An innovative approach for the return of reusable space transportation vehicles has been proposed by DLR: The winged stages are to be caught in the air and towed by subsonic airplanes back to their launch site without any necessity of an own propulsion system. This patented procedure is called in-air-capturing. The paper describes how “in-air-capturing” works and quantifies performance advantages for RLV. It gives an overview of ongoing experimental and numerical work at DLR in raising the TRL within the project AKIRA. Afterwards, the H2020 project FALCon is explained and early available results are presented. In its final part, the paper proposes a development roadmap on how to bring this efficient RLV technology to reality.


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Highly Efficient RLV-Return Mode “In-Air-Capturing” Progressing by Preparation of Subscale Flight Tests


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    2019 ; Madrid, Spanien


    Publication date :

    2019-07-04


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Shuttle subscale ablative nozzle tests

    POWERS, L. / BAILEY, R. | AIAA | 1980


    Shuttle Subscale Ablative Nozzle Tests

    L.B. Powers / R.L. Balley | AIAA | 1982


    Extraction of Subscale Free-Flight Aerodynamics from Rotary Tests of Combat Aircraft

    Beyers, M. E. / Ericsson, L. E. / AIAA | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1997



    Overview of a planned subscale in-air capturing demonstration

    Krause, Stefan / Funke, Alexander / Cain, Sebastian | IEEE | 2024