Peenemuende was already working on the A-4B and A-9/A-10 versions of their missiles before the war ended. Von Braun's concepts of the early 1950's imagined manned gliders with vast swept wings alighting back at launch base on Earth - and on Mars! The first designs, including the initial space shuttle competitors of the late 1960's, consisted of two stages, both winged, both recovered at base, refueled, and relaunched. By the 1970's some NASA designers claimed a single-stage-to-orbit winged launch vehicle was possible. This was certainly a good alternative the SSTO ballistic designs, which relied on rocket thrust to hover and make a safe landing. As the space shuttle demonstrated, if you can glide you can land without having to rely on any rocket engines functioning. The appealing simplicity of the concept has been offset by the technological risk in developing it. The problem with any single-stage-to-orbit concept is that if the empty weight of the final vehicle has been underestimated it will not be able to deliver any payload to orbit, or even reach orbit. Since weight growth of up to 20% is not unknown in aerospace projects, this is a very real threat which has made both NASA and private investors reluctant to invest the billions of dollars it would take to develop a full-scale flight vehicle. Nonetheless Lockheed was selected in 1996 to develop the X-33 technology demonstrator for just such a vehicle. At last report it was suffering weight growth problems...
VKS-R Russian winged orbital launch vehicle. Sled launched, delta winged, single-stage-to-orbit, LOx/LH2 launch vehicle. 290 metric ton and 550 metric ton versions considered. Studied in tradeoff studies leading to MAKS. Release conditions: Piggy-back, 290,000 kg, Mach 0.5, zero altitude. Effective velocity gain compared to vertical launch 100 m/s. The wheeled sled would get the vehicle up to a velocity where the wings could provide lift, allowing lower-thrust engines to be used than in a vertical-takeoff design. This saved weight, but velocity losses during lifting flight to orbit almost cancelled the advantage, resulting in the approach being unattractive in comparison to pure vertical-launch or air-launch designs.RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
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