Launch Vehicles
If a rocket is launched to deliver a payload from a planetary surface into space it is called a launch vehicle.
There are several broad categories that launch vehicles fall under, including:
- Expendable launch system
- Reusable launch system
- Single stage to orbit
- Two stage to orbit
- Three stage to orbit
For the launch vehicles currently in use for human spaceflight, see that article.
There were over 70 orbital launches in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Rocket Launch
Famous quotes containing the words launch and/or vehicles:
“I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)