Single stage to orbit : politics, space technology, and the quest for reusable rocketry
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Single stage to orbit : politics, space technology, and the quest for reusable rocketry
（New series in NASA history）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003
Available at / 3 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
While the glories and tragedies of the space shuttle make headlines and move the nation, the story of the shuttle forms an inseparabe part of a lesser-known but no less important drama-the search for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Here an award-winning student of space science, Andrew J. Butrica, examines the long and tangled history of this ambitious concept, from it first glimmerings in the 1920s, when technicians dismissed it as unfeasible, to its highly expensive heyday in the midst of the Cold War, when conservative-backed government programs struggled to produce an operational flight vehicle. Butrica finds a blending of far-sighted engineering and heavy-handed politics. To the first and oldest idea-that of the reusable rocket-powered single-stage-to-orbit vehicle-planners who belonged to what President Eisenhower referred to as the military-industrial complex.added experimental ("X"), "aircraft-like" capabilties and, eventually, a "faster, cheaper, smaller" managerial approach.
Single Stage to Orbit traces the interplay of technology, corporate interest, and politics, a combination that well served the conservative space agenda and ultimately triumphed-not in the realization of inexpensive, reliable space transport-but in a vision of space militarization and commercialization that would appear settled United States policy in the early twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
Part I: The Conservative Agenda for Space
1. The Reagan Revolution
2. Commerce on the High Frontier
3. Space Warriors
Part II: The Quest
4. X-30: The Cold War SSTO
5. Space Visionaries
Part III: The Space Ship Experimental
6. Launching the SSX
7. The SDIO SSTO Program
Part IV: Spaceship Wars
8. W(h)ither SSTO?
9. The Disorder of Things
10. The Clipper Graham
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"