Star Raker! - The Giant Insane Mach 7.2 Space Plane

on a cold february morning in the 2000s the californian skies have been cleared for a very special flight a giant machine with 12 supersonic turbo jets rolls out onto the desert runway the crew double check its urgent cargo is secure components for a 70 000 ton solar power plant destined to skim the atmosphere in low orbit above the earth for this colossal monster this mission would be the first of many flights this year one of 25 years of operations planned to build a ring of 60 orbital power stations to solve the us energy crisis at 8 36 president al gore has approved the flight and the tower has authorized takeoff the captain gives the command go with throttle up and the rockwell international star raker takes to the sky but this alternative history never happened breaking the sound barrier at mach 6 this 12 engine turbo turbojet's spaceplane would have ushered in a new age of space exploration and made even the most impressive spacex rocket obsolete but the legendary star plane would never be built and today it's possessor the space shuttle is no more what was the star raker how did it fly and why did america decide to never build it grab your oxygen and let's jump into low earth orbit [Music] in the 1970s america faced increasingly worse energy shortages and when the demand grows greater than the immediate supply the circuits break tension passengers right 307 is canceled until further notice its main source of petroleum had ground to a halt thanks to international crisis in iran and the middle east and nuclear had been ruled out after two high-profile nuclear meltdowns there's no shortage i don't believe there's a shortage by 1977 the threat of running out of energy had gripped the nation with president carter declaring then we must start now to develop the new unconventional sources of energy that we will rely on in the next century and boy would they come up with something that would tick the unconventional box nasa pitched a series of 60 gigantic geosynchronous satellites orbiting the planet beaming down refined energy for the world's use it was called the satellite power system and would be comprised of a global network of giant photovoltaic arrays and boy they were huge with two long solar panel structures five kilometers long by four kilometers wide or 3.1 miles by 2.4 miles for a total of 11.73 kilometers long or 7.2 miles in imperial units weighing the small amount of 10.42 million kilograms or 22.97 million pounds now you're thinking nick that doesn't make any sense how can we imagine the size of these satellites in a more realistic way well here's an excellent graphic from scott from aerospace projects review that shows off the solar power satellite over new york it's bigger than manhattan and easily crushes part of the outer burrows as well and you can see more detail about this on his website down below which as i always do i strongly recommend by being in orbit whether dust and day and night cycles would be eliminated allowing the power station to produce energy 24 7. the electricity generated would be sent down via microwaves to a thin receiving mesh that could be built pretty much anywhere even over oceans this project would take 30 years to realize all 60 units but it would spawn an incredibly lucrative industry planetside in the united states the sps is an attractive challenging and worthy project which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address physicist robert g john wrote in support of the project but the problem was how would nasa even get all of the materials personnel solar panels and more into orbit to build these power stations so far they had only launched the 77 metric ton or 85 us ton skylab into low earth orbit using a huge saturn v rockets left over from the earlier apollo moon missions the new solar power plants weighed a hundred times more than even the modern international space station that we have orbiting us today and rockets wouldn't cut it it would need over a thousand saturn v launchers to even get one sps into orbit let alone 60. so nasa turned to the market for the solution and the first to reply was boeing [Music] boeing had a variety of different ideas but the key one that they provided was called the space freighter the space freighter was boeing's pitch to solve the earth to orbit problem of the sbs program as its name may infer it was actually a rocket system space plane that would act like a lorry for space station components for assembly in orbit and it would work like this the rocket would be comprised of two stages the booster and the orbiter it would sit on the launch pad and launch to the east once the propellant was expended in its main fuel tank it would jettison the booster and the second stage aptly named the orbiter would continue to orbit which i think is really self-explanatory once the orbiter had reached its destination it would rendezvous with the station scaffold dock and unload its materials each mission would have a payload of 424 000 kilograms or 934 thousand pounds the space freighter would then use the remaining fuel to de-orbit and return to earth landing via a runway much like the shuttle the booster section that it separated earlier would have also done the same using on-board jet engines to become more plane-like and land on a very wide runway approximately 200 miles away from the launch pad when the booster and the orbiter were reunited back at the launch site they would have been reassembled and new cargo loaded for another flight and just pausing this for a second because this back at the launch site is a detail that many sources kind of glossed over but it's actually far more complex you see the booster would land approximately 200 miles down range of the launch site this would