Re:385 Feet of Crazy: The Most Audacious Flying Machine
by greglindahl on Thursday August 23, 2018 @01:20PM
(#17828979)
As you can tell from air launch not dominating the market, there are minuses to it, too. Pegasus has extra mass because it's got aerodynamic surfaces that traditional rockets don't need. And it takes a lot of gear at the remote airstrip to support the launch.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/06/08/airplane-with-pegasus-...
Point in case, note the size of the Pegasus orbital rocket [2]. Or the orbital anti-satellite missile, sized like a typical cruise missile, all thanks to air launch [3] from a typical fighter jet.
Now that SpaceX is able to recover the first stages from some launches, the cost of first stage is a bit less of a factor, but still there are other considerations, like ability to launch from any decent runway vs having to maintain a dedicated facility, unusable for any other commercial purposes, far away from humans due to incredible amount of noise rocket engines create.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_launch_to_orbit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT