AbstractSevere weight penalties can occur if the sizes of Orbital Sortie Vehicle stages are not near their optimum values. In particular, single-stage rocket configurations with or without “zero-stage” boosters are necessarily much larger than two-stage configurations. Conventional cryogenic propellant combinations provide a reasonable range of vehicle sizes. By comparison, one storable-liquid propellant combination would require vehicle size to be excessive, while two “exotic” propellant combinations do not appear to provide enough size reduction to warrant their use. Second-stage structural efficiency has a major effect on overall vehicle size. It appears feasible to design a two-stage Orbital Sortie Vehicle whose gross lift-off weight is 50–70 times the payload weight.


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    Title :

    Propulsion and staging considerations for an orbital sortie vehicle


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Acta Astronautica ; 15 , 1 ; 29-34


    Publication date :

    1987-01-01


    Size :

    6 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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