Just stumbled across Scott Manley's vid on the Roton test vehicle.
The concept seems to have evolved a fair bit since the presentation at Making Orbit in... 1995?
Back then, the rotor was meant to be the entire lift system. Yes. No aerospike in the base, just the rotor.
If memory serves, the rotor was supposed to be somewhere around the middle, not the top. It would act as a centrifugal propellant pump for the tip rockets. And, as the air thinned, it would adjust its pitch from very shallow, with the rocket thrust serving to spin the rotor for aerodynamic lift, to very steep, with rocket thrust providing the lift and just enough angle to keep the rotor spinning for pump action. I don't think emergency autorotation was part of the plan.
A spinoff (so to speak) concept was the spinny engine: an aerospike with canted combustion chambers and a big honkin' bearing in the middle (plus rotary plumbing arrangements), which, like the rotor, would be its own pump. Should actually have been simpler than a bipropellant rotor, but still a bit of a nightmare.
The pseudo-aerospike, with a cluster of conventional little engines clustered around the rim of a truncated plug nozzle, was a largely unrelated concept that was making the rounds at about the same time. I guess Rotary Rocket maybe picked up on it for the same reason it was being discussed, i.e., it would be more convenient to fabricate than a "real" aerospike?
And... there were suggestions of using Roton as a suborbital cargo vehicle, capable of making a round trip on a single fueling. Obviously, for high-value, urgent cargo... or for high-value cargo that some third parties might want to interdict (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
Ah, the wild and crazy times of the mid- to late-1990s!
Comments