Re: Scram Success

From: Tkalbfus1 (tkalbfus1_at_aol.com)
Date: 11/22/04 

Date: 22 Nov 2004 16:46:47 GMT

>This is one of the silliest ideas I've seen in this thread. The scramjet
>won't reach space at a high velocity because the engines won't work in
>vacuum.

Why does it have to? Couldn't it reach the necessary velocity to reach space
while still in the atmosphere? Once the scramjet shuts down, it will still
retain some of this velocity won't it? Isaac Newton once said that an object in
motion will tend to stay in motion unless a force acts upon it. the two forces
in question are air resistance and gravity. Are you saying that those two
forces will act to bring the ship to a complete halt once the scramjet shuts
down, and that the ship will plummet straight down to the ground afterwards?
Could you not take atmospheric drag and gravity into account and yet conclude
that they still won't slow the ship down enough to prevent it from reaching
space?

>So, you propose to lob a nuclear powered stage out of a suborbital
>transport and hope the engine works and gets the thing into LEO. If
>something goes wrong, you've got a "hot" nuclear reactor impacting the
>earth. Not a good design.
>
>Jeff

You don't design the thing to fail, you design it to succeed. You test the
engine to see it it works before you launch it, and then you launch it.

Tom

Relevant Pages

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