Other
Scientific paper
Jun 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999stin...0005094o&link_type=abstract
Collected Works, Stanford Univ. Stanford, CA United States Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Other
Cost Effectiveness, Cost Reduction, Ignition, Launch Vehicles, Mars Exploration, Mars Missions, Single Stage To Orbit Vehicles, Aerospace Planes, Low Cost, Mars Surface, Payloads, Risk, Saturn 5 Launch Vehicles, Soviet Spacecraft, Throwing, Transfer Orbits
Scientific paper
In recent years, a lot of time and energy has been spent exploring possible mission scenarios for a human mission to Mars. NASA along with the privately funded Mars Society and a number of universities have come up with many options that could place people on the surface of Mars in a relatively short period of time at a relatively low cost. However, a common theme among all or at least most of these missions is that they require heavy lift vehicles such as the Russian Energia or the NASA proposed Magnum 100MT class vehicle to transport large payloads from the surface of Earth into a staging orbit about Earth. However, there is no current budget or any signs for a future budget to review the Russian Energia, the US made Saturn V, or to design and build a new heavy lift vehicle. However, there is a lot of interest and many companies looking into the possibility of "space planes". These vehicles will have the capability to place a payload into orbit without throwing any parts of the vehicle away. The concept of a space plane is basically that the plane is transported to a given altitude either by it's own power or on the back of another air worthy vehicle before the rocket engines are ignited. From this altitude, a Single Step to Orbit (SsTO) vehicle with a significant payload is possible. This report looks at the possibility of removing the requirement of a heavy lift vehicle by using the Stanford designed Single Step to Orbit.(SsTO) Launch Vehicle. The SsTO would eliminate the need for heavy lift vehicles and actually reduce the cost of the mission because of the very low costs involved with each SSTO launch. Although this scenario may add a small amount of risk assembling transfer vehicles in Earth orbit, it should add no additional risk to the crew.
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