True, no methalox in trenches, but no nitric acid either. Starships on military missions wouldn’t be landing in trenches anyway anymore than would your notional spaceplanes. And major domestic and overseas bases can support LNG and LOX storage.

Military Starship is a foolish concept for that reason alone. No methalox in trenches.

Now, SuperHeavy could lob one of those bent-looking bionic aero shells conceived for Mars. That could have a tank it it—shell splits and the pallet deploys chutes after it goes subsonic.

If you want something that can land, then take off…that all but demands the kinds of fuels the military already has.

Again, this is why a Buran style craft is MUCH better than Starship.

A mission goes like this:

Launch space-plane/drone in peacetime.

De-orbit to the theater of operations (nitric acid used up for retros)

Land, pick-up soldiers, drop explosive, whatever.

Crank up jet, take back off…fly to U.S. territory just like any other plane. Maybe even in-flight refueling. You won’t get back to space, but you can extract assets.

You won’t need nitric acid after de-orbit…just use it up, dump remainder overboard.

Now, this craft doesn’t have to be as big as Buran, but it likely has to be bigger than HOT EAGLE/SUSTAIN/Dream Chaser.

TAV studies might have had something similar.

Having the craft use Jet-A is a must in my book.

You aren’t trying to build a true space-plane…no bloody scramjet nonsense. You are just building a regular plane that can withstand re-entry.

The Buran Analog could take off and land on its own….no 747/Antonov carrier needed. Originally, SpaceDev’s Dream Chaser looked more like X-34 side-launched from a mini-Energia stack.

Dennis Jenkins had a book called LOCKHEED SECRET PROJECTS–INSIDE THE SKUNK WORKS.

If you have this volume, turn to page 94. There is some art depicting how the VentureStar started to morph. First it had an inner payload bay–then a hump…and then:

“By mid-2000 the payload had been moved completely out of the vehicle and into a piggyback container. This may not be detrimental since it would allow the vehicle to carry payloads of almost any given size and shape, at least within some aerodynamic and thermal considerations.”

That isn’t a “brainstorm” I came up with….it is what the original Dream Chaser was going to be…before becoming a lifting body like the Soviet BOR-4.

This is why I am an advocate for parallel staging and side payload mounts.

The payload can be a wide aerobrake disk, TAV, telescope, etc.

Modularity should be what comes first.

My thinking is–what does a Grunt need in the field?
Not a mini-Boca launch complex….just something he can gas up with Jet-A and hop in.

O/T on combustion
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-theory-safety-combustion-scenarios-unfold.html

I had the same interpretation of the I&I article as you did. Just the latest in an increasingly numerous body of calls for SLS-Orion to be abandoned.

Jeff Wright,

If you want something that doesn’t run on cryogens, why pick something as nasty as nitric acid as part of the mix? Or kerosene, for that matter, that has coking issues and is also prone to freezing in space. Impulse Space has thrusters and engines that run on ethane and nitrous oxide – neither of which is a cryogen and neither of which is nasty in the way nitric acid is nor given to freezing.

That is good news…they deserve a friend in high places.

I’d rather see a kerosene/nitric acid space plane with no cryogens.

I admit that it’s not quite clear from Issues & Insights’ op-ed whether they’re advocating total termination of NASA’s human spaceflight program, or just NASA’s role in getting its humans into space: “it raises the question of whether this government agency should be in the manned spaceflight business at all anymore.”

I suspect they just mean the latter — probably like lots of us here. I’m happy to see NASA astronauts walking around on the Moon. I just want to see commercial space companies doing the part that gets them down on that regolith, just like how the U.S. Antarctic Program leases a flight on an Air Force C-17 or National Guard C-130 when they need to get their peeps to McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott.

It’s in an official NASA statement:

t.co/x60mJrgzVd

He doesn’t really go into detail about what the medical emergency was.

Not quite. Voyager 2 encountered Neptune in August 1989, crossing its orbit in the process.

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/02/24/is-it-time-to-permanently-ground-nasa/