Special thanks: Aerospaceprojectsreview.com Support Me: www.patreon.com/foundandexplained Discord to chat with me: https://discord.gg/WXb565P9nQ Website: www.foundandexplained.com
In the 1970s America faced increasingly worse energy shortages. It’s main source of petroleum had ground to a halt thanks to the international crisis in Iran and the Middle East, and nuclear had been ruled out after two high-profile nuclear meltdowns.
NASA pitched series of 60 gigantic geosynchronous platforms orbiting the planet, beaming down refined energy for the world's use. It was called the Solar Power System and would be comprised of a global network of gigantic photovoltaic arrays. And they were huge, with two long solar panel structures 5 km long by 4 km wide, or 3.1 miles by 2.4 miles - for a total of 11.73 kilometers long, 7.2 miles in imperial unites, and weighing the small amount of 10.42 million kilograms or 22.97 million pounds.
By being in orbit, weather, dust and day and night cycles would be eliminated, allowing 24/7 constant energy production. The electricity generated would be sent down via microwaves to a thin receiving mesh, that could be built anywhere, even over oceans.
"The SPS is an attractive, challenging, worthy project, which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address," physicist Robert G. Jahn wrote in support of the project.
But the problem was – how would NASA even get these into orbit. So far, they had only launched the 77-metric-ton (85-U.S.-ton) Skylab into low-earth orbit using a huge Saturn 5 rockets left over from the apollo moon mission. The new solar powerplants weighed 100 times more than even the modern international space station above us today, and rockets wouldn’t cut it - it would need over 1,000 saturn 5 launches to get even one SPS into orbit - let alone 60. So NASA turned to Boeing for the solution.
The Space Freighter was Boeing’s pitch to solve the earth to orbit problem of the SPS program. As its name may infer, it was a rocket system slash space plane that would act like a lorry for space station componets for assembly in orbit. Each mission would have had a payload of around 424,000 kilograms or 934,000 pounds.
For the goal of two SPSs a year, this system would have required a stunning 240 space launched a year – or a turn around every 36 hours. Wommentating on the plans later in 1981, NASA made a 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/airfreight operations,".
Rockwell came up with this, the Airbreather/Rocket-Powered, Horizontal Takeoff Tridelta Flying Wing, Single-Stage-To-Orbit Transportation System, or dubbed today as "the Rockwell International Starraker. It was a space plane that was 103 meters (310 feet) long with a wing span of about 93 meters (280 feet), and would have carried a maximum of 89.2 metric tons (196,600 lbs) 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 $15 per pound ($55 per pound in 2010 dollars). In metric, this is $25 USD per kilograph.
For comparisons sake, Elon musk with his space x rockets costs around $2,720 per kilogram into orbit. So clearly, this dream of low-cost orbit delivery is totally insane.
thanks to its vast tri-delta wing blendered design, there was a great deal of internal volume for not only cargo but fuel as well. The cargo deck was modeled after the C-5 galaxy, 20 feet high and 20 feet wide, in a square shape, and 141 feet long. Thats 6 meters by 6 meters, bt 42.9 meters for those living outside the US.
The craft would have two engine systems, the first was conventional jet engines, specifically hydrogen fueled high bypass supersonic turbofan/air-turbo-exchanger/ramjet engines, each with 140,000 lbf of thrust. Then the space plane also had three hydrogen fuelled rocket engines, each with 1.06 million lbf of thrust and an ISP of 455 seconds - enough to get it into a high orbit.
Here is where it gets crazy, the aircraft would then rise to an altittude 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 km before activating its rocket engines - hitting speeds up to Mach 7.2 .
In terms of the SPS program we outlined before, this would mean than 1100 flights would have been required each year
Yet- why was never built?
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 enegy concept, the SPS, seem foolish.
Without a need for a launch craft, the whole concept unraveled. Work did continue on other projects, but thats a video for another day.
Credit: Found And Explained
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 turbojets rolls out onto the desert runway.
The crew double check its urgent cargo is secure, components for a 70,000 tonne
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 Starraker takes to the sky.
But this alternative history never happened. Breaking the sound barrier at Mach 6,
this 12-engine turbojet space plane 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 its possessor, the Space Shuttle, is no more. What was the Starraker,
how did it fly, and why did America decide to never build it?
Grab your oxygen and let's jump into Low Earth Orbit.
In the 1970s, America faced increasingly worse energy shortages.
And when the demand grows greater than the immediate supply, the circuits break.
Attention all passengers, flight 307 is cancelled until further notice.
Its main source of petroleum had ground to a halt thanks to international crises
in Iran and the Middle East, and nuclear had been ruled out after two high-profile nuclear
mountdowns. 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 that 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 5km long by 4km wide, or 3.1 miles by 2.4 miles,
for a total of 11.73km 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 boroughs 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, weather, 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. Jahn 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-tonne or 85-US-tonne Skylab into low-Earth orbit using
a huge Saturn V rocket, leftover from the earlier Apollo moon missions.
The new solar power plants weighed 100 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 launches 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.
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 SPS program. As its name may infer, it was actually a rocket system
slash spaceplane that would act like a lorry for space station components for assembly and 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 934,000 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 onboard 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 is actually far more complex.
You see, the booster would land approximately 200 miles downrange 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 downrange
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 turnaround 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'd 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 Starraker.
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 as the Rockwell International Starraker. 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 per pound, which is $55 per pound today. In metric, this is $25 per
kilogram. For comparison's sake, Elon Musk with the SpaceX rockets costs around about $2,720 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 internal 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 6 by 6 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 140,000 pounds of thrust. The spaceplane 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 Starraker would start its mission with a conventional runway takeoff with conventional
turbofan power. Its ramjets 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
counted 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, then 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 Starraker would perform
a low gamma flight path angle and high alpha angle of attack re-entry de-acceleration profile
at approximately max six, 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 at 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 Starraker 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 Starraker every eight hours from a fleet of 30 aircraft which is pretty
insane. The Starraker 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 8,000 to 14,000
feet long 2,440 meters to 4,270 meters for landing and takeoff 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 Starraker represents
the direct thrust of future aerospace development. It is necessary that the essential technologies
be pursued actively yet the world would never see further development. Why was this miracle machine
never built? In the end the Starraker 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 Starraker 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 Starraker design was the fuel. The Starraker 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 Starraker 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 Starraker. 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 would
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 Starraker concept and Aerospace Projects 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 realize my
dream. Thank you so much for watching!
