The Roton

[rotorworks]

Looking for others thoughts on the defunct Roton. The design was definately ambitious, but had they the money would it have worked? (Ignoring that just about anything will work if you continue to throw money at it).
What Im particularly interested in is the rotor recovery system. According the various remains of info on the net, NASA tested rotor recovery as a posible system for both the Mercury and Gemini programs, and I have seen about two seconds of footage on a documentary, but as yet been unable to find any tech papers on this, any one got a lead?
Scattered info seems to indicate that this was tested as an airbrake successfully at MACH 3.5, but whether this was thie limit it would work at, or just as fast as they tested it I have been so far unable to establish.
Anyway I beleive most of the Roton guys went to XCOR, and bought most of the documentation and data reguarding it.

One thing that always struck me with this idea, was that the blades would be exposed to very high temps, and this may be a problem for rotor blades which have a fairly small surface area, however Roton seemed to indicate that the blades would be in an effectively cool area, when coned up, and that advanced TPS wouldnt be required.

 

[Sparweb]

I vaguely remember this from a tv documentary. I couldn't tell what the advantage would be over a conventional parachute. It certainly isn't mechanically simpler.

Steven Fahey, CET
"Simplicate, and add more lightness" - Bill Stout

 

[rotorworks]

I think the main idea was that you wouldnt have to land in the water. Plus if you have the rotors powered by tip jets, then in theory you would have the ability to make a powered landing.
All in all it was a fairly interesting idea, which was as much a victim of the iridium failure as much as a lack of funds.
Interestingly the most novel idea was the motor, than the rotor recovery system. The motor was a modern version of the aerojet idea, basically spinning the motor, instead of using turbo pumps. This was supposed to cut alot of weight out of the design.
However when their funds got tight they changed to NASA's Fastrack engines, and went belly up in 2000 (I think).
The original roton concept was for the tip jets of the rotors to take it right to orbit. Basically the blades would increase pitch as the alt increased right through to 90deg, maintaining a slight spin, just enought to keep the fuel flowing to the rockets. The idea was that in the low atmosphere, the blades would do the majoritory of the lifting, saving fuel.
However i have digressed slightly.

I beleive that the tests that were conducted by NASA for a rotor recovery were conducted in the 60's, possibly by Bell. AFIK the tests were conducted at AMES.
But so far I have been unable to find any references what so ever.
Anybody know?

 

[unclesyd]

Here is a big Url for search on Roton at Space.com

http://google.space.com/search?q=Ro...eet=default_frontend&ip=68.106.196.100&num=10