Request Black Horse One Stop to Orbit

[n0mad23]

This one never got any coverage when it was kicked around a few years ago. I wonder if it'd come around the same time as the X-Prize if it would have generated more interest.

Still, I think it might be a lot of fun in the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator environment.

The Black Horse as appearing in the 1995 addition of Analogue Magazine.

The idea was a bit like the Delta Glider, but would take off from a runway on jet fuel (kerosene) and then rendezvous with an aero-tanker to top off the tanks with H202. When full of fuel, the Black Horse would then rocket into orbit.

Links to related literature:

Analogue article - "Black Horse: One Stop to Orbit"

http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html

AIAA 95-2955 - "In-flight Propellant Transfer Spaceplane Design and Testing Considerations"
http://www.risacher.org/bh/bh-paper1.html

"The Black Horse: A Layman's View"
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/magnus/bh/laymans-view.html

A small section on the Black Horse is also on the Island One site here:
http://www.islandone.org/Launch/

 

[MaverickSawyer]

What aircraft is used as the tanker?

 

[Ark]

This would be cool, but I dunno how you could really simulate the tanker rendezvous. Maybe with a bit of code that spawned the tanker aircraft and set it to hold a specific heading, altitude, and airspeed. It would be tricky to make rendezvous and refuel without running out of fuel or blowing your launch alignment window.

 

[Tacolev]

This would be cool, but I dunno how you could really simulate the tanker rendezvous. Maybe with a bit of code that spawned the tanker aircraft and set it to hold a specific heading, altitude, and airspeed. It would be tricky to make rendezvous and refuel without running out of fuel or blowing your launch alignment window.

Tricky indeed but orbital rendezvous is pretty tricky too and that stuffs the bread and butter of a lot of the pilots around here. I'm sure that would be an appreciated challenge.

And if it's too hard just have a scenario start in mid-air having just topped off.

 

[n0mad23]

I was actually thinking along Tacolev's line here and hoping for a Black Arrow already fueled and in flight.

But I do see this already has been done - "Aircraft Refuel Project" - by jmw back in 2008 - [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3639"]http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3639[/ame], so I'm thinking now it's really not so out of the question. Couldn't such a project use FuelMFD or one of the variants? It's what the Aircraft Refuel Project used.

I've read some more of work from the links I posted above, and there are certainly some red flags that need to be addressed before making such a project work here. For sure those wings are going to have to be rethought, for one thing - but I think the low loading wings are worth exploring in terms of re-entry. There's some really interesting info about this in the docs. With larger wings, you actually get less friction and more lift on re-entry which in turn keeps the temperatures down.

BTW - the original plans called for a Boeing Stratotanker for the aerial fuel rendezvous - specifically the KC-135Q or 135T as both had fuel tanks independent from the airplane's fuel supply, and could be dedicated to H202 storage. The Wiki page on the KC-135 is found here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-135_Stratotanker

 

[sputnik]

Yes, I always wanted to do this.

The spaceplane part is simple enough; what held me back was getting the tanker to work realistically. The challenge I wanted to model was that, in the Black Horse, you need to model the burning of JP-5 and H2O2 from separate tanks, instead of one joint propellant tank as is normal practice in Orbiter. That's because the Black Horse needs to take off, join up, and transfer H2O2 before it's burned enough JP-5 that it's eating into what's needed for the orbital mission.
Fun!

 

[River Crab]

I know it's a complicated source (though I don't know much about code), but Moach's open-source G42-200 Starliner simulates fuel and oxydizer separately.

 

[sputnik]

I'll take a look, though that's not really the hard part. (It might be a bigger challenge make sure the engine is dead dead dead when either tank is empty, as my last attempt at a code that does that, Aries and Gagarin, had some minor issues where you could continue to run the engines, if you wanted to badly enough).

The challenge is the tanker. My last notion (never tried) was a self-grafting boom; you attach it to an aircraft that doesn't have a boom in the mesh, and it provides it. Attached a bit like with Velcro Rockets, and since it's always the same boom mesh, animation never gets to be a big issue. The thing would be tested for a Boeing 707, but you could graft the thing to a KC-10 or A330 easily enough.
It would search for a specific attach point code within a few meters of the boom, move the boom as appropriate, and transfer fuel from the tanker to the receiver when the boom end was in contact with the refueling attach point. Not too hard conceptually, but it's work, and I obviously haven't gone and done it.

But I'd much prefer this approach to the one where you use FuelMFD. When you're using FuelMFD, you're not flying the spacecraft, and on the boom is the one time you really want and need to fly the spacecraft....

Still, that's just my preference. I'd just like to see one done at all.