mean that if it took off from cape canaveral in florida it would actually land in the sea thus engineers decided that this space freighter would need to leave from either nevada or arizona landing in a successive state to the west such as new mexico or texas then the booster would be put on a train and sent back to the launch site so not only would the rocket need to be built but a new airport 200 miles down range and a railway line connecting them both making the project very expensive for the goal of two spss built per year the system would require a stunning 240 space launches a year or a turn around every 36 hours with a fleet of 94 space freighters they expected to have each one flying every five days reaching the retirement milestone quickly in only four years this was actually only one of many other sps launch vehicles proposed in the era and it deserves its own video in greater detail so give this video a like if you would like to see more other wacky plans that were proposed just like this one speaking of the plans commenting on them later in 1981 nasa made the very interesting observation the magnitude and sustained nature of this advanced space transportation program concept requires long-term routine operations somewhat analogous to commercial airline and air freight operations and it's those last words that are very telling what if this system really did have more in common with air freight operations than rockets like the star raker overlooking the ideas in the late 70s for a space freighter rockwell international realized there were several areas that could be substantially improved they came up with this the air breather rocket powered horizontal takeoff tri-delta flying wing single stage to orbit transportation system or dubbed today is the rockwell international star raker it was a space plane that was 103 meters long with a wingspan of 93 meters and would have carried a maximum of 89.2 metric tons of cargo into low earth orbit around 300 nautical miles above the equator or 555 kilometers overall this would have allowed firms to get payloads into orbit for a cost of around 15 dollars per pound which is 55 dollars per pound today in metric this is 25 us dollars per kilogram for comparison's sake elon musk with the spacex rockets costs around about two thousand seven hundred and twenty dollars per kilogram to put something into orbit so clearly this dream of low cost orbit delivery is totally ridiculous and would be a total game changer thanks to this vast tri-delta wing blended design there was a great deal of eternal volume not only for cargo but fuel as well the cargo deck was modeled after the c-5 galaxy and it was 20 feet high and 20 feet wide in a square shape and 141 feet long that's 6x6 and 42.9 meters for those living outside the usa the craft would have two engine systems the first was a conventional jet engine specifically a hydrogen fueled high bypass supersonic turbofan air turbo exchanger ramjet engine each with and forty thousand pounds of thrust the space plane also had three hydrogen-fueled rocket engines each with 1.06 million pounds of thrust and an isp of 455 seconds enough to get it into that high orbit and this is how it would all come together the star raker would start its mission with a conventional runway takeoff with conventional turbofan power its ram jets would also act as supercharged alpha burners to help it get into the air it would then jettison its landing gear that would land softly via parachutes and be used for the next mission it would then head to the equator from florida flying much like a normal plane this would burn up fuel and mean less for the trip into orbit but rockwell international countered that future versions would have in-flight refueling and this is where it gets crazy the aircraft would then rise to an altitude of 45 000 feet before diving directly down to 37 000 feet to build up speed and break the sound barrier then it would angle upwards to reach 95 000 feet or 29 kilometers before activating its rocket engines hitting speeds up to mach 7.2 it would then shut down the air breather engines while closing air breather inlet ramps once it reached the high enough orbit point it would then shut down rocket engines and execute a ho-man transfer to 556 kilometers above the earth or that sweet 300 nautical mile orbit with the aircraft or should i say spacecraft now in orbit it would open its nose to release the payload directly or if meeting the vast space station scaffold building the solar power plant dock it would have a system of rails on board that could quickly mate with the rails of the space station and funnel out cargo the nose that would actually swing out would have a two level crew compartment with a flight deck and seating on the upper level than electronics life support and emergency supplies on the lower deck there wasn't really any sleeping quarters as the missions were not expected to take very long as opposed to the boeing space freighter that would be over 24 hours there was also an airlock on the back of the section to allow access to the cargo bay either in flight or once it got up to space leaving orbit would be fairly typical of the same flight path of the shuttle that we have today the star raker would perform a low gamma flight path angle and high alpha angle of attack re-entry de-acceleration profile at approximately mach 6. then reduce alpha angle of attack to appropriate angle for maximum lift drag ratio for a high-speed glide and cross-range maneuvers to subsonic velocity which is about what a plane flies out at mach 0.85 it would then open its inlets and start some of the air breather engines and then perform a powered flight to a landing field land on a runway and taxi to the ramp the star raker would have enough fuel for a 300 nautical