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Radian Aerospace announces plans to build a single-stage-to-orbit space plane
- raxxorrax 5y agoThis would be an incredible engineering feat. I think there is still a stage and some parts that aren't reused on a Falcon 9 rocket. Also some said re-usability of parts is less economically important than assumed, it is only worthwhile if you do a lot of starts. But to have a plane reach space and establish orbit would be awesome. Many said it would not be possible with the gravity and atmosphere of Earth.
- techdragon 5y agoI've always thought the X-33 program was terminated wastefully. The concept was sound, the engineering was just a bit too bleeding edge, but slowing down and reducing funding rather than outright cancelation would have been better. Whats pivotal about this company is they have the correct heritage for this work. The CTO is former head of the Future Space Transportation and X-33 program at Boeing. This is the X-33 with a quarter of a century of learning to build on. Its definitely possible to make this work if they get the money. But it might have a hard time competing with SpaceX and Starship if it doesn't move relatively quickly, they might be able to survive in a niche that SpaceX doesn't have much success with, but the economics behind Starship means that its going to be very hard to find those niches once Starship starts flying commercial payloads and people begin to adapt their architectures to take advantage of "I can just make it bigger and heavier because Starship is so cheap". The more the industry moves that way the worse off an SSTO will be since they will inherently be paying the full penalty of the rocket equation and cannot hope to be as "brute force" performant as SpaceX's Starship. Looks really really cool though and I can't wait to see more... Go team space!