dropped rockets - road to space?

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Here is a method of flying a rocket up on a plane then dropping it and the rocket takes over from there.

Its similar to the dropping of rocket-planes from under aircraft, but because it has no wings and goes immediately to vertical propulsion it needs less fuel [weight].

With the sinuous mind of man where there is a will there may be a way.
www.newscientistspace.com...
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Sounds interesting, but I could see some serious problems resulting from this. Such as,

When the rocket is falling, the boosters dont light up.

Its relying on one para (from what I gathered) and they have a tendancy to not open at the worst of times, though I guess they do have a back up and they have used them on the current shuttle with no failure. (or as I am aware of).

Thumbs up for NASA and their wacky ideas I sure hope (if they take this method) that it enables us to open up space a bit more and allow for more productive missions.

One more thing, for soem reason this reminded me of the first shuttle eesign, the ''piggyback'' one, I thought that was what this thread was about. You got my hopes up.

This is not a new idea. Back in the 70s the US Air Force successfully "launched" a minuteman ICBM from a C-5 cargo plane (using a similar parachute based system).

The problem is that the payload that can be carried by most airplanes is very small. Orbital Sciences operates a pegasus launch vehicle, which is carried to altitude by a DC-10 and then launches from there. It can only put about a 1,000 pounds into low-earth orbit (and the DC-10 is a big airplane). Compare this with the more conventional Titan IVB - which can put around 100,000 into low earth orbit.

Definitely not a new idea.

B-52s have dropped Pegasus rockets for launch in studies for a long time, including the testing of scramjets.

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As to rockets not firing, a nose-cone chute and backup chute would seem a likely possibility.

To test the concept, t/Space built models 6.35 metres long - about one-quarter of the size of the full scale 27.5-metre rockets. Each of the mock-ups consisted of two steel tanks welded together with a nose and tail made of fibreglass.

It doesn't sound like they used the actual weight of a fully fueled rocket, just a hollow tube.

I guess the ultimate results depends on how much carrying capacity a virtual wing craft can carry and how high it can go.

Im guessing that the inertia of the flight still stays with the rocket as dropped with some forward direction loss of speed because it is going crosswise to the air. So it could still have either free-fall or climbing inertia, vertically speaking, from flight as it fires its rockets.
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But these rockets arent really going to carry very large payloads are they? A couple of astronauts and their kit, maybe some experiments and thats it.

The article said that they would then dock up with the new shuttle when they got to space as well so they woluldnt have to take much stuff. Though this brings up another query, if the shuttle goes up into mspace beforehand, wouldnt it defeat the object of sending the astronauts up seperately?