Jon Goff has put up the fourth installment of his survey on space transport concepts. As he noted earlier, it could be the basis of a useful textbook on the subject, with a lot more work and analysis (and accompanying graphs and figures). When I was on The Space Show the other day, David got a chat from an aerospace engineering student about when he’d learn how to design low-cost launchers, because he hadn’t seen anything about that in any of his course work. This would be the text for such a course.
As Jon notes, TPS is a common thread in making reusable entry vehicles practical and cost effective. The Shuttle tiles are too high maintenance, and risky (as we saw with Columbia). However, a lot of these issues go away if the vehicle “swallows the tank” (as Rockwell and others proposed in their X-33 concepts). No external tank dramatically reduces the risk to damaging the tiles, and containing a hydrogen (or even hydrocarbon, though to a lesser degree) fuel tank makes the vehicle much more “fluffy”* on entry, considerably reducing the heat load. Because of the ET, Shuttle had unique TPS issues that future vehicles are less likely to have to worry about. And also, as Jon notes, XCOR is in the process of building exactly the type of “X-vehicle” that will be useful to start to prove out both trajectory and TPS concepts, something that NASA should have done years ago, and probably would have had it still been NACA.
[Update late afternoon]
Notwithstanding the silly microkerfuffle in comments, I should add that when I came up with the term “fluffy,” it didn’t occur to me to apply it to a vehicle. I really intended it to apply to something that actually is fluffy (i.e., homogeneously undense, e.g., liquid hydrogen), rather than something that has low average density, but very high local density with vast volumes of low or zero density. We should probably come up with some other word to describe a large empty tank, to distinguish between the homogeneous and heterogeneous cases.
*A word I came up with years ago at Rockwell to mean the opposite of “dense.” Others may have come up with it independently.