

- Ed Kyle