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The latest Popular Science has at least a brief description of
areospike technology (along with a great cover shot and an inside
composite photo of the DC-X test flight).
Have you ever seen a large audio speaker that fires down and has
a large spike below it to disperse the sound? Take the spike, turn it
so it points down, and put a ring of igniters around the top that fire
in and down along the spike.
The claim is that a traditional rocket engine, with the bell-shaped
exhaust nozzle, is optimally efficient over a very small ambient
pressure (altitude) range, where the areospike use a combination of
ambient pressure and shock waves to shape the exhaust pattern optimally
over a much wider range, "with no moving parts".
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Propultion and Materials Know-how exist today to enable Single Stage
to orbit vehicles (many different ways).
What doesn't exist is the funding, so unless development and building
can be done privatly, we can forget about it, no matter how it is done.
When the Space Shuttle was proposed/designed, it was to have a weekly
flight rate at less then 50 Million per Flight... and what did we get!
10 Flights a year at over 500 Million each. After that Congress isn't
going to aprove ANYTHING (in this area) no matter what is claimed,
specially in the current hard economic times.
Some paper studies and "small" proof of concept projects (as the DC-X)
is the most you can expect... if you are very very lucky.
Gil
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