"The Rocket Company"

Over at hobbyspace.com, there's a great novel about the development of a reusable rocket, written by Patrick J. G. Stiennon & David M. Hoerr. The novel appears in serial form, one chapter per week, at
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archiv ... ePage.html.

It's actually fascinating reading. The fictional novel discusses the challenges and trade-offs of building a revolutionary new space vehicle. I highly recommend that all of you check it out.

note: if you click on the URL, remove the . after it, cause it makes the URL wrong.

Sigurd
http://hhboard12.free.fr/Sigurd/index.html

I'm reading it, it's great. Not only does it explain space science and technology in simple terms, it shows how high tech enterprices are afected by economics, policy and politics. It's also a window into the mind of the aerospace engineer.

It's relevant to XPrize technology because it deals with low cost rehusable space access, like Rotary Rocket. (And yes, Burt Rutan's SS1 is mentioned!)

As a plus, one of the authors designed a space ship currently under production, the Kisler.

This is a quote from John Carnak's from his Q&A thread:

orbital:
My pet plan for orbital has been "boosted SSTO" for quite some time. This is basically the plan described in "The Rocket Company" serial on Hobby Space -- a straight up / straight down booster, and a very high performance upper stage. I think there are strong engineering and operational reasons for this, even though it looks like an inefficient staging point at first glance.

Aparently he liked reading it.

However, the novel's analysys of Burt Rutan's use of composite materials caused controversy, see the thread Technicals Firsts of SS1.

The Rocket Company is an excellent read if you have the time, I especially like this particular quote as it relates to the X-Prize

"But John Forsyth wasn't intending to wait around until the demand was there. He was going to develop the demand by careful nurturing the expectation that things like lunar expeditions would soon become paying propositions."