Author's Note

Note: I actually did this mission before the moon mission. And yes, I did use the Aeris 4A.

Oh yeah, if you didn't know, I unlocked the aerodynamics path and the science path first and then the rocket path.

Single Stage to Orbit

The administration at Equestrian Aerospace had a plan, to get to space using a plane, a spaceplane to be exact. A spaceplane was not a normal type of plane, it was a plane that is able to get into space, hence its name. They built this spaceplane because waiting for an optimal moon encounter would take a long time.

The spaceplane hanger was ready to deploy the Aeris 4A, a spaceplane that would get into orbit if flown correctly. The spaceplane was designed by Equestria's finest engineers, using parts from Planetshine's C7 Aerospace company. It had front AV-R8 winglets as canards, 2 ramjet engines, a toroidal aerospike engine and RCS as a cherry on top for docking with something like a space station.

The pilot for this mission was Lyra. Lyra would make a better pilot for this mission, not because Planetshine wasn't at the space center, but instead, she had flown a plane before. Her knowledge of flying a plane was better than anypony else, so the administration told her to fly the plane.

The plane taxied to the end of the runway, ready to take off. Lyra started up the throttle, the ramjet engines had a kick to them, accelerating the plane very quickly. She then pitched the plane up a little bit, and it flew. She then retracted the landing gear and then coasted along at about 500m above sea level to gain enough speed to pitch up and get to space.

Once she pitched up, she flattened the plane out and coasted along at about 10000m to gain even more speed until pitching up again to get to space. When the ramjet engines flamed out, the aerospike engine kicked in, getting her apoapsis above the Karman Line.

Once her apoapsis was above the Karman Line, she coasted along pointing prograde to reduce drag and waited for a while until her spaceplane was at its apoapsis. Once it was at apoapsis, she did a small prograde burn to get her into orbit. She was able to do a small prograde burn because her ascent was very efficient.

The spaceplane did one orbit before Lyra pointed her plane retrograde and did a small burn to get herself out of orbit and back to the space center. The retrograde burn only took a while, using only 100 delta-V out of her 400 delta-V remaining from her aerospike engine.

Once she entered the atmosphere, she started spinning her spaceplane to evenly distribute the heat. The cockpit she was in wasn't the best at heat resistance, and would only tolerate so much. The only problem now was that she was going to undershoot the space center's runway. She stopped her spinning once the spaceplane was at a safe speed and started to pitch the spaceplane up.

The spaceplane instantly went up and she then fired up the ramjet engines. She kept the throttle low and flew at a high altitude for a bit before gradually pitching down to land at the runway. The Aeris 4A had a very good glide ratio for what it was because of its delta wings. The wings provided enough lift for a 50m/s touchdown.

She touched down quite close to the start of the runway. The spaceplane landed very softly with a near zero vertical speed. Lyra slammed on the brakes and the spaceplane slowed down to a complete stop. After all that, the administration told her to taxi the spaceplane into the spaceplane hanger for some upgrades, such as better front canards and other things like that.