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Thanks! Could you move my post to the appropriate topic?This is the Boeing Beta TSTO concept
Thanks! Could you move my post to the appropriate topic?This is the Boeing Beta TSTO concept
That brings to mind a thing about this English language, and language generally, words move, they change spellings, shift meanings, sometimes even reverse meanings. This English language has a many centuries history of specific terms becoming generalized.The thread title is hopeless... "Reusable Launch Vehicle concepts" would be better.
Space Shuttle is strictly ...
Exactly. Dreamchaser and X-37 are just winged spacecraft. The Space Shuttle was a first and foremost a launch vehicle. And it had a reusable upperstage/fairing that could carry crew and return the main engines.Icthink the media (as usual) is at the root of the confusion... because of the X-37. Admittedly, the X-37 has a "Shuttle orbiter shape". So many medias are calling it "the X-37 shuttle."
DreamChaser is also a victim of that siliness. Because its manned variant (on the backburner) was the one CCDEV vehicle that was winged - just like the Shuttle: unlike Dragon 2 or Starliner.
But outside Dreamchaser and X-37, nobody call RLV or SSTO "space shuttles". It's ridiculous.
Strictly speaking, both SSTO and TSTO can either be reusable or expendable.Or maybe it is just a case of "Space Shuttle" vs "space shuttle". The second one however is rarely used. For example, if you browse "reusable rockets" on Google Scholar, the nomenclature is
- Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV)
- Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO)
- Two Stage To Orbit (TSTO).
It's not a bug - it's a feature ...RLV concepts are a nightmare for a forum like this one, because there has been bazillions of very different concepts - two stage, all-rocket, airbreathing, exotic designs...
Because the second stage is not reusable.When I think of RLVs, I usually think of concepts from the 1990s.
Falcon 9 is a true RLV…yet I don’t think I have heard it called an RLV in popular literature…just “reusable.”
Study of Alternate Space Shuttle Concepts. Volume 2, Part 2: Concept Analysis and DefinitionSome studies from a 1971 Lockheed report.
The title of the article translates as "history of the space shuttle". Historical article.1978 ? a bit late to the party, all those pictures are Phase A Shuttle proposals, circa 1969.