Transferring boosters and Starships between BC and KSC

[InterestedEngineer]

And has anyone done the math to see if a full-loaded booster can cover that distance? The apogee height? Will the sea-level engines be effective during a climb-out beyond 100 km? Can it survive a faster descent from a higher apogee? Will an entry burn be necessary because of the higher altitude? As I write this, I recall that this was explained previously in another thread.

Yes primitive math was done. (flat earth version, which is more pessimistic than the two-body version)

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63725.msg2727394#msg2727394

[InterestedEngineer]

It doesn't have aerosurfaces to steer itself. It's ballistic. That is what Jim is trying to tell us.  Can mortar or cannon fire change direction? Only the newer ones, which have fold-out aerosurfaces, can do that.

There's 8.7km/sec of deltaV on a fully fueled booster.  At most Aero is needed to slow down.  If one aims for overshoot (so debris doesn't land on Orlando) then you could use aero to come back to KSC  from the Atlantic in lieu of all that overkill of deltaV.

Only need about 4km/sec to overshoot KSC, then another 1km/sec for a re-entry burn, 500m/sec for the actual landing.

That leaves us with 8.7-5.5  = 3.2km/sec for running different trajectories, skating circles around a launch tower, or whatever.   Aero is just a deltaV bonus, it's not strictly necessary for this proposal.

what will likely be difficult to do is not overfly a populated area of Florida.  Even Starship is gonna have that problem.  A A solution to that is if you generate debris, the trajectory is the Atlantic or the Gulf, and you use deltaV or aero to come back to KSC.  Anything off nominal gets dumped in the Atlantic.  That's what the shuttle trajectories I've looked at did.  The S turn that Flight 11 matches the S turns the shuttle made coming into Florida...

CORRECTION:  the proposal is for 4.8km/sec, not 4.0kms/

So the deltaV required before course corrects is 4.8+0.5+1.0 = 6.3kms/

That leaves us with 8.7 = 6.3 = 2.4km/sec of deltaV to play with.