Trantor wrote:I agree 100% to the rest, but it is not that bad with the runways. You´ll have to have matching or lower ACN to PCN*, and as military planes usually have very low ACN due to their undercarriage this is not an issue. More weight? Just add wheels.
You also need to land on other airports, too, so you always design transporters to do so.
It's admittedly not that severe a problem with plain old air-launch rockets. It's a bigger problem for over-complex monstrosities like Skylon, which has an undercarriage capable of supporting its fully-fueled weight, which it carries all the way into orbit and back. Keep in mind that the moment Skylon leaves the runway (assuming the thing ever flies), that heavy-duty undercarriage is dead weight that will not be needed to support that load again until the next launch. Landing must be done with empty fuel tanks, giving them much less weight to support.
Alexandr Koori wrote:I'm not saying that the air start, even with IL-76 could lift a man into space, but for satellites it looks competitive.
Did you miss the part about Pegasus being the most expensive launcher in existence?
You're not making things cheaper by adding air launch to the equation. You only move infrastructure around and replace a simple pad with a big, expensive carrier airplane that ends up with most of a launch pad built into it, except more expensive because it has to work while flying on a plane.
Alexandr Koori wrote:Are you concerned about an excess of fuel on board? Think about tanker aircraft like KC-10. "Molnia" includes programs included a non-toxic blended fuel "Kerosene-hydrogen-oxygen".
Yes, I'm concerned about the fuel. Why do you think rockets launch where they do?
If you're carrying cryogenic hydrogen, you're venting hydrogen. LOX/RP-1 is safer to work with, but carrying large amounts of LOX along with it still makes it far more dangerous than a plain old fuel tanker. Plus, the KC-10 only carries 160 tonnes of fuel, which makes for a pretty small rocket...the Falcon 9 carries about 300 tonnes of LOX/RP-1, the Atlas V about 284 tonnes of LOX/RP-1 and another 21 tonnes of LOX/LH2. These aren't even heavy lift rockets.
Alexandr Koori wrote:Outlying military airfield will solve the problem of security.
Oh, really? Run civilian launches out of a military airfield because it's too dangerous to do out of a civilian airport, they won't mind at all?
Alexandr Koori wrote:It is also interesting is the system "Parom", the main element of which will be the interorbital module that will "pull over" with loads from low hights to the working orbits, making it even SpaceShip2 or M-21 a real transport ship.
No, it makes them barely adequate and unusually expensive transport ships. For small launches, the cost of involving another spacecraft that must be supplied with fuel, moved to the right orbit, scheduled together with your launch, etc will be exorbitant. It's something that's more useful the larger your launches are, which is why Parom was sized to handle cargo containers larger than the payloads lifted by the Shuttle or Proton. Just the scheduling issue and consequences of a delay will make this impractical to use for routine small satellite launches.