Spaceport Earth
Joe Pappalardo, Cedar Mill 629.4, 2017
A collection of essays by a staff writer for Popular Mechanics.
Vomit Comets
Many of the essays are about small companies at the small desert airports designating themselves "spaceports", where vomit comets might someday take off and land for brief thrill rides above the 100 km Karman line.
The Karman line is a legal fiction; it is too high for aerodynamic lift, and too low for orbit. It is the demarcation between national airspace (where a sovereign nation are permitted to shoot down intruders), and "outer" space, where foreign orbiting objects can pass overhead without interference. That's an interesting place; however, the potential energy is less than 3% of orbital energy, and 1.5% of escape energy. Achieving orbit with rockets requires stored propellants and suffers from the Tsiolkovsky exponential, so the extra difficulty of reaching "real" space is far more than 30 or 60 to one.
Either way, the difficulty can be far less with a launch loop. Without the need for wings or onboard propellant, launch loops can launch vehicles to high orbit with less cost, energy, and risk than a vomit comet to the Karman line.
So, municipalities and taxpayers are paying for space travel and getting very expensive amusement rides. To date, no aircraft has flown to orbit, though hybrid aircraft like the space shuttle have flown back, after the lifting heavy wings and wheels with extra large rockets. After !SpaceX demonstrated vertical landing and reuse for first stages, a major justification for winged landing evaporated.
Wings may assist orbital return and landing at multiple sites, and increase survivable return to secondary landing sites for military missions in wartime, but new technologies may evolve to replace that function as well. I'm imagining a twin-fuselage aircraft like the LauncherOne mothercraft, with a net between the fuselages, designed for midair rendezvous with a spacecraft descending on parachutes. Make the net-toting aircraft robust and maneuverable; don't loft that capability to orbit with every mission.
Vertical Launch
The more interesting parts of the book are about historical and recent developments for vertical launch. Much of that is about !SpaceX, some about BlueOrigin, and some about less-well-known vertical launch sites like Wallops, Vandenberg, and Kourou.
Since the book was written, development of the !SpaceX Boca Chica launch site near Brownsville at the southern tip of Texas has slowed. Inadequate demand, perhaps; the world has more launch sites than mission types.
The book starts with the author's coverage of the last space shuttle launch; remarkably similar to my own "coverage" of the first space shuttle launch. Some interesting history of the "nationalization" of the Air Force Atlantic Missile Range into the Kennedy Space Center. p23 the author's photos of the !SpaceX innovative ball-and-socket stage separators are withheld; ITAR violation. p29 "I swear I feel a warm flash on my face" ... I remember that too. Kourou spaceport replaced Hammaguir in the Algerian Sahara. 5.3N latitude, 25 percent fuel savings to GEO. First Ariane launch in 1979.