Comment by fogh1
19 hours ago
I think they were mentioned briefly. Aerospikes can work with rdes potentially if the certain versions catch on, but at the end of the day the heat fluxes are even worse for the detonation based engines. The main reason aerospikes don’t make sense is that you adding more area that gets the highest amount of heat flux and your plumbing and cooling jackets becomes a nightmare.
I wonder if aerospikes were popular as an idea in the J-2 engine ~Apollo era since USA only had gas generator engines (and expander RL-10).
You can't get to very high chamber pressures with those, and then maybe aerospike was a way to work around the limitations.
Then XLR-129 and SSME came along with staged combustion cycle and you can just have higher pressure engines. They can both run at sea level and still have a decent efficiency in vacuum.
The linear aerospike for X-33 was kind of a neat tech demo and fit in with the whole shape of the vehicle and composites, non-tubular tanks and large base area. Maybe too many new things at once in retrospect.