SpaceLiner - a Visionary Concept of an Ultra Fast Passenger Transport under Investigation in FAST20XX

Abstract

A strategic vision has been proposed by DLR which ultimately has the potential to enable sustainable low-cost space transportation to orbit. The baseline idea is simple and quite conventional: Strongly surging the number of launches per year and hence dramatically shrinking manufacturing and operating cost of launcher hardware. The obvious challenge of the vision is to identify the very application creating this new, large-size market. All recent assessments of the launch business are sobering. Nevertheless a market, well beyond the recent assessment, could be created if the conventional thinking of what rocket propelled vehicles are to be used for is exceeded. Ultra fast transportation, much faster than supersonic and even potential hypersonic airplanes, is definitely a fundamental new application for launch vehicles. Even in the case that only a very small portion of the upper business travel segment could be tapped by a rocket-propelled intercontinental passenger transport, the resulting launch rates per year would be far in excess of any other credible scenario. By no more than partially tapping the huge intercontinental travel and tourist market, production rates of RLVs and their rocket engines could increase hundredfold which is out of reach for all other known earth-orbit space transportation applications. The fast intercontinental travel form of space tourism, not only attracting the leisure market, would, as a byproduct, enable to also considerably reduce the cost of space transportation to orbit.