/sci/ - Science & Math

Since this is the space thread, I was thinking last night that ULA could replace the RL-10 with a cluster of smaller XCOR engines and that they would not need to develop a full RL-10 sized engine to get off of it. ie no need for a large xcor engine, can take advantage of nearer term work.

They spoke favourably of upper stage engine clusters in one of those ULA papers, in that it increased stage reliability due to engine out capability, so I could see them being fine with it.