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Space/Science » in reply to re: The Rutan tourist vehicles are NOT space launchers

re: The Rutan tourist vehicles are NOT space launchers
Marsbug — (archived)

There's a lot of uses for suborbital spaceflight, but I'm not sure point to point earth travel is among them: a decent sized hop still involves a lot more fuel and a more difficult re-entry than going up for ten minutes and then straight back down again. For a long hop (new york to tokyo) you're basically following the same flight path as an ICBM, and the re entry and fuel problems are the same if you want land instead of going splat. In fact the problems are in the same ball park as for an orbital flight. I'm not saying Burt Rutan hasn't got some tricks up his sleeve, but they'll need to be a huge leap beyond what makes spaceships one and two work, and they're impressive all by themselves.

Does anyone know how much time a ship using SS2 technology could stay in space if fuel were no object? I imagine the limiting factor is the re-entry speed, but how far could it be pushed? You could do a lot with ten minutes in space, but you could do a lot more with twenty or thirty.

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