I only offer a different way of looking at existing ideas......Waldo

X-Prize RocketCat an F-14/NOS/Tar spacecraft

    As the F-22 and JSF come on line in America's military the F-15 Eagles and F-14 Tomcats will be discarded as scrap or sold for parts.We actually sold Eagles to Arab nations and Tomcats to Iran. So they might need some spare parts to kill our guys with. The Grumman F-14 Tomcat although stated to the public as an aircraft with a 73,000 foot ceiling and a Mach 2 top speed can actually top over 80,000 feet and approach Mach 2.8 clean. These photos depict an F-14 Tomcat which would be equipped with an auxiliary tank of Nitrous Oxide under it's belly and a solid rocket with a tar base and a morphing/ablative nozzle (nozzle ablates and gets larger at the same rate as needed for perfect combustion at it's corresponding altitude) over it's wing. This 40,000 lb. thrust engine would burn for one minute pushing the aero rocket Tomcat over 60 miles into space. All the weapons and armament avionics and attack radar are removed for weight savings. It would only carry 1/3 of it's total internal fuel capacity and the remaining tanks would be filled with non combustible inject o-foam. to make those areas more rigid. An RCS system would be added to the nose and wing tips to control yaw, pitch and roll in space and during reentry. Fuel for this will be contained in spheres in the nose which once housed the attack radar. The entire aircraft would be coated with ablative silicone and reentry would be stabilized with a supersonic parachute in the tail where the original braking chutes are stored and deployed in the same way only at 120,000 feet then as the vehicle hits 80,000 feet on descent, cut away. All off this hardware is standard on the Tomcat. The added feature of the swing wing lets it take off slow and carry more payload then tuck the wings in and blast for altitude. This vehicle could be built for about 4 million dollars ( I believe surplus Tomcats in perfect order will be sold for about 2-3 million dollars) and flown every weekend for so you and a brave friend could pop into space just for yuck's. Makes you wonder about all these X-prize "X-pert's" building all those weird ideas including technology that doesn't even exist yet. Maybe they need the money or maybe they need your money.

My beautiful wife Denise showing

"Home Sick Angel" concept rear view

My wife Denise holding "Home Sick Angel"

an F-14 Tomcat with Nos/Tar rocket assist