Interesting read, thanks!
Always insightful Jon. My question seems to be the same as yours:"By performing the turnaround maneuver, you're using aerodynamic lift to bend your trajectory around so that the downrange (away from the launch site) velocity is now actually turned into velocity heading back home. . .. . .Unfortunately, since this isn't a concept I've seen investigated in the literature before, and as the aerodynamic turn-around maneuver is more complicated than I know how to easily analyze. . ."From what I've read in the past, even at Mach 3 it is very difficult to make a real turn. IIRC, Blackbird needed a couple hundred miles to turn at high speed. I'm not sure you can get the sort of turnaround from aerodynamics you'd like. Instead I think it's more likely you'd scrub off so much speed (racing term for the same effect) in a 180* turn that there wouldn't be any left for glideback. Just guessing, though.
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I thought Jon and Co-conspirators might like the picture from GRTz Makeyev, because it has actual parameters of the trajectory for their boostback TSTO with seconds and kilometers. Trying to attach the picture to the post now.URL (must select Russian for pictures, English seems empty):http://www.makeyev.ru/rocspace/rossiyanka/-- Pete
Thanks for the input, and the hard data. One of these days I'll have to learn russian (my only non-english language that I'm fluent in, Tagalog, isn't really used a lot in the rocket literature for some reason...)