Next-Generation Aerospace
Next-Generation Aerospace — Terra Invicta technology. Aeronautical engineers explore reusable suborbital and single-stage-to-orbit craft.
About Next-Generation Aerospace
Next-Generation Aerospace is a Terra Invicta technology in Materials with a research cost of 5,000.
Aeronautical engineers explore reusable suborbital and single-stage-to-orbit craft.
For too long, our efforts to venture beyond Earth have been inherently wasteful affairs. Every rocket jettisons multiple stages, each of which contains its own engines, propellant, and other equipment, during its passage into space. This is obscenely expensive, and also a source of increasingly problematic orbital debris fields. If we are to launch more spacecraft, more often, using them as we use airplanes, we must develop reusable vessels. While partially reusable vessels have flown in the past, new refinements in parachutes and airbags now allow the recovery of every stage. Because even this remains highly inefficient, our engineers have prototyped a far superior alternative - a single-stage-to-orbit, or SSTO, craft, which expend no major hardware during their flight. This has been achieved partly by advances in materials and construction techniques, which enable the craft to survive hypersonic flight and multiple orbital re-entries, and partly by improving mass-ratio sufficiently to carry both copious amounts of propellant and a crew/cargo payload all the way to orbit, without any need to separate. With this achieved, we can begin to think about reaching space as an almost everyday pursuit.