Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Poor Man's Space Travel

Poor in the title implies both the low budget requirement and less technical know how required to implement the idea. It is the final aggregate design I proposed earlier. In order to lower the cost of space travel, you have to carry more at every launch. Large and heavy cargo capability allows planetary travel as well. 

The Space Rocket will be launched from a Multiplane (Stage Zero) at a very high altitude. The multi wing plane will have small turbofan motors between the wings. Advantages of Multiplane are; high lifting capability, faster climbing, increased structural strength, compact design for such a heavy lifter plane, no need for a giant runway. The plane will have wheels under each bottom turbofan for distributed weight distribution. Multiplane will be over powered for its capacity so that it could climb at really high altitudes. At its maximum altitude it will release the Rocket. Multiplane than will ascend to ground slowly with almost no fuel left and no payload. The advantages of this approach: no need to be close to Equator to launch, much less air drag on the Rocket so less fuel would be wasted on drag, much less air drag would also allow non aerodynamic designs for the rocket, no need for complex heatshields on the Rocket, no need for complex ground launch pad. Therefore a lot of technical complexity can be avoided. Space Rocket will be multi staged Solid Propellent Rocket. Solid propellent rockets are reliable, compact, simple, easily storable compared to liquid fuel versions. The lower specific impulse of these rockets can be overcome by making them bigger and more staged. They can be manufactured faster and easier than liquid versions. The casing of these rockets can be recovered like in Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster (After burnout, they were jettisoned, and parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean, where they were recovered, examined, refurbished, and reused.)

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