|
Spaceships weren't meant to come apart after lift off with bits
falling away until only one piece makes it into orbit only to come
back on parachutes or in a dead-stick glide. They were intended
to be solid metallic cigar shapes that soared whole into the cosmos
and returned intact to land on a majestic tail of fire. Anything
less is second best and avoiding the issue of whether or not your
engines were up to snuff in the first place.
 Maybe
that's the reason why the Douglas Aircraft Company began its SASSTO
project in the 1960s. That stands for Saturn Applications
Single Stage To Orbit. The brain
child of designer Philip Bono, this was one
of a number of attempts over the past few decades to produce a
spacecraft that does not break up like a celebrity marriage on lift
off, but flies into space in one piece and returns with its honour
intact.
The Douglas SASSTO was meant to be the equivalent to Nasa's Saturn
SIVB booster with enough power to put a two-man Gemini spacecraft into
orbit. But unlike the SIVB, which could only be used once and
was then tossed away like a multi-million dollar wad of Kleenex, the
SASSTO could return to Earth and land using its engine.
<Boring technical bit>
 It
was supposed to do this using an aerospike, which is a sort of
open-sided rocket engine that looks like a huge plug on the bottom of
the ship. This engine is smaller and lighter than conventional
rockets, but with superior performance because the entire plug
acts like one big engine with peculiar properties. The rocket
exhaust streams down the plug in a ring with the curved sides of
the plug containing and guiding the exhaust like the half of the bell
of a rocket motor. On the open side of the exhaust, the
pressure of the surrounding air also contains the exhaust like the
other half of the bell. The clever bit is that as the rocket
ascends, the shape of the exhaust must widen to maintain efficiency.
With a conventional rocket this is very difficult to do, but with the aerospike the lowering air pressure that comes with higher altitudes
allows the exhaust to spread out automatically. As a
bonus, on return from orbit the plug would be cooled with liquid
hydrogen so that it could act as a heat shield before being restarted
for the final landing.
</Boring technical bit>
And you could refurbish the ship, refuel her, and send her right
back up again.
The Douglas company had high hopes for the SASSTO. They
figured that a fully reusable spaceship that didn't even need tanks or
boosters replaced would be much more economical than expendable
rockets, and because it didn't need all the assembly and preparation
work would be an excellent lifeboat and rescue craft.
 Unfortunately,
neither SASSTO nor any of her cousins, such as the Delta Clipper of
the 1990s, has ever entered service. Part of this is due to the
fact that the actual costs and savings (if any) of the single stage
design remain unknowns, which makes them unattractive to budget-concious
agencies. Part of it is due to the Space Shuttle eating up so
much of the American space budget for so long, which is what killed
off the Douglas project.
And part of it may be that Nasa just doesn't have any poetry in its
collective soul. |
Everyone
who knows anything about how the future is supposed to be knows
that spaceships are not supposed to look like this. 
They
are supposed to look like this. 