The Tupolev Tu-2000 is a planned hypersonic aerospace aircraft designed by the Soviet Tupolev Design Bureau. It is designed to test and verify the technology of a single-stage orbital aerospace aircraft and the Tupolev Tu-360 intercontinental hypersonic bomber.
Initial work on the Tu-2000 began in the 1970s as a Soviet response to the American X-30 hypersonic aerospace aircraft project. At that time, the Tupolev Design Bureau began to design an aerospace aircraft with a launch weight of about 300 tons, taking into account various methods of propulsion, such as liquid rocket engines, nuclear-powered engines, plasma engines. The Tu-2000 project was officially launched in 1986, and three years later, the Tupolev Design Bureau proposed a single-stage orbit entry aerospace system that could take off and land normally on the ground. A combined power plant of a turbojet engine, a scramjet engine and a liquid rocket engine was used.
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Giant ship cannon doctrine
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The Tu-2000 was designed as a tailless delta-wing aircraft with a smooth and streamlined overall shape and a total of 7 engines in the rear fuselage, 4 turbojet engines (for maneuvering in the atmosphere), 1 scramjet engine (for acceleration to hypersonic speeds), and 2 liquid-fueled rocket engines (for maneuvering in a vacuum). In recent years, the U.S. Air Force has also sought a similar single-stage orbital spacecraft, or hypersonic subspace rocket plane. The X-20 space fighter was a multi-stage orbital airfield landing spacecraft envisioned by the United States in the early days of the Cold War, followed by the X-30 program. Skunk Works once used the SR-71 Blackbird high-altitude high-speed reconnaissance aircraft as a spacecraft knapsack launch platform, which must have been a two-stage orbit. The Americans did not come up with a single-stage orbit scheme during the Cold War.
Due to the large number of engines required to optimize flight efficiency in different flight modes, most of the airframe space of the Tu-2000 was occupied by liquid hydrogen fuel tanks, all of which ran on liquid hydrogen fuel. The cockpit of the two crew members is located at the tip of the head of the aircraft, and the safety and security system of the aircraft is very distinctive, in the event of a crash hazard, the cockpit can eject as a whole to escape, and the seats of the crew can also eject to escape.
The Tu-2000 needs to take off from a standard airfield runway up to 3 kilometers long, after takeoff, first fly at subsonic speed with a turbojet engine to reach the set starting point of acceleration, then start the scramjet engine at a specific altitude to accelerate to more than Mach 15, gradually detach from the atmosphere, and finally enter the Earth orbit in outer space for 200 kilometers, the Tu-2000 can carry out a one-day mission in orbit and can use rocket engines for orbit change maneuvers.
The following video is from:
Giant ship cannon doctrine
, duration 04:59
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia took over the Tu-2000 project and presented a conceptual model of the Tu-2000 at the Moscow Air Show. It is planned to implement the project in two stages: the first stage is to create an incomplete Tu-2000A aircraft with a flight weight of 70-90 tons, a maximum speed of Mach 6 and a wingspan of 14 meters, and the Tu-2000A is only used to verify hypersonic performance and does not conduct tests in orbit.
The second stage assumes various implementation options: Tu-2000B, Tu-2000C and hypersonic airliners. The Tu-2000B is a semi-finished suborbital hypersonic bomber with a range of 10,000 km, a take-off weight of 350 tons, and six engines that provide speeds in excess of Mach 8 at subspace altitudes, but cannot yet fly into outer space orbit. The Tu-2000C has a take-off weight of 260 tons and a speed of Mach 15-25. It will carry a load of 8-10 tons into outer space orbit of 200 km. Hypersonic airliners, on the other hand, have too little detail.
By the time of the collapse of the USSR, the Tu-2000 project was in full swing, and by January 1991, many structural elements of the Tu-2000A had been manufactured: a nickel-alloy wing, cryogenic fuel tanks and a titanium composite fuel line. The American X-30 project at that time seemed to lag behind the Tu-2000 in progress, indicating that the level of aerospace technology of the Soviets was not bad.
The Tu-2000 project was discontinued due to the lack of research funding in the summer of 1992, and it was rumored that Tupolev had switched to commercial use, but to this day there is no follow-up. So far, both the U.S. and Soviet/Russian space shuttles sent into space on booster rockets have made normal orbital flights and then landed at airfields as normal. However, the normal airport take-off and landing type aerospace aircraft that do not rely on multi-stage rocket boosters for unipolar orbit have not appeared so far, but there are various ideas, either unipolar operation cannot fly out of the atmosphere, or multi-stage operation flies out of the atmosphere, which shows that the technical difficulty is very great.
At present, the most promising two-stage orbit scheme in Russia is to use the M-55 as a launch platform for spacecraft, see for details: Russia plans to launch a spaceplane with the M-55 high-altitude research aircraft knapsack, but the prospects of the project are unknown
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