12 ms·
It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your p
by bruckie 4mo ago
It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.
- notahacker 4mo agoYou've just got the problem of building a fixed wing aircraft which can carry your rocket full of explosive propellant, successfully release it pointing in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way....
- Rover222 4mo agoYou're extremely limited by the amount of mass you can even launch from a mothership aircraft. There's no future in this idea outside of small sat, and probably not even there.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoThat isn’t very helpful considering rocket launches only spend a few seconds in atmosphere mostly going vertically to get above the majority as quickly as possible .