But is not a real RLV program. It’s just a narrow test for one technology. Hence I think naming it Reusable Booster System Pathfinder is misleading.
Overspecification
They overspecify the problem by requiring a glide landing. Why is it superior to powered landing? At the moment, there’s no clear reason to believe it is! Both need to be developed further to understand their advantages and drawbacks. To my knowledge, there have been only six liquid rocket VTVL prototype manufacturers so far: McDonnell Douglas, JAXA (who was the contractor?), Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems and Unreasonable Rocket. Only a few of those have flown to higher than a few hundred meters. The design and operations space is mostly totally unexplored.
Nevermind the large number of other alternatives to boostback. Jon Goff had a recent “lecture series” about these.
I understand that this is just one program, but this should not gain the status of the reusables approach of the air force – stuff like that easily happens.
Master Design Fallacy
They also discard evolution and competition – instead just requiring a single masterfully designed prototype before something operational. Sure, this is much better than starting a multi-billion dollar program without a first lower cost prototype, but nevertheless, it sucks. Somebody brief them on newspace! Rand Simberg, Monte Davis, Jonathan Goff, Clark Lindsey, or one of the numerous people who get it. Or one of the prominent company leaders: John Carmack, Jeff Greason, David Masten.
An Ideal Program
Just specify some boost delta vee points and let companies demonstrate progress towards that. A popup tailflame lander would perhaps give more vertical velocity while some good glider or even a booster that has engines for cruising back could boost far down range to give lots of horizontal velocity. There ain’t a clear winner – there might not even be and multiple approaches would have their uses.
Gravity Loss (now moved to gravityloss.com) 