Single-stage-to-orbit

A single-stage to orbit (or SSTO) vehicle could reach orbital velocity without using multiple stages. There are various approaches to SSTO, including pure rockets that are launched vertically, and airbreathing scramjet-powered vehicles that are launched and land horizontally like an airliner. The term usually refers to a reusable single stage.

For rocket-powered SSTO, the main challenge is making the vehicle light enough to carry sufficient propellant to achieve orbit, plus a meaningful payload weight.

For airbreathing SSTO, the main challenge is system complexity and associated R&D costs, material science, and construction techniques necessary for surviving sustained hypersonic flight within the atmosphere.

Whether rocket-powered or airbreathing, a reusable vehicle must be rugged enough to survive multiple round trips into space without adding excessive weight or maintenance.

No SSTO launch vehicles have ever been constructed. Current orbital launches are either performed by multi-stage fully expendable rockets, or by the Space Shuttle which is multi-stage and partially reusable. Several research spacecraft have been designed and partially or completely constructed, including the DC-X, the X-33, and the Roton SSTO. However none of them have come close to achieving orbit.

Why SSTO?

The goal of fully reusable SSTO vehicles is lower operating costs, improved safety, and better reliability than current launch vehicles. Ultimately the goal is airliner-like operations.

Problems with the multistage approach drive the design path toward SSTO.

Multistage rockets are used because as propellant is consumed, more and more of the vehicle constitutes dead weight. For example, the maximum thrust is needed at takeoff when the vehicle is heavy, and later on the engine must be throttled back to avoid damaging the vehicle. Since engine weight is proportional to thrust, this means that a smaller/lighter engine generating less thrust is more beneficial as the vehicle approaches orbital speed. In addition a single stage rocket must carry large empty tanks to orbit, which reduces payload capacity.

The Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation shows this dead weight will prevent reaching orbit unless the ratio of propellant to structural mass (called mass ratio) is very high -- between 10 and 25 to 1 (i.e. 24 parts propellant weight to 1 part structural weight). By contrast, an airliner has a mass ratio of about 2 to 1 (1 part fuel to 1 part structural weight).

It is extremely difficult to design a structure which is strong, safe, very light, and economical to build. Designers often liken the task to designing and building an egg shell.

This problem originally seemed insuperable, and drove all early designers to multistage rockets, whereby sections of the rocket structure were discarded as the propellant in that section was consumed.

However expendable multistage rockets entail discarding carefully engineered and highly costly manufactured structure and engines. Therefore if the stages could be reused, this would permit much cheaper launch, since the parts costs would be amortised over many flights.

One problem with multistage reusable rockets is the difficulty of reusing even the first stage, and the development cost of such a large device. Analysis shows the optimum staging velocity (the speed at which the first stage is dropped) is very high -- possibly 12,000 feet per second (3657 meters per second). This in turn means after separation, the large first stage is at high altitude and headed downrange very fast, which makes it difficult to turn around and get back to the launch point. In addition, the stage has to be able to reenter without damage from a speed as high as Mach ~10.

Also the reusable first stage would be very large, nearly the size of a Saturn V to lift an orbiter the size of the current shuttle. Because development cost of aerospace vehicles is related to weight, it would be extremely expensive to develop.

Some approaches envisioned parachutes to gently lower a reusable first stage. However for most US launches the trajectory is over the Atlantic ocean, and complex liquid fueled stages are usually damaged by a salt water landing.

All these complication drove designers to using a single reusable stage. It avoids discarding expensive engines, plus it avoids the problems of retrieving the large first stage, also the increased development cost of two separate vehicles.

If an SSTO vehicle were combined with reliable systems and lower maintenance design of a more automated nature, it could greatly reduce operational costs.

The SSTO problem

An SSTO vehicle has one major problem - it needs to lift its entire structure into orbit. To reach orbit with a useful payload, the rocket requires careful and extensive engineering to save weight. This is much harder to design and engineer. A staged rocket greatly reduces the total mass that flies all the way into space; the rocket is continually shedding fuel tanks and engines that are now dead weight.

Single stage rockets were once thought to be beyond reach, but advances in materials technology and construction techniques have shown them to be possible. For example, calculations show that the Titan II first stage, launched on its own, would have a 25 to 1 ratio of fuel to vehicle hardware. It possesses a sufficiently efficient engine to achieve orbit, but without carrying much payload.

It is now clear an SSTO vehicle is achievable, but it is less clear if a reusable SSTO with an economic payload can be built for a feasible cost.

Dense versus hydrogen fuels

It might seem entirely obvious that hydrogen would be the fuel of choice for SSTO vehicles. When burned with oxygen, hydrogen gives the highest specific impulse of any commonly used fuel; around 450 seconds, compared with up to 350 seconds for kerosene.

However, hydrogen suffers from some notable disadvantages: -

It is deeply cryogenic - it must be stored at very low temperatures and thus needs heavy insulation.
It escapes very easily from the smallest gap,
Having a wide combustible range, it can be easily ignited and burns with a dangerously invisible flame.
It tends to condense air which in turn is highly oxidizing to many common and flammable materials.
A large coefficient of expansion for even small heat leaks.

All of these issues can be dealt with, but usually with extra manpower and hence higher cost. Furthermore, the density of liquid hydrogen is much lower than other fuels, about 1/7 of the density of kerosene.

This means that, while tanks for kerosene can fairly easily be 1% of the weight of their contents, hydrogen tanks struggle to weigh even 10% of their contents. This is due partly to the low density, but is also a result of the additional insulation that is required to minimize boiloff (a problem which does not occur with kerosene and many other fuels). The low density of hydrogen further impacts the design of the rest of the vehicle - pumps and pipework need to be much larger in order to pump the fuel to the engine. The end result is that the thrust/weight ratio of hydrogen fueled engines is 30-50% lower than comparable engines using denser fuels.

