Various US Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV) Projects

Archibald said:
The thread title is hopeless... "Reusable Launch Vehicle concepts" would be better.

Space Shuttle is strictly ...
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That brings to mind a thing about this English language, and language generally, words move, they change spellings, shift meanings, sometimes even reverse meanings. This English language has a many centuries history of specific terms becoming generalized.
For instance, the words meat, bread, fruit, have each had a term of being employed to mean food generally.

Space Shuttle, space shuttle, is now living that evolution.

Space shuttle is no longer strictly The Space Shuttle.
English language users are adopting it as the general term for a concept.
The language will do what its users do with it and there is no stopping such change, such evolution.

Related reading:
The books Words on the Move, and, Word on the Street, by the linguist John McWhorter.
The books discuss this phenomenon and others at length with many examples.
I believe comment is also made within them that while such change is happening in real time, some people will express their protests regarding said change via the certain irony of employing words which went through their own evolutions in prior decades or centuries.
 
Or maybe it is just a case of "Space Shuttle" vs "space shuttle". The second one however is rarely used. For example, if you browse "reusable rockets" on Google Scholar, the nomenclature is
- Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV)
- Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO)
- Two Stage To Orbit (TSTO).

I think the media (as usual) is at the root of the confusion... because of the X-37. Admittedly, the X-37 has a "Shuttle orbiter shape". So many medias are calling it "the X-37 shuttle."
DreamChaser is also a victim of that siliness. Because its manned variant (on the backburner) was the one CCDEV vehicle that was winged - just like the Shuttle: unlike Dragon 2 or Starliner.

But outside Dreamchaser and X-37, nobody call RLV or SSTO "space shuttles". It's ridiculous.

And I'm know what I'm talking about: I've browsed and downloaded RLV stuff (Pdf and links) since 2002 and I have a few thousands documents.
 
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Archibald said:
Icthink the media (as usual) is at the root of the confusion... because of the X-37. Admittedly, the X-37 has a "Shuttle orbiter shape". So many medias are calling it "the X-37 shuttle."
DreamChaser is also a victim of that siliness. Because its manned variant (on the backburner) was the one CCDEV vehicle that was winged - just like the Shuttle: unlike Dragon 2 or Starliner.

But outside Dreamchaser and X-37, nobody call RLV or SSTO "space shuttles". It's ridiculous.
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Exactly. Dreamchaser and X-37 are just winged spacecraft. The Space Shuttle was a first and foremost a launch vehicle. And it had a reusable upperstage/fairing that could carry crew and return the main engines.
Nobody called DynaSoar a space shuttle.
 
Archibald said:
Or maybe it is just a case of "Space Shuttle" vs "space shuttle". The second one however is rarely used. For example, if you browse "reusable rockets" on Google Scholar, the nomenclature is
- Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV)
- Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO)
- Two Stage To Orbit (TSTO).
Click to expand...
Strictly speaking, both SSTO and TSTO can either be reusable or expendable.
 
publiusr said:
When I think of RLVs, I usually think of concepts from the 1990s.

Falcon 9 is a true RLV…yet I don’t think I have heard it called an RLV in popular literature…just “reusable.”
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Because the second stage is not reusable.
 

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Some studies from a 1971 Lockheed report.
 

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FYI, another new stack of pictures showing the early development of Convair Space Shuttle were uploaded at the SDASM Flickr archive today. :cool:
Dear members and mods, please let me know, if this topic is the right one, or move this post to a more suitable topic.
 
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fightingirish said:
FYI, another new stack of pictures showing the early development of Convair Space Shuttle were uploaded at the SDASM Flickr archive today. :cool:
Dear members and mods, please let me know, if this topic is the right one, or move this post to a more suitable topic.
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It's crazy to imagine so many of these pieces of art being in the same room at the same time, but of course they were. I'd love to try to bring them (and others) back together as an exhibit or something.
 

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Information from a 1971 MDC report on a Shuttle and Booster design.
Booster details:
 

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Follow-up to above post, this one is for the Shuttle design.
 

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