>>12269049If the final design were big enough to achieve a ~91% propellant mass ratio with maximum payload it could reach orbit. If I go ahead and assume a 0.5% payload mass ratio, that means for a 20 ton payload capacity you'd be looking at a vehicle that weighed 340 tons dry with payload and 4000 tons wet with payload.
Just for reference, hydrolox has a bulk density of 280 kg/m^3, which means to carry 3660 tons of it we'd need a combined total useful tank volume of 13,072 cubic meters. That's a shitload of volume for a vehicle that can only mass 320 tons dry after adding thermal protection coatings and engines.
So yeah, SSTO Delta Clipper would probably have never happened, though it still had a better chance of happening than SSTO Venture Star.
A two stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle based on the Delta Clipper concept would have worked fine though. The thing is, if you imagine how they'd optimize a TSTO Delta Clipper, its design would rapidly converge with Starship, simply because Starship is already built using smart decision making for eliminating cost, complexity, and useless mass.
