How close are we to building a reliable SSTO spaceplane platform?

The government hides behind incompetence. Most of the cost overruns are purposely to acquire a large black budget.

Spend 5 billion, show us trinkets that cost them a few millions. On and on.

please fuck off to /pol/ or /x/ I am seriously tired of this shit

two days now, jesus christ.

em drives oviously. self contained movement is foreign and hardly studied. but obvious when understood

well, obviously.

read some geometry and vectors then come back

You'd need to couple tech like in your image with something like a ground-based slingshot/railgun to achieve proper orbit and be more efficient than chemical rockets.

>Blame 50 years of government monopoly on spaceflight. It's only now with a handful of private start-ups that we are seeing how much money can be saved. A Falcon 9 launch is only $62M which sounds like a lot but is historically unprecedented. These costs will only fall as SpaceX's launch capabilities grow.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
>Government is pretty horrible at everything it does; space is no exception. One critical difference is government subcontracting everything out the separate companies, which creates an assload of administrative middle-men positions. Great for white-collar workers, not great for costs. SpaceX by contrast designs and builds everything in-house.

implying anyone else that wasnt the goverment could have started the space industry in the first place

shure little kiddy boy, shure

imagine this, its the 60, the cold war is on but goverment says: " WE WILL NOT INVEST NOT EVEN A SINGLE PENNY ON SPACE IF ANYONE WANTS TO DO IT IT MUST BE 100% PRIVATE"

HAHA, IF THAT HAPPENED IT IS OBJECTIVELY OBVIOUS we wouldnt have launched not even the smallest of smallest of probes.

big projects require a large common organism to guide them, aka government. even todays EVERY FUCKING PRIVATE space corporations depends on subsidies, so go learn your facts straight before you can sit at the adults table

Subsidies don't mean government involvement, they are governmental support. If I give you $1M and let you do whatever you want with them as long as you show me results, it will be different than giving you $1M and telling you what to do.

bullshit, provide some numbers on this

Not him, but have you ever had a look at what private aerospace companies like ULA or SpaceX have to give to the government in patents and fulfilled science contracts to get subsidies? That shit is regulated tighter than the pedophile adventures of ecclesiasts around the world. SpaceX and Tesla have to share most of their worthwhile in-house technology and ULA is basically sucking on Congress' tits since they have to buy the RD-180 engines for their shitty rockets. If there weren't a few too many ULA lobbyists present then Tony would've had to shut the door long ago. The US gov has all their fingers in the private market, if you don't see this then congrats, you're an idiot extraordinaire.

You could at least put in the effort to google the thing pictured. It's Skylon, an SSTO design that uses a hybrid jet-rocket design.

>The US gov has all their fingers in the private market,
When the goverment helps private business:

WAHHH WAHHH GET YOUR WAHH WAH FINGERS WAHHH OUT OF MY BUSINESS

When goverment says maybe ula shouldnt overprice by 3000% on things that can be bought cheaper.

ITS NATIONAL SECURITY!!

wow
just wow
clearly you never even remotely had to do with gov business
kys

>clearly you never even remotely had to do with gov business
neither did you , ignorant piece of shit, you do not own an ULA level company.

yes i know its hard selling potatoes to uncle sam, but that sucks only cause youre a shitty potatoe farmer, and newsflash, if it wasnt for all the help the govermenment givey ou, you would be out in the streeeeeeeeeet little boy, so yknow what, youre a welfare queen, and thats lesson namber one for free, for more dial 0800-helpforretardedignorants

wew laddy, that's a whole lotta assumptions
i know you're """"real smart"""" now because your econ101 teacher didn't call you out for being a retarded fuck today, but atleast try to think before embarrassing yourself with that gibberish you just posted you assblasted cuck canuck

epurse govermentalis

in case you havent notice your brainlet non education that is a god tier quote (that combines my scientist intelligence with my philosophical intelligence both of which you lack)
referencingt the great galileo, when he was talking about the earth moving around the sun. The ignorant priests told him a lot of made up stories because they were butthurt, just like you

and he said, epurse muovis, which is a metaphor for whatever you say the objective physical reality is that the earth goes around the sun

so now, the objective reality yuo cant see is that goverment is good and private company is bad

every economist knows this no matter what they lie on their paper

eppurse governamentalis

MANNN it feels good to be the superior, touchdown one pointt ot superior teaam

...

>>>/jealous ignorant/
(my comeback is so much wittier than yours, if you want i can give you some tips ;)
well gotta go back to my great life, good luck in your shitty life with no girls, its been good beating ya1

Spaceplanes aren't a bad idea. SSTOs are.

I think air-launch (lifted off by a large conventional aircraft, like SpaceShipOne), plus a winged reusable booster stage, plus a winged reusable upper/return stage, is an excellent reusable launch concept. However, it might only be suitable for small payloads due to how large the aircraft would have to be relative to the payload.

$62 million plus $40 million in insurance costs associated with 1 launch failure every 10 flights

they have had 1 launch failure in 29 launches

>They seem like an absurdly wasteful way to deliver tiny payloads into orbit.
So let's build an SSTO to worsen the mass fraction to be even more wasteful?

Not that user, but he's right.

Skylon empty weight: 53,400 kg
Skylon loaded weight: 325,000 kg
Sabre engine max thrust: 2,940 kN
Sabre engine thrust-to-weight ratio: 14
Hence, Sabre engine weight: 21,406.73 kg

Replacing Skylons 2 Sabre engines with 2 SSMEs saves 35'785.46 kg empty weight. Assuming a required delta-v of 9'500 m/s (including atmospheric and gravitational losses) and an average exhaust velocity of 4278 m/s Skylon with SSMEs could thus carry 17,825 kg to orbit as opposed to the claimed (and probably bs) 15,000 kg of a Skylon with Sabre engines.

>I think air-launch (lifted off by a large conventional aircraft, like SpaceShipOne), plus a winged reusable booster stage, plus a winged reusable upper/return stage, is an excellent reusable launch concept.
Not really. Air launch only saves 300-450 m/s delta-v. This means you'd still need something like a 400 ton rocket. So the carrier aircraft would have to be in the vicinity of 1300 tons MTOW. That's far beyond our capabilities. For comparison: the An-225 airplane has something like 640 tons MTOW.

>SSMEs
found your problem right there little buddy boy uneducated, you want to use... haha
no wait
you want to use
SHITTILY ALMOST NON REUSABLE THAT TAKES ONE OFNBILLIONS DOLLARS TO REFURBISHATE

instead of le epic easily fly to the moon and back to an airport like if it was commonplace that the god tier (you couldnt possibly understand even half their engineering genius) sabre engine is easily clean-check-refly

yeah, shure

But what about re-entry and landing?