User:N2e/Sandbox/Launch vehicle landing gear

Launch vehicle landing gear
Landing gear have traditionally not been used on the vast majority of space launch vehicles. With some exceptions for suborbital vertical-landing vehicles (e.g., Masten Xoie or the Armadillo Aerospace' Lunar Lander Challenge vehicle), or for spaceplanes that use the vertical takeoff, horizontal landing (VTHL) approach (e.g., the Space Shuttle, or the USAF X-37), landing gear have been largely absent from orbital vehicles during the early decades since the advent of spaceflight technology, when orbital space transport has been the exclusive preserve of national-monopoly governmental space space programs. Each spaceflight system to date has relied on expendable boosters to begin each ascent to orbital velocity. This is beginning to change.

Recent advances in private space transport, where new competition to governmental space initiatives has emerged, have included the explicit design of landing gear into orbital booster rockets. SpaceX has built, and flown eight times, an orbital booster-test-vehicle with a large fixed landing gear in order to test low-altitude vehicle dynamics and control for vertical landings of a near-empty orbital first stage.

The orbital-flight version of the SpaceX design includes a lightweight, deployable landing gear for the booster stage: a nested, telescoping piston on an A-frame. The total span of the four carbon fiber/aluminum extensible landing legs will be approximately 60 ft, and weigh less than 2100 kg; the deployment system will use high-pressure Helium as the working fluid.