A spaceplane is an aircraft designed to pass the edge of space. It combines some of the features of an aircraft and some of a spacecraft. Typically, it takes the form of a spacecraft equipped with wings, and may be airbreathing or be purely rocket based.
To date, only pure rocket spaceplanes have succeeded in reaching space, although several have been carried up to an altitude of several tens of thousands of feet by conventional aircraft before r...
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A spaceplane is an aircraft designed to pass the edge of space. It combines some of the features of an aircraft and some of a spacecraft. Typically, it takes the form of a spacecraft equipped with wings, and may be airbreathing or be purely rocket based.
To date, only pure rocket spaceplanes have succeeded in reaching space, although several have been carried up to an altitude of several tens of thousands of feet by conventional aircraft before release.
An aerospace plane features some differences from rocket launch systems.
All aircraft utilize aerodynamic surfaces in order to generate lift. Typically the force of lift generated by these surfaces is many times that of the drag that they induce. The ratio of these forces (the Lift-to-drag ratio or L/D) varies between different aircraft designs but can be as high as 60 in high performance gliders but is closer to 7 or less for the aircraft configurations more typical of supersonic aircraft including aerospace planes.
In practice a lift...
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