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Why we need a fast courier rocket service
In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote: The problem is considerably reduced for rockets because of their very short transit time. In particular, that makes it feasible to have a small vehicle that makes ten trips a day, rather than a big one which can only make one trip a day... What about the airspace? I assume that the rockets will launch and land near large cities, but large cities have multiple airports and restricted airspace and air traffic. If the rocket is flying city pairs, not hub and spoke, there's going to be a lot of rocket launches and landings at ten trips a day between city pairs. It's going to mean real changes to airspace allocation and traffic control. Even less-frequent rocket traffic is going to require changes to the latter, because (like really-high-performance aircraft) rockets can't just wait around for a few minutes while ATC sorts out some snafu -- if they are coming in for a 3:47 landing, they're going to land *at 3:47* and ATC will have to be organized to accommodate that. If you adopt my favorite approach -- VTVL -- then one obvious option is to have vertical columns of reserved airspace, off limits to winged traffic, extending from ground level up to the top of winged-vehicle airspace. (The columns don't need to be all that wide: a rocket can't dawdle around in mid-air for a few minutes to shuffle sideways, so it's going to have to be capable of aiming pretty precisely at its landing point quite early in descent, and it can aim at the top of the column instead. Similarly, traffic control within a column will not be a big deal, because whether going up or down, a rocket traverses the full height of the column pretty quickly.) This completely separates rocket traffic from airplane traffic, except in emergencies. -- MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! | |
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