BAC Mustard

The BAC Mustard, short for Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device, was a reusable launch system concept studied by the British Aircraft Corporation in the mid-1960s. It was meant to work as a multistage rocket whose stages were near-identical winged spaceplane modules, launched upright, separating during the climb and gliding back to land on a runway so that every stage could fly again. The idea grew out of earlier English Electric studies and took the American Douglas Astro proposal as a starting point. In the most detailed design the stack weighed roughly 420 tonnes at launch and was to place about three tonnes in geostationary orbit. Several billion pounds of development funding never appeared, the last major design study dated from early 1967, and the British government ended the project in 1970. Its experience later fed the HOTOL spaceplane programme.