Sputnik":h8oyd6o5 said:
Megalodon":h8oyd6o5 said:
The problem with SSTO is that the mass fraction is incredibly challenging, and if you miss your targets even slightly the whole vehicle becomes impractical. It's awesome if it works, but the more likely outcome is that it ends up tens of billions over budget and then canceled by the next administration. It's not an idea that has a plausible path to actually existing in the real world.
Skylon
Like I said, plausible.
It'll never be funded at a high level, it would never stay on budget if it did, and the idea is worse than VentureStar even if it had someone to pay the bills that didn't care.
Setting aside financing, I'll try to explain the challenges of a concept like this and why it's so unlikely to work.
Some of the challenges here are:
-SSTO pays a huge mass penalty for hauling all the extra mass to orbit.
-Using hydrogen pays a huge penalty because the mass fraction of the tankage sucks
-hydrogen engines have a poor thrust to weight ratio
-air breathing engines have a
terrible thrust to weight ratio
-heat shields have a huge mass penalty, particularly big ones.
-gravity losses are made worse by poor thrust to weight ratios and mass penalties.
So basically all the engineering challenges for Skylon are multiplicative, they compound with each other. Every aspect of the problem makes every other aspect harder. VentureStar is almost as bad, but at least it didn't try to use air breathing engines.
The SpaceX concept might seem unwieldy, but it's extremely clever because the design decisions are synergistic, they make each other's jobs easier.
-Hydrocarbon fuel allows high mass fractions.
-Hydrocarbon fuel allows extremely high T/W engines
-Not doing SSTO leaves unnecessary mass behind
-And allows reduced thermal protection on the first stage
-And allows the only thing that needs a full heat shield, the upper stage, to be small.
It's still incredibly difficult, but it's not obviously going to fail for known reasons, which is an improvement in this industry.