credit: Virgin Galactic / caption: why the straigth wing and v-tail?
This design for Virgin Galactic's mini satellite launching rocket LauncherOne was shown by the company's small satellite launch general manager Adam Baker at the 60th International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, Korea in October. For a more colourful LauncherOne design click through to the extended portion of this blog post
credit: Virgin Galactic / caption: This colourful design appears to have a SpaceShipOne like wing and canards. A flyback booster?
on November 6, 2009 12:16 AM | Reply
Rob,
I hope the second image was correctly credited by whoever gave the talk at the IAC?
The concept was a reuseable, fly-back first stage, worked on independently by a chap called Rick Newlands, who is one of those British backroom engineers who seems to get overlooked whilst others gain the plaudits :-(
It is called Black Cab, and Rick Newlands wrote a presentation for the 2009 UKSpace Conference which had several slides about it. Unfortunately he was ill, and someone else had to step in to make the presentation, but he had communicated with me previously about it, and I also made reference to it in a talk at the UK Space Conference aswell, since I felt he deserved more recognition.
I'll try and find out what propulsion system he envisaged for it eventually - at the time, it seemed to be a toss up between a hybrid and a liquid bi-prop for the first stage. The vehicle combined features from a number of other winged vehicles or concepts, most notably Space Ship 2, Skylon and Pegasus.
All the best,
Richard