A comparison of future fully reusable winged single-stage and two-stage launch vehicles with different propulsion concepts
- Paper ID
90-iaf-191
- author
- company
DLR - German Aerospace Research Establishment
- country
Federal Republic of Germany
- year
1990
- abstract
The paper deals with the evaluation of future fully reusable launch vehicles on the basis of mass and cost comparisons. Altogether 16 winged single-stage and two-stage vehicles are compared. Besides pure rocket launchers, vehicles with rocket and separate ramjets are considered. It is found that neither the horizontal take-off single-stage vehicles nor the single-stage ramjet vehicles represent an alternative to the vertical take-off single-stage rocket vehicles. Among thein the dual-fuel launcher yields lowest dry mass and lowest launch cost. Among the two-stage rocket launchers, stage separation at Mach 3 and application of propellant crossfeed principle leads to vehicles with lowest dry masses. Under these conditions the dual-fuel launcher again has lowest dry mass and lowest launch cost. The differences in launch cost between horizontal take-off and vertical take-off two-stage launchers are relatively small. Therefore no clear preference can be given for either one of the take-off modes in this case.