Space vehicle

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Saturn V, the largest and heaviest space vehicle brought into operational status as of January 2020.

A space vehicle or spaceship is the combination of launch vehicle and spacecraft. The earliest space vehicles were expendable launch systems, consisting of a single or multistage rocket, which carried a spacecraft that was a relatively small portion of the total vehicle size and mass.^[1] An early exception to this, the Space Shuttle space vehicle, consisted of a reusable orbital vehicle carrying crew and payload, supported by an expendable external propellant tank and two reusable solid-fuel booster rockets.

History[]

In the 1865 Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon, successful attempts are made to launch three people in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. In 1880, The Pall Mall Gazette described Verne’s Columbiad as a "space-ship" — the first recorded use of this term.^[2]

The concept of a "space ship" (or "rocket ship") was further developed in twentieth century science fiction such as Flash Gordon, as a self-contained, presumably rocket-powered, unitized vehicle capable of reaching an extraterrestrial destination keeping its structure intact, and requiring only refueling, like an airplane. Real-world rocket technology did not make this possible; while the airplane requires an amount of fuel occupying a relatively small fraction of the total size and mass, the rocket requires an oxidizer in order to operate in the vacuum of space.^[3] It also cannot use atmospheric air as its propellant; this function is served by the high-volume and high-mass fuel and oxidizer. Also, the high amount of energy required to reach at least low Earth orbital speed requires an extremely high proportion of propellant to dry vehicle mass. Also, mid-twentieth century structural technologies made it impossible to construct a single set of propellant tanks capable of holding enough mass to reach the required velocity. Thus, expendable multi-stage launch vehicles were the necessary design choice when spaceflight began in the late 1950s. However, starting in the 1990s, developmental work began on such unitary single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) space vehicles with projects like X-33, Roton, McDonnell Douglas DC-X, and Skylon. By 2020, most SSTO developmental projects had failed with the exception of Skylon, which continues development.

Current space vehicles[]

A majority of space vehicles currently in use are expendable, designed to carry a single payload into space but not for recovery and reuse. They typically consist of several stages which detach in sequence as the vehicle gains speed and altitude and propellant is exhausted.

Reusable space vehicles are capable of launching multiple payloads and can be recovered after each use. The only fully reusable space vehicles currently in use are New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo. Both of them perform suborbital spaceflights. SpaceX is developing their Starship to be a fully reusable orbital space vehicle.

References[]