Concepts of reusable spacecraft
This page is far from complete... preliminarily:
HTHL - Horizontal Take off, Horizontal Landing
SSTO - Single Stage To Orbit
- Hotol
- NASP - National Aerospace Plane
TSTO - Two Stage/with Booster
- small Hotol, launched piggyback from an Antonow-225
- Kellyspace want to tow a small
Orbiter into the stratosphere with a normal plane
- X-34
(a small technology demonstrator for X-33)
- Sänger - a small Orbiter, launched piggyback from an airbreathing
carrier plane at a height of 40km at Mach 8
VTHL - Vertical Take off, Horizontal Landing
SSTO
TSTO
- Space Shuttle (USA, only orbiter and booster reusable)
- Buran (Russia, Launch rocket: Energija, only orbiter reusable)
- Hermes (only orbiter reusable)
- Horus (only orbiter reusable)
VTVL - Vertical Take off, Vertical Landing
SSTO
- Delta Clipper DC-Y (the small prototype
DC-X(A)
absolved a couple of flights)
- Rotary Rocket Company's Roton
uses a rotating, centrifugal force-pumped aerospike engine for launch
and a deployable, unpowered rotor for landing. (Payload ca. 3100 kg to LEO.)
TSTO
Only Shuttle and Buran do exist, X-34 and X-33 are being built.
Kelly, Kistler and Rotary Rocket plan to perform the first test flights
in the next years (1999/2000).
Hermes probably doesn't have a chance - some design work has been done, but
it's far too small; Horus is similar, and there doesn't seem to be serious
development on it right now; NASP was apparently never intended to be
realised; Hotol depends on Alan Bonds hybrid engines, which are patented
and secret...
Nobody's planning to built DC-Y /DC-I right now.
There are models of Sänger but neither plans nor money to build it.
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