Space taxi thread

[Temstar]

Every manned space program needs at the very minimum a manned spacecraft. And unless we're dealing with the very earliest days of a space program we're talking about a spacecraft that could at the very least hold multiple crew members, can dock and can perform some orbital manoeuvres and then a re-entry. In real life we currently have Soyuz, Shenzhou and Dragon (kinda sorta) in service with Orion, CST100 and PPTS in development along with a few spaceplanes.

Given the importance and ubiquity of this piece of hardware I thought we should a thread dedicated to it. So show us the space taxi your space program is based on and tell us a little bit about it. We're bound to pick up some tricks from each other.

I'll start. I have three manned spacecraft I commonly use. The one I use this most is this: Crew Excursion Vehicle Demeter II

• 800L of bipropellant for 1442m of delta-V
  
• 240L of monopropellant
  
• two solar panels to support the electrical system for probe core
  
• service propulsion system made up of two LV-909
  

Like any good space taxi its got a LES system that can save the spacecraft and crew during all stages of descent despite using SRBs at lift off (for cheaper launch cost):

When abort is triggered the following happens:

• launch vehicle liquid fuelled engine shutdown
  
• core stage retro-rocket fire
  
• deploy SRB recovery chute as drag chute to slow the booster down (in the event of an abort before SRB jettison). The SRB is not decoupled from the rocket itself since the dead weight of the rocket serve as ballast to slow the SRBs down
  
• emergency separation between spacecraft and rocket
  
• LES abort motor fire
  
• Spacecraft SM engine fire
  

LES tower jettison after gravity turn.

Two Demeters docked with my Munar propellant depot.

Edited April 21, 2013 by Temstar

[Scotius]

As always great pieces of engineering Temstar. But wouldn't be easier to use couple of retro-firing separatrons to slow down booster stage while escape tower pulls the capsule to safety?

[Temstar]

As always great pieces of engineering Temstar. But wouldn't be easier to use couple of retro-firing separatrons to slow down booster stage while escape tower pulls the capsule to safety?

Oh I thought of that too. Those sepratrons double as retro-rockets to slow the core stage down upon payload release so that it falls back on Kerbin on a sub-orbital trajectory.