3 ms·
This is pretty cool but to be honest I don't expect it to be very advantageous. The big advantage of airlaunch is the Isp improvement from launching at altitud
by InclinedPlane 9y ago
This is pretty cool but to be honest I don't expect it to be very advantageous.
The big advantage of airlaunch is the Isp improvement from launching at altitude. Since the rocket equation is exponential with respect to the ratio of delta V and Isp improving Isp even a little has big effects, and reducing delta V even a little does too.
But the big advantage of ordinary vertical launch rockets is that it's fairly straightforward to just make them bigger. The Saturn V was able to launch Skylab with a 6.6 meter diameter. And rockets could easily be scaled up to launch even larger diameter payloads. That's pretty difficult with something like Stratolaunch. Even with basically the largest aircraft ever made it still has a pretty small payload mass and fairing size.
One other cool thing about stratolaunch is that it has the ability to launch out of a lot more locations since it doesn't depend on a launch pad and tower. However, I suspect that's not going to be of huge importance.
I'd like to see what they can do with this technology but I suspect it'll be underwhelming.