>>12059413>Also the space shuttle was like, basically a 2-staged horizontally stacked rocketShuttle is a booster-sustainer, literally the WORST rocket design before you even start to look at the other parts of Shuttle, such as the Orbiter itself.
If you are doing booster-sustainer, what you have actually done is split a first stage in half and wrap it around a second stage, then lengthen that second stage to the point that it would have much too low a thrust to weight ratio to be able to achieve orbit in time, which means the second stage now also needs to fire its engines during the early parts of the launch, which means it cannot use vacuum optimized engines and it won't have full propellant tanks by the time stage separation happens.
Do you know why booster-sustainer rockets were first invented? It's because back when the Atlas rockets and the R-7 rockets were the hot new thing, nobody was certain that engine ignition while flying would ever be reliable enough to count on. We're talking early 50's level of design constraints here.
Do you know why Shuttle was a booster-sustainer? It's because they wanted to recover the "expensive" parts, the engines, and throw away the "cheap" parts, like the $70 million external tank.
Do you know why SLS is a booster sustainer? It's because Congress didn't want to spend a lot of money (lol) developing a big kerosene first stage and redeveloping the RS-25 to be able to be lit in flight.
Do you know why Ariane 5 and 6 are booster sustainer? It's because frogs are fucking retarded.
