The Black Horse

The cutting edge in Black Horse development is now at :

Pioneer Rocketplane

The Black Horse is a proposed design for a single stage to orbit, reusable launch vehicle. The primary investigator for the Black Horse was Mitchell Burnside Clapp. Although originally concieved as a military vehicle developed for the United States Air Force, political realities make it unlikely that the USAF will ever actually build the vehicle.

The key idea behind the Black Horse is that it can be aerially `refueled' from a tanker such as the USAF KC-135. This has caused some people to describe it as `stage-and-a-half' rather than a true SSTO vehicle. It will take off and land horizontally from a runway, and will be piloted by human pilots. Two demonstration vehicles were planned as stepping stones to the Black Horse, called the Black Foal and the Black Colt. The Foal would demonstrate aspects of the technology and provide proof of concept. The Colt would fly to half orbital velocity and utilize an off-the-shelf `kick-stage' to put satellites in orbit.

Other information

• In-flight propellant transfer spaceplane design and testing considerations
  The definitive paper by Mitchell Burnside Clapp
• An approximate method of assessing the performance of propellant transfer spaceplanes
  a relatively recent analysis by Mitchell Burnside Clapp
• Space Lift: Suborbital, Earth to Orbit, and on Orbit
  A White Paper from the SPACECAST 2020 study, published in Summer 1995 Air Power Journal
• Black Horse: One Stop to Orbit
  An article by Robert M. Zubrin and Mitchell Burnside Clapp, which appeared in the June 1995 issue of Analog magazine. (reprinted with permission)
• The Black Horse FAQ
• A layman's view of the Black Horse by Daniel Risacher
• Images of the Black Horse
• A QuickTime movie (1.2Mb) created by Sabri Sansoy
• Flying into space on wings of flame
  a slighty fantastic article with a lot of history from Focus Magazine
• Links to info about other proposed launch systems

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