Spaceplane

The intensified in the 1980s and again scheduled at the start of the new millennium -body aircraft to be developed as an alternative to the launchers and space shuttles, which are currently responsible for the transport of people and payloads into space. From body aircraft brings the hope of enormous reduction in transportation costs and a significant increase in the safety of the space transportation compared to today's systems.

Concepts and projects

Unlike the space shuttles, the idea of the space plane is to be able to start on a normal runway like an airplane to reach orbit. The most important difference to a booster rocket or space shuttle is that a space plane over engines has, the oxygen from the atmosphere ( ramjet and scramjet ), so that the amount of the entrained fuel can be reduced to reach the space.

In addition to the development of novel actuators that require a space plane, one of the biggest problems of re-entry into the atmosphere after a successful orbital mission. As the indoor air ( arrow-shaped ) must have for hypersonic flight in the atmosphere during ascent over an extremely good aerodynamic shape, no ordinary heat shields such as the Space Shuttle can be used. This increases the demands on the aircraft structure greatly and can be available today or materials not be solved little.

Overall, there were many officially operated by space agencies for projects bodied aircraft, including:

  • X-15 (USA)
  • Skylon (in development)
  • Rockwell X-30 (USA)
  • Orient Express (USA )
  • BOR
  • Dyna- Soar
  • Hope X
  • Kliper
  • HOTOL ( United Kingdom )
  • Singer II ( Germany )
  • Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG -105 (Soviet Union)
  • Space Plane (Airbus)

All these projects were terminated at the latest in the 1990s for lack of money. Currently underway, especially in the U.S. basic research on air-breathing rocket engines (see Boeing X -43A ). In addition, the heat exchanger of the British Skylons project is developed, a project which was not further specified through a planning stage.

Inspired by the Ansari X-Prize also private companies came up with the idea of a space aircraft, but only with sub-orbital targets apart. This competition was successfully completed by SpaceShipOne on October 4, 2004. The successor SpaceShipTwo has completed since 2010, first test flights and to transport passengers commercially from 2014 to suborbital space as planned.

Skylon (spacecraft)
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