AAWSAP DIRD, Space Access: Where We’ve Been and Where We Could Go, March 2010

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was contained within CONUS, demonstrating a significant maneuver capability. If a
glider carries a fuel reserve, it can be reaccelerated to a recoverable-range glide speed.
A typical circuit pattern for initial testing of a hypersonic asp-type vehicle
Flight-test ground track for hypersonic cruise vehicle
Los A
1.75g acceleration for
climb portion of flight
......--Continuous 2g tum
Mach 15 ground track
Figure 42. Hypersonic Decelerating Descending Turns are Wide But Within a Reasonable CONUS Area if
Mach 12 or Less
But where is our space infrastructure? Forty years after Apollo, why have we advanced
so little (as illustrated in Figure 43)? Like the pioneers' Conestoga wagons, most of our
trips to LEO are one way, and when we do return, we do so with little more than the
people we took to space. There is no evidence that any Conestoga wagons ever
returned to St. Louis or St. Joseph, Missouri, from which most departed; rather, most
were used as building materials on the West coast.
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