Why are space rockets shot straight up? Wouldn’t it be easier to make a spacecraft that ascends like regular aircraft until it’s out of the atmosphere?
In: Technology
You kind of answer your own question, don’t you? If it were easier, then that’s the way we’d be doing it, wouldn’t we?
It depends on your definition of “easy”, I suppose… In one sense, you’re absolutely right – air to orbit launches mean the rocket can be smaller, carry less fuel because it doesn’t have work as hard or go as far to achieve the same orbit as a conventional launch, and can be optimized for launching in high atmosphere rather than having to account for all the lower atmosphere it would otherwise have to cut through.
Virgin Galactic had heavily invested in this research. They built the plane, but never managed to get a suitable rocket. The plane, one of the largest ever built, was recently sold off to a company that’s going to use it for launching hypersonic research vehicles.
But now you have two problems. You have TWO vehicles instead of one, which VG had spent millions and millions on and only got one half of that equation done. That’s not simple, not in the slightest.
Weight is a big budget item in a rocket. The more weight you have to lift, the more fuel you need. The more fuel you need, the more weight you have to lift – because you can’t get your fuel along the way! They call this “The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. You need enough fuel that is energetic enough and a rocket efficient enough to hoist itself out of the atmosphere, or space travel isn’t possible. On larger Earth-like planets, with more gravity than here, conventional space travel as we know it isn’t possible, because there’s no fuel power enough that you can carry with you to escape those planets.
So if you consider mixed-mode engines, something suitable for a leisurely climb into the atmosphere, *wings*, the fuel it needs, and then the consideration you need in space, where you can’t use air breathing engines – there is no air, wings become dead weight which just eats your fuel budget, what you have is a large and overly complicated rocket with capabilities it doesn’t even need and can’t even use during the most critical part of its mission. The space shuttle, even for being a marvel of its era, was not without its undeniable criticisms.
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