The Rotary Rocket Company developed the Roton rocket in the late 1990s as a planned fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) crewed spacecraft. A full-scale test vehicle made three hover flights in 1999.
It had wheels on its landing legs and was towed to launch.
Gary Hudson and Bevin McKinney were the main developers of the Roton Rotary Rocket. Gary emailed Nextbigfuture photos of the wheeled rocket.
This is the plan for the SpaceX Starship and the Super Heavy Booster.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Being (rather obviously) from Texas, I derive special joy that this can be towed by a pick-up truck. You could make a pretty funny movie involving this.
Kudos to SpaceX for being innovative – on many levels.
Given the weight and value of what’s on the wheels, I’m guessing some engineering effort might go into reinventing the wheel 😀
Gary Hudson, the founder of Rotary Rocket, also provided an initial seed donation to help fund the creation of the SENS Research Foundation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Hudson_(engineer)
I would vote for mech warrior legs instead of wheels
the tanks were already weilded inside the ring segments
Also, the skin of the rocket is the fuel tank, other than the ends of the tanks.
Also, there would be no wheels on expendables, no legs!
Don’t need to reinvent the wheel I guess…
Does the SpaceX rocket shown above actually have fuel tanks, engines, etc., or was built for some other reason??? I’ve never seen any fuel tanks being hoisted into place…
That is *clear* from Musk: “Attach wheels to the landing legs & tow Starship to the launch pad”. Both articles seem to headline a different thing, however.
I don’t think Elon is implying that Starship will carry the wheels with it either. It wouldn’t matter for a test version but why would a production Starship reduce it’s payload by the weight of wheels when they can be just put on to move it?
These wheels are not on the rocket. They are used to roll the rocket, but clearly do not launch. You may as well say the crawler was *on* the Saturn 5.
This prototype is currently on display at the Mojave Airport.