This inefficiency indirectly affects gravity losses as well; the vehicle has to hold itself up on rocket power until it reaches orbit. The lower thrust of the hydrogen engines means that the vehicle must ascend more steeply, and so less thrust acts horizontally. Less horizontal thrust results in taking longer to reach orbit, and gravity losses are increased by at least 300 meters per second. While not appearing large, the mass ratio to delta-v curve is very steep to reach orbit in a single stage, and this makes a 10% difference to the mass ratio on top of the tankage and pump savings.

The overall effect is that there is surprisingly little difference in overall performance between SSTOs that use hydrogen and those that use denser fuels, except that hydrogen vehicles may be rather more expensive to develop and buy. Careful studies[1] have shown that some dense fuels (for example liquid propane and LOX-- liquid oxygen) exceed the performance of hydrogen fuel when used in an SSTO launch vehicle by 10% for the same dry weight.

One engine for all altitudes

Some SSTO vehicles use the same engine for all altitudes, which is a problem for traditional engines with a bell shaped nozzle. Dependent on the atmospheric pressure, different bell shapes are optimal. Engines operating in the lower atmosphere have narrower bells than those designed to work in vacuum. Shape of the bell not optimized for the height makes the engine less efficient.

One possible solution would be to use an aerospike engine, which can be effective in a wide range of ambient pressures. In fact, a linear aerospike engine was used in X-33 design.

Other solutions involve using multiple engines and other altitude adapting designs such as double mu bells or extensible bell sections.

Comparison with the Shuttle

The high cost per launch of the Space Shuttle (a vehicle sold to America's Congress as a way to reduce launch costs), sparked interest throughout the 1980s in designing a cheaper successor vehicle. Several official design studies were done, but most were basically smaller versions of the existing Shuttle concept.

Most cost analysis studies of the Space Shuttle have shown that manpower is by far the single greatest expense. The original idea was to have a maintenance schedule comparable to that of a commercial airliner, with a two-week turnaround. The final vehicle required massive amounts of maintenance after every launch. Using the most technically advanced engines and materials backfired in a number of ways, most notably resulting in equipment requiring constant maintenance.

This resulted in a vehicle that requires great maintenance after every mission. The engines are removed and inspected, and prior to the new "block II" main engines, the turbopumps were removed, disassembled and rebuilt. While space shuttle Atlantis was refurbished and relaunched in 53 days between missions STS-51-J and STS-61-B, generally months are required to repair an orbiter for a new mission. Given that there are 25,000 people working on Shuttle operations, the payroll alone is the Shuttle's single biggest operating cost.

Many in the aerospace community concluded that an entirely self-contained and reusable vehicle would solve these problems. The idea behind such a vehicle is to reduce the processing requirements from those of the Shuttle.

Examples

Early versions of the Atlas rocket can be considered to be expendable SSTOs by some definitions. It is a "stage and a half" rocket, jettisoning two of its three engines during ascent but retaining its fuel tanks and other structural elements. However, by modern standards the engines ran at low pressure and thus not particularly high specific impulse and were not especially lightweight; using engines operating with a higher specific impulse would have obviated the need to drop engines in the first place.

The first stage of the Titan II had the mass ratio required for single stage to orbit capability with a small payload. A rocket stage is not a complete launch vehicle but this demonstrates that an expendable SSTO was probably achievable with 1962 technology.

The Apollo Lunar Module was a true SSTO vehicle, albeit on the moon. It achieved lunar orbit using a single stage.

A detailed study into SSTO vehicles was prepared by Chrysler Corporation's Space Division in 1970-1971 under NASA contract NAS8-26341. Their proposal was an enormous vehicle with more than 50,000 kg of payload, utilizing jet engines for (vertical) landing. While the technical problems seemed to be solvable, NASA preferred a winged design that led to the Shuttle as we know it today.

The unmanned DC-X technology demonstrator, originally developed by McDonnell Douglas for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program office was an attempt to build a vehicle that could lead to a SSTO vehicle. The 1/3 size test craft was operated and maintained by a tiny crew of three people based out of a trailer, and the craft was once relaunched less than 24 hours after landing. Although the test program was not without mishap (including a minor explosion), the DC-X demonstrated that the maintenance aspects of the concept were sound. That project was cancelled when it crashed on the first flight after transferring management from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization to NASA.

There are, a number of efforts around the world to study SSTO, and several have recently progressed to active funding. These include the Japanese Kankoh-maru project and the ESA work on projects like Skylon.

Alternative approaches to cheap spaceflight

Many studies have shown that regardless of selected technology, the most effective cost reduction technique is economies of scale. Merely launching a large total quantity reduces the manufacturing costs of the equipment, similar to how mass-producing an automobile reduces costs per vehicle.

Using this concept, some aerospace analysts believe the way to lower launch costs is the exact opposite of SSTO. Whereas reusable SSTOs would reduce per launch costs by making a reusable high-tech vehicle that launches frequently with low maintenance, the "mass production" approach views the technical advances as a source of the cost problem in the first place. By simply building and launching large quantities of rockets, and hence launching a large volume of payload, costs can be brought down.

A related idea is to simply obtain economies of scale from building simple, massive, multi-stage rockets using cheap off-the-shelf parts. The vehicles would be dumped into the ocean after use. This is known as the "big dumb booster" approach.

This is somewhat similar to the approach some previous systems have taken, using simple engine systems with "low-tech" fuels, as the Russian and Chinese space programs still do. Although these nations' launchers are not as cheap as they could be, they are significantly cheaper than their western counterparts.

External links

A Single-Stage-to-Orbit Thought Experiment
Why are launch costs so high?, an analysis of space launch costs, with a section critiquing SSTO