Let's say right off the bat that in the described project there is still more fiction than real achievements. However, the beauty of the idea lies precisely in the fact that for its implementation you will not have to come up with anything fundamentally new - what will be used that has already been created by people and tested in practice.
The device in question has a working title (on the office) "Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion" (Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion), and abbreviated - Sustain, which can be translated as "Support" and pronounced more pleasantly.
The main ideologist and engine of the project is Roosevelt Lafontant, a retired US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel; he was hired by the Schafer Corporation, a military technology consulting firm working with the US Marine Corps. The program itself is based in Arlington, where the USMC Space Integration Branch is located.
According to the norms of international law, the airspace of the state extends 80 kilometers from the surface of the Earth. Jumping over this zone means eliminating the need to obtain permission to cross the airspace from any country - allies, hostile or neutral.
In La Fontaine's practice, there was a case when, during the operation against al-Qaeda in 2001, diplomatic agreements with neighboring countries took so long (several weeks) that it was not possible to land a helicopter assault in Afghanistan at the right time.
This prompted the lieutenant colonel to think about the possibility of landing a small task force "from above", bypassing the airspace of states located between a military base (or an air force ship) and the place of hostilities.
I must say, the idea of a space landing is not new. Moreover, it is not the first time that an attempt has been made to implement it. Indeed, according to the general concept of Sustain, it resembles the "Hot Eagle" project, which we have already talked about. There are some differences though.
So. About 10-15 Marines and two pilots board the Sustain, a swept suborbital vehicle. Sustain is suspended under the belly of a booster plane, which lifts it to a height of several kilometers and drops it.
To gain speed, Sustain must use a combination of a ramjet engine (up to an altitude of 30 kilometers) and a rocket engine (further). The latter should throw the car in a parabola much higher than those 80 kilometers.
After gliding in a huge arc up to 11,000 kilometers, Sustain should land on its wings.
Although these wings have a large sweep angle and are not too large in span, the car should be able to land on almost any level surface. This is perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of the entire concept. But do not count, in fact, on a network of airfields on enemy territory?
It should be noted that other US departments, namely the Pentagon Research Agency (DARPA), the Air Force (USAF) and NASA, with the assistance of industrial companies have long been developing projects of hypersonic suborbital aircraft (you can recall at least the recent FALCON bomber, Hyper-X series machines and the new X-37), as well as partially reusable launch vehicles with winged stages (a recent example is the HLV from Northrop Grumman).
All this is a kind of "rich soup" in which new technologies are prepared and from which the Sustain project can extract the necessary ingredients. Note that a partially reusable vertical launch complex can become one of the options for launching a shuttle along a suborbital trajectory.
Well, and the most probable way of launching - from the board of the carrier aircraft - is a technology that has already been worked out for a long time. Remember the triumph of SpaceShipOne, which made three leaps into near space, reaching a record height in the last of them - more than 112 kilometers.
Aircraft designer Burt Rutan, who created the world's first private space shuttle and its launch vehicle WhiteKnight, is now working on a larger project: a bundle of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. Although Rutan is busy with space tourism, the booster plane for Sustain in the pictures here looks suspiciously like WhiteKnightTwo, to which they just added another turbojet engine.
As for suborbital manned shuttles, long-range space "jumps" and technologies necessary for the safe entry of the device into the atmosphere at high speed, all this is being actively developed by several companies at once. We can recall only a few fresh, very serious projects that have gone much further than the drawings: the New Shepard that has already flown (in the form of a prototype), only the Silver Dart being designed and built (in the form of a prototype, again) a small space shuttle Dream Chaser.
Sustain is different from them. But the difference is not so great as to consider the creation of this apparatus impossible. However, everything here depends not on engineers, but on politicians.
As David Ax writes in Popular Science, "Congress has shown interest," and therefore "the Marines are thinking of flying a prototype in 15 years." Serial samples of the landing shuttle could be built by 2030.
"Sustain is not the vision of the opium smoker," says Lafontaine. "It just needs lubrication." Well, that's understandable. In Russia, they say "If you don't grease, you won't go", meaning money by "greasing".
In conclusion, we note that La Fontaine, describing the advantages of the space landing system, singles out hostage rescue operations as a very important field of application of Sustain. This implies the seizure of US citizens (or even embassies) by terrorists on the territory of troubled countries.
The unprecedented speed of response provided by a suborbital jump of a special forces group from the territory of the United States directly to the scene of action, in such a situation, can be a decisive factor in saving someone's lives. And this is another argument for politicians who keep their hands on the state purse.