mile subsonic cruise or 555 kilometers as well as two landing attempts just in case the first one wasn't successful in terms of the sps program we outlined before they would need 1 100 flights each year to support the sps program or about one launch of the star raker every 8 hours from a fleet of 30 aircraft which is pretty insane the star raker had several advantages over the space freighter including the ability to land at any airport that could hold a 747 or c5 galaxy it only needed a runway of about eight thousand to fourteen thousand feet long two thousand four hundred and forty meters to four thousand two hundred and seventy meters for landing and take off respectively this would mean that it could pick up cargo by itself at some regional airport before heading to the space launch site no special intermodal transport needed industry experts expressed that the star raker represents the direct thrust of future aerospace development it is necessary that the essential technologies pre-pursued actively yet the world would never see further development why was this miracle machine never built [Music] in the end the star raker never really came close to development it was a change in political power in the united states to the reagan administration and the price of oil plummeting that made this expensive energy concept the ring of sps satellites seem very foolish and very expensive without a need for a launch craft the whole concept unraveled work did continue on other projects at rockwell international but that's a video for another day there also were some issues with the star raker design for one it could carry less than other sps launch systems and relied on future materials technology that wasn't really possible back then as cool as a single stage to orbit plane is even today there hasn't been a successful space plane design with us only coming close with rockets launched from flying aircraft so it's ambiguous if even the concept itself would work another flaw with the star wrecker design was the fuel the star raker was supposed to be powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen two things you don't really find lying around at many airports if any across the united states tons of infrastructure would need to be built to support the refueling of these giant space planes but engineers proposed that the creation of this lucrative industry would come with its own supportive infrastructure build it and they will come so to speak and in addition as of an insult to injury the actual space plane had a geometrically complex multi-cell fuel tank a series of conventional cylinders that were put together side by side to make a boxy fuel tank they were held together by a web of internal tension to keep them together whilst in flight this concept would have meant greater volume and be incredibly lightweight but such a fuel tank had never been built and there were many questions if it was even possible to design such a thing flash forward to the year 2021 and we can't help but think that such a mission for an alternative fuel source would have been very useful in the age of global warming and the climate emergency if we had near infinite power in orbit around the planet it would have been incredible for transporting energy around the world and made fossil fuels obsolete overnight it is possible that america would have shared the sbs power network with its allies around the world if not the rest of the world to prevent further climate calamities although perhaps that idea is a little bit utopian and it's more than likely they would have just turned the satellites into some sort of orbital microwave cannon the rockwell international star raker would have been the ideal craft for many other missions and a fleet of them being available for various tasks at a moment's notice is eye-watering for this space fan imagine the other orbital stations we could have built the use for deep space mining or even a passenger version to take us to the stars for all the never built concepts that i have covered on this channel this one hurts the most and makes me the saddest of them all thanks so much for watching today's video on the star raker it was an incredible invention and something that we can all agree should have been built again as i mentioned there was plenty more plans for various other sps launches from many other developers and two more from rockwell international as well i could have made an hour-long documentary on the whole program so leave a like down below if you think i should go into way more detail on these other programs and release something that will take me six months to make a very special thank you again from scott from aerospace projects review who helped with the final points of detail with this concept while it's been widely published there was plenty of missing pages from the star wrecker concept an aerospace project's review provided the nitty-gritty detail that we love so much so definitely click on their link down below and go check them out lastly a very special thank you to my patreons that have supported this channel so far and have been incredible for everything from ideas to helping me realise my dream thank you so much for watching

Channel: Found And Explained

Views: 1,291,976

Keywords: space, star raker, space plane, space shuttle, single stage to orbit, us air force, space shuttle take off, space x, future space, space history, space documentry, virgin, blue origin, star raker space plane, rockwell international, never built, secret project, aerospace project, luxury, luxury travel, mach, sound barrier, rockets, plane rocket, rocket plane, missile plane, solar power, space station, future space station, saturn v, saturn 6

Id: JsS0Gn0IN2I

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021