SINGLE-STAGE-TO-ORBIT SPACEPLANES

While the main focus over the past forty years has been on winged spacecraft launched with conventional rockets or from airplanes, the Russians have never abandoned the idea of eventually fielding a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) spaceplane that can take off horizontally like an ordinary aircraft. Although the development of an SSTO system remains a distant dream (even in the West), plenty of research has been done in the field in the past decades.

One of the first Soviet SSTO spaceplanes was put on the drawing board by Yevgeniy S. Shchetinkov in 1966 at the Scientific Research Institute of Thermal Processes (NII TP, the former NII-1 and the later Keldysh Research Center). Shchetinkov, a veteran of the GIRD and RNII rocket research institutes of the 1930s, had formulated ideas for scramjet engines as early as 1957. Using a com­bination of ramjet, scramjet, and liquid-fuel engines, his proposed spaceplane had a take-off mass of between 150 and 250 tons and was capable of placing between 6 and 11 tons into orbit [18].