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Astronautics
with present plans for using expendable ones,
including the cost of developing the spaceplanes
themselves [see ‘The Aviation Approach to Space
Transportation’, David Ashford, Aeronautical Journal
of the Royal, Aeronautical Society, August 2009.]
Practical travel to Mars requires shorter
journey times than can be achieved with chemical
rockets. The probable solution is to use nuclear
rockets along the lines of those nearly ready
for production in the USA in the 1970s, assisted
perhaps by long electromagnetic rail guns in
Earth orbit to provide an initial boost. Again,
low-cost access to orbit would greatly ease the
development of such new systems.
Perception
The revolution in spaceflight will be one of
perception as much as one of engineering.
Spaceplanes will introduce an airline method of
operating, which in turn will transform the image of
spaceflight from exotic to routine.
Space will lose the ‘exceptionalism’ that has
enabled the extraordinary practice of throwing
away a vehicle after each journey to persist for so
long and space operations will become subject to
the same sorts of checks and balances that affect
terrestrial transport.
The change from expendable to reusable
launchers will come to be seen as being as profound
as the change from balloons to aeroplanes in the
history of air transport. The perception of low-cost
and safe access to space using existing technology
will change from ‘too good to be true’ to ‘why wasn’t
it done years ago?’
About the author
David Ashford is Managing Director of Bristol Spaceplanes Ltd, an
innovative small company developing the Ascender spaceplane. He was
involved in Concorde, the Skylark sounding rocket, and missile and
electronic warfare projects at Douglas Aircraft and BAE Systems, and has
published some 20 papers on space transportation and has written three
books on spaceplanes and space tourism. His book,
Space Exploration: All
That Matters
was published by Hodder in 2013. David is a Fellow of the
Royal Aeronautical Society and is a Rolt Fellow at the Centre for the History
of Technology at the University of Bath.
It would take about eight more years for design
maturity to approach that of airliners today. In
particular, this requires extending the life of rocket
engines and shortening turnaround time so that
spaceplanes can make one or more flights per day.
Achieving this 15-year timescale will need a large
investment, which probably depends on the rapid
take-up and expansion of space tourism, with major
players racing to be early to market and thereby
providing the required funding. Trends and crazes
are notoriously difficult to predict but space tourism
seems to have the required ingredients.
Funding remains the key issue. The development
cost of an orbital spaceplane is on the high side for
private-sector investment, and government space
agencies are not yet taking spaceplanes seriously.
So, with the ultimate goal of a Spacebus type
vehicle the strategy should be to precede it by a less
expensive suborbital spaceplane, affordable by the
private sector, profitable in its own right but which
has the same basic design features as the longer
term objective.
On to the Moon and Mars
Low-cost access to orbit will enable the
cost of travelling further afield to be greatly
reduced. Large orbital space depots would
become affordable, and these would be used for
maintaining and re-fuelling reusable space tugs
and planetary landers.
These might be similar in principle to the vehicles
used for the US flights to the Moon in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, except they would be fully reusable.
As with transport to and from orbit, reusability and
higher traffic levels would greatly reduce the cost.
The cost of the first lunar base could be reduced by
about 10 times using reusable vehicles, compared
European spaceplane
designs from the 1960s.
Above right: Virgin
spaceship VSS Unity
touches down after flying
freely for the first time
after being released from
Virgin Mothership Eve
(VMS Eve) on 3 December
2016 in the Mojave Desert.
An airliner
capable of
flying to
orbit would
transform
spaceflight
by providing
vastly lower
costs and
improved
safety
