Rocket Engines
All spaceplanes to date have used rocket engines with chemical fuels. Due to the orbital insertion burn necessarily being done in space, orbital spaceplanes require rocket engines for at least that portion of the flight.
Read more about this topic: Spaceplane, Description, Propulsion
Famous quotes containing the words rocket and/or engines:
“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.”
—Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)