What you call a “slow news day:”

Converted Ballistic Missiles Could Launch Aid to Disaster Zones

Before anyone gets too worked up, this idea springs not from some tax-dollar-spewing government think-tank, but from a grad student in Tokyo.

The idea: a natural disaster strikes the Middle of Nowhere. Ships will take forever to get there; planes can’t. So… put medicine, electrical generators, whatever, onto the fronts of decommissioned ICBMs and launch into the disaster zone. Supplies can be on-site in an hour or less. One one hand… sure, you could do that. On the other hand… ah… no.

1) Launching ICBMs can make other nations twitchy.

2) ICBMs, even decommissioned ones, are *expensive* and the payloads are small.

3) How good is your targetting? And is a generator falling out of the sky what the people on the ground really need?

4) Airplanes can be there in a few hours. If they can’t land – rough terrain, no runways, etc. – they can always do the Berlin Air Lift Candy Bomber thing and chuck relief supplies out the back under parachute.

Personally, my biggest issue is #2. Unless your Intercontenental Ballistic Package Delivery System is kept in a state of constant readiness – and that’ll cost a lot – it’s going to take a long time to get it ready to launch. So ICBMs just seem a poor choice here. However… there is a forthcoming alternative: rocketplanes.

The likes of XCOR’s “Lynx” suborbital rocketplane will, if it works out, turn out to be a vehicle with performance that at least kinda-sorta approximates ICBMs, and will by definition be kept in a virtually constant state of readiness, and will by definition be relatively cheap. Lynx is rather small, of course, and on its own couldn’t carry much very far; but put an upper stage on it, as XCOR plans to do, and you can put a payload into orbit… or halfway across the planet. Does this make economic and logistical sense? Well… still, probably “no.” But I think it makes less un-sense than expending an ICBM. And Lynx will, hopefully, be just the first, small generation; follow-on craft will be bigger and more capable. I can imagine that a successful suborbital tourism rocketplane might lead to a 737-sized suborbital transport rocketplane, carrying a few dozen passengers across oceans in a matter of minutes; this sort of vehicle would, with the aid of a simple pop-up stage, be able to toss quite a payload of band-aids at a disaster zone.

Of course, if such a system becomes available, it’ll still need to be kept in a state of readiness. And how best to do that? By constant operations. Going on a century ago, a lot of people were sure that the future of rocketry was bound up in  postal rockets… shooting mail across the miles via rocket. That of course didn’t work out, and it likely wouldn’t work out today; in the era of email, there’s just not enough mail to justify it. But you know what we’re not going to run out of anytime soon? Crazy people. Any rocketplane-based suborbital payload delivery system that can send a meaningful disaster-recovery payload across the planet can also fire quite a number of high-paying adrenaline junkies out into space. Not in a capsule, mind you, but in little more than space suits. Lob ’em up there in a pop-up stage that looks like any conventional upper stage… rockets and tankage to the rear, cylinder-cone payload shroud at the front, with the passengers sitting inside the shroud as if they were in a bus. As the people-pod exits the atmosphere, blow the “top” off the shroud (or have it split and fold aside) so that the passengers are now sitting in a “convertible,” exposed to space. Then let ’em jump… to continue to ascend, hit apogee and then descend, re-enter and come down on chutes. You *know* that there would be a line around the block for spacediving. This would spur innovations in astronaut maneuver systems, as the spacedivers would want simple and reliable maneuver capability so that they could link up like parachutists do, as well as drive innovations in *cheap* space suits. The upper stage would be recoverable and resuable; probably coming down on chutes. But install bigger chutes, and it could come down loaded with bandaids, meds, generators and perhaps even a doctor or two (presumably wearing space suits and yelling “XTREME!” all the way down.)

Back to the original idea: it’s not new. Not by a long shot. In the late 1950’s the US Army studied using the Redstone rocket as a battlefield cargo delivery system, lobbing weapons and ammo at Our Boys; they even examined launching Our Boys with the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. This led to the Douglas ICARUS concept… a modified Single Stage to Orbit launcher meant to fire 1,200 fully-armed Marines across the planet. More on all these ideas HERE. None of these were ever built.