United Earthlings

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The following is a briefing on the SSTO currently in development by the Belkaland Space Administration & the Panther Aero corporation.



Project Pegasus

Project Pegasus came about as a requirement from the Belkaland Space Administration (BSA) for a next-gen replacement for the reliable, yet aging Space Shuttle acquired from the Osean Federation. The companies that answered the call were the Osean companies Venom Advanced Aerospace & SOB Aircraft; a Verusean company called Jian Dao Xiao Industries; and 3 Belkalandian companies called Eagle Industries, Grunder Industries, & Panther Aero.

Of the six companies that responded to the called, only 2 were even remotely acceptable to BSA, the design by Venom Advanced Aerospace, the Air-launched D-30 & M-29 Mothership and the Panther Aero design only known as the PA.101. After an evaluation of both designs, the D-30 & M-29 was deemed the more risky of the 2 designs as the D-30 used the M-29 as the launch pad; and the PA.101 was deemed the more expensive as the M-29 was at the time being designed as a supersonic bomber for Belkaland’s ally, The Confederacy of Birkaine.

After some deliberation by ESA, Venom, & Panther, it was decided that the PA.101 would be selected due to the preference of safety over expense. In the end, it didn’t matter as Birkaine canceled the M-29 Bomber as it had quickly begun to go over budget and the cost of the D-30/M-29 system skyrocketed.

PA.101


5-View image of the PA.101

Design:

Using a crank arrow wing design, the PA.101 has all the aerodynamics of the Space Shuttle which uses the similar Double-Delta wing. This was well liked as it would lessen the impact of pilot training as they could use the same strategies of re-entry as the Shuttle; all that would be different was the initial pre-re-entry checks & maneuvers. The reason for the slight change would be due to the advanced alloys used to form the heat shield & hull.

Initial designs had used an in-development alloy made from Titanium, Carbon, & Tungsten. This new alloy, being developed by Dinsmark University, has shown to possess nearly all of highly wanted qualities of the base elements that made up the alloy; heat resistant, light weight, & durable. The only thing that it didn’t have was malleability due to the ultra-high melting temperature, but with further development of newer forges, it would be possible to heat the alloy enough to form the wanted piece. Another problem that has recently encountered is the difficulty of mass-producing the alloy.

So far, there has only been enough of the alloy made to build a 1/50th scale unmanned model for researching. Further development of the alloy manufacturing is required; estimates have shown it’ll take 7 to10 years for advancements to reach the needed level to truly mass-produce the alloy. Due to the large amount of time it would take, Panther Aero revised their design slightly to use a system similar to the Space Shuttle’s tile system. However, to prevent a repeat of the tragedy of the first production Space Shuttle, Panther designer Bagera T. Devlin devised a backup system in case of tile breach. Under the tiles is a 1 inch layer of high grade titanium with a further 2 inches in likely rupture areas such as the leading wing edge & wheel access doors. However, this redesigned heat shield increased the overall weight of the PA.101 by nearly 7%, mainly due to the secondary titanium heat shield.

As with any spacecraft like the PA.101, one of the most important sections is the cargo bay. Because of cheaper costs of unmanned heavy-lift rockets, the PA.101 cargo bay is roughly half the size of the Space Shuttle’s. Instead, the PA.101 uses the added space from the smaller bay for added stores for long term missions, such as moon trips and possibly even a Mars mission in the future.


Engines:


Model of the Prototype SABRE Combined Cycle Engine

At the heart of the PA.101 are its propulsion units, the SABRE Combined Cycle Engine and magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. The most prominent of them are the 4 SABRE Combined Cycle Engines mounted in pairs on each side of the PA.101. These engines are the key to the PA.101’s SSTO abilities. SABRE (Synergic Air Breathing Engine) is a hypersonic hydrogen-fueled air breathing combined cycle rocket engine/turbojet engine/ramjet engine designed for propelling craft into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The engines are designed to operate much like a conventional jet engine at up to around Mach 5.5, 26 km altitude, and then close the air inlet and operate as a highly efficient rocket to orbital speed.

