High Altitude Launch for a Practical SSTO

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High Altitude Launch for a Practical SSTO

Landis, Geoffrey A. / Denis, Vincent / Lyons, Valerie

Existing engineering materials allow the construction of towers to heights of many kilometers. Orbital launch from a high altitude has significant advantages over sea-level launch due to the reduced atmospheric pressure, resulting in lower atmospheric drag on the vehicle and allowing higher rocket engine performance. High-altitude launch sites are particularly advantageous for single-stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicles, where the payload is typically 2% of the initial launch mass. An earlier paper enumerated some of the advantages of high altitude launch of SSTO vehicles. In this paper, we calculate launch trajectories for a candidate SSTO vehicle, and calculate the advantage of launch at launch altitudes 5 to 25 kilometer altitudes above sea level. The performance increase can be directly translated into increased payload capability to orbit, ranging from 5 to 20% increase in the mass to orbit. For a candidate vehicle with an initial payload fraction of 2% of gross lift-off weight, this corresponds to 31% increase in payload (for 5-km launch altitude) to 122% additional payload (for 25-km launch altitude).

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Document information

Title :

High Altitude Launch for a Practical SSTO

Contributors:

Landis, Geoffrey A. (author) / Denis, Vincent (author) / Lyons, Valerie (author)

Conference:

Conference on Commercial/Civil Next Generation Space Transportation, Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF-2003) ; 2003 ; Albuquerque, NM, United States

Publication date :

2003-02-01

Type of media :

Preprint

Type of material :

No indication

Language :

English

Keywords :

Launch Vehicles And Launch Operations