SSTO Comments

Note that airplanes are much more heavily used than helicopters,
suggesting that for many applications HTOL win. For space, all vehicles
are vertical take-off and all, except shuttle, are vertical landing --
although the vertical landers are not reusable. The shuttle solves the
fuel problem by not carrying much in the orbiter.

On Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 02:06 AM, Ryan Healey wrote:

> This means that right from
> the start the mass at take-off of the HTOL craft will be more then the
> VTOL
> craft with the same fuel mass. Whether HTOL can compensate for that
> with the
> wings remains to be seen (when someone builds them) but does seem to be
> unlikely.
>

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html