DARPA's RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) programme

Another one for the "project cancelled" bin - the Mach 4 aircraft Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites was designing for Space Launch under DARPA's RASCAL (Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch) programme. The aircraft was called the MIPCC Powered Vehicle (MPV) because the four F100 engines were to be modified with "mass injection pre-compressor cooling", or MIPCC. This injected water and/or liquid oxygen into the inlet duct to cool the compressor and add massflow, fooling the engine into thinking it was flying at lower altitude in thicker air and maintaining its thrust to higher altitude and Mach number. This was intended to allow the MPV to zoom-climb out of the atmosphere, deploy a rocket-powered upper stage and satellite, and fire its reaction-control motors to turn round and re-enter.

MIPPC was tested on the ground, and worked, but RASCAL proved too "DARPA hard". Space Launch is still trying to get the concept off the ground using a modified F-4 (http://www.spacelaunch.com/products.asp)

Wow,
Thanks for the update on RASCAL CammNut. I was wondering what happened to that program. I had no idea the design had changed so much from the version originally shown in Aviation Week.

http://www.responsivespace.com/Papers/RS2%5CSESSION%20PAPERS%5CSESSION%208%5CLOPATA%5C8004P.pdf

Here's an AIAA paper on RASCAL

And GA Tech's spin on the matter:
http://www.ssdl.gatech.edu/Papers/Masters/YoungMasters.pdf


Moonbat

An interesting paper on RASCAL fromNATO's website:

http://ftp.rta.nato.int/public/PubFullText/RTO/EN/RTO-EN-AVT-116/EN-AVT-116-02-APP-02.pdf

Hi,

http://archive.aviationweek.com/image/spread/20030922/25/2
http://archive.aviationweek.com/image/spread/20030922/26/2
http://archive.aviationweek.com/image/spread/20030922/27/2

This is RASCAL, which has a thread, here:

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,2561.msg123213.html

TomS said:

This is RASCAL, which has a thread, here:

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,2561.msg123213.html

Click to expand...

OK,we can merge the topics.

TomS said:

This is RASCAL, which has a thread, here:

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,2561.msg123213.html

Click to expand...

I wanted that to succeed so bad. Bet it could have shattered the higher altitude time-to-climb records.

merged

Me too, Sferrin. Me too. I wonder if there's still anymore research on MIPCC being done at all.