Operating a turbojet engine at up to Mach 5.5 is difficult. Previous engines proposed by other designers have been good jet engines but poor rockets. This engine design has shown to be a good rocket engine, as well as being an excellent jet engine at all speeds. The problem with operating at Mach 5.5 has been that the air coming into the engine heats up as it is compressed into the engine, which can cause the engine to overheat and eventually melt. Attempts to avoid these issues typically make the engine much heavier (scramjets/ramjets) or greatly reduce the thrust (conventional turbojets/ramjets). In either case the end result is an engine that has a poor thrust to weight ratio at high speeds, and so the installed engine is too heavy to assist much in reaching orbit.

The SABRE engine design avoids this by using some of the liquid hydrogen fuel to cool the air right at the inlet. The air is then burnt much like in a conventional jet. Because the air is cool at all speeds, the jet can be built of light alloys and the weight is roughly halved. Additionally, more fuel can be burnt at high speed. Beyond Mach 5.5, the air would still end up unusably hot, so the air inlet closes and the engine instead turns to burning the hydrogen with onboard liquid oxygen as in a normal rocket.

Because the engine uses the atmosphere as reaction mass at low altitude, it has a high specific impulse, and burn about one fifth of the propellant that would have been required by a conventional rocket. Therefore, it is able to take off with much less total propellant than conventional systems. This, in turn, means that it doesn't need as much lift or thrust, which permits smaller engines, and allows conventional wings to be used. While in the atmosphere, using wings to counteract gravity drag is more fuel-efficient than simply expelling propellant (as in a rocket), again reducing the total amount of propellant needed.

The second engine on the PA.101 is a single Magnetoplasmadynamic thruster which is located in the tail. The Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster (MPDT) is a form of electric propulsion (a subdivision of spacecraft propulsion) which uses the Lorentz force (a force resulting from the interaction between a magnetic field and an electric current) to generate thrust. It is sometimes referred to as Lorentz Force Accelerator (LFA) or MPD arcjet.

Generally, a gaseous fuel is ionized and fed into an acceleration chamber, where the magnetic and electrical fields are created using a power source. The particles are then propelled by the Lorentz force resulting from the interaction between the current flowing through the plasma and the magnetic field (which is either externally applied, or induced by the current) out through the exhaust chamber. Unlike chemical propulsion, there is no combustion of fuel. As with other electric propulsion variations, both specific impulse and thrust increase with power input, while thrust per watt drops.

However, the MPDT has 2 problems. One problem is that power requirements of the order of hundreds of kilowatts are required for optimum performance. Current interplanetary spacecraft power systems (such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs)) and solar arrays are incapable of producing that much power. So until the creation of a powerful enough powerplant is developed, any Mars missions for the PA.101 are out of the question. The other problem with the MPDT is that MPD technology in general has been plagued by the degradation of cathodes due to evaporation driven by high current densities (in excess of 100 amps/cm^2). The use of lithium and barium propellant mixtures and multi-channel hollow cathodes had been shown in the laboratory to be a promising solution for the cathode erosion problem. But after further research, the use of multi-channel hollow cathodes has shown to seriously degrade the specific impulse of the engine. Further development is required to correct this.

The PA.101 would use this engine for long term missions such as Moon trips and given enough fuel, Mars missions. But until the MPDT is perfected, the PA.101 is limited to orbital flights and the occasional 2 week-long Moon trip.




As you can see, the PA.101 is almost ready for a full scale protoype. However, we require help in testing & further development of the PA.101 as Belkaland has never attempted to test something like this on her own.

In return for you help, Belkaland will grant UEMS full-production & sale rights of the final PA.101 production model. However, we do request that 15-20% of the profit from PA.101s be transfered to Belkaland so that we can pay Panther Aero for their design & help fill the Regional coffers until Hypersphere Ltd. can bounce back.

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