1971 McDonnell Douglas Shuttle Concepts

 aircraft, drawings, projects, rockets, spacecraft
Nov 102011
 

One orbiter with two booster options: a flyback booster and an interim Titan III L4 booster

 Posted by at 10:58 pm

  3 Responses to “1971 McDonnell Douglas Shuttle Concepts”

  1. Kelly Starks says:
    November 11, 2011 at 4:02 pm

    Why is there a PanAm logo on that drawing?

    shades of 2001 Space Odyssey 😉

  2. Jeff Wright says:
    November 12, 2011 at 1:07 pm

    In terms of a reusable shuttle, how about this concept:

    Hypergolic disposable external tank–pressure-fed. The all oxygen orbiter I posited some years back.

    The engine is on the orbiter, and is a pressure-fed, but the orbiter is not what is under pressure, just that expendable tank. The conduits have to be sound of course, but the orbiter’s engine itself should be far more serviceable than SSME. Have easily swappable ablative nozzles. The orbiter has a Venture-Star style TPS, but pintle engines. Truly disposable tank, lots of oxygen left over for cold gas thrusters. Keep solids.

    The result is a smaller STS stack but faster turnaround, one would think…

    • Kelly Starks says:
      November 12, 2011 at 3:31 pm

      I’d avoid hypergolics like the plaque. The stuffs extremely toxic and chemically reactive – so its not only a pain to work with, you can’t dump the tanks in the ocean.

      I like biamese. Say take the current orbiter design, stretch the hull 30-40 feet behind the payload bay and fill that with a LOX tank. Scale up the wings appropriately and fill them with Kerosene. Swap out the SSME’s for RD-180’s or something new. That will get you from about where the SRB’s drop-off the current shuttles to orbit with no tanks. To get to there, launch it belly to belly with a identical stretched orbiter – a complete twin, either can go to space or be the booster. At launch, all fuel and LOX for both ships comes from the buddy ship. With both ship drinking off its tanks, it starts running out – about where the SRBs drop off now. So empty buddy/booster disconnects and goes back to the base (adding jet engines is really needed) and the other uses its full tanks to go to orbit. Eliminating the ET’s and SRB’s from the current shuttle stack – and becoming fully reusable.

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