The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums

This is obviously only relevant to very early in the OA timeline, but:

I seem to remember that, some years ago, there was much talk and some design work on spacecraft using aerospike rocket engines; apparently, there were some advantages in mass budget and efficiency. What happened? None of the recent designs seem to use them.

They've been researched off and on for about half a century--same with scramjets, jetpacks, flying cars, post-Hindenburg advanced airships, and probably quite a few other things.

What happened? Watch this guy; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4zFefh5T-8

Every time they get built, they never get launched. NASA looked into them this century - as in the 2000s+ for one of their projects. ARCAspace says they've built one, had a series of videos leading up to the test/launch and then...took a break for a month, returned, and didn't act like anything happened, going back to their conventional nozzle rocket for a spell.

Maybe they're cursed by the ghost of Proxmire. They also seem complex; basically ten or so smaller thrusters in a parallel array - maybe the TurboPump problems come back in a sort of spectre? In any case, I hope they actually fly one day.

Bumping this from a day ago.