The Kistler K-1 was a two-stage reusable rocket under development by Kistler Aerospace from 1994 on. The K-1 was designed to place a 10,000-pound payload  in Low Earth Orbit. The K-1 was originally intended to launch constellations of Low Earth Orbit communication satellites. When the LEO communication satellite market collapsed, K-1 development lapsed into dormancy. It was briefly revived when the bankrupt Kistler Aerospace was purchased by the suborbital startup Rocketplane LLC, which became Rocketplane Kistler.

The merged company attempted to market the K-1 to NASA as an International Space Station resupply vehicle under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. This effort was unsuccessful. In 2007, NASA cancelled the K-1 COTS contract. Rocketplane Kistler declared bankruptcy a short while later.

At the time the K-1 was in development, the design raised some eyebrows among observers due to its unusual recovery mode. The K-1 was to be launched from a desert location (either the Nevada nuclear weapons test site or the Woomera launch site in Australia). Both stages were designed to land in the desert using a system of very large parachutes (six on the first stage, three on the second stage) and airbags. The stages would then be recovered with “a crew of less than 10 people,″ returned to the launch site, cleaned, and prepared for the next with, supposedly, minimal refurbishment.

Skeptics wondered how reusable the K-1 would turn out to be in practice. The parachute-and-airbag landing mode did not appear to be very robust; it would only take one rock in the wrong place to cause significant damage. (One Air Force officer with considerable rocket development experience told us that if Kistler made it to flight status, he planned to buy stock in any publicly traded company that made industrial x-ray machines.)

It turns out, though, that the K-1 landing mode was not original to Kistler. If Kistler’s application was questionable, however, the original application was little short of insane.

In 1958, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency recommended the development of a “transport missile.″ It was suggested that the Redstone rocket, developed by Dr. Wernher von Braun at the ABMA’s Redstone Arsenal, could be adapted to carry up to six soldiers or a small amount of cargo on a suborbital trajectory. The objective was to rapidly deliver forces to the battlefield.

Oddly enough, the development of the Redstone Transport Missile was justified on economic grounds. The ABMA stated that, “The cost versus effectiveness of rocket transportation compared to fixed-wing aircraft transportation appears to demand that rocket transportation be substituted for the conventional aircraft transport system in the immediate future.″ This statement is rather dumbfounding. At the time, the Redstone had a flyaway cost of about $2 million – nearly $16 million in today’s dollars. $2.6 million per soldier is a lot of money for a parachute drop. The C-130 Hercules, which was just coming into service, cost more than the Redstone missile but a C-130 could be flown thousands of times  – and it carried more than six troops.

There does not seem to have been any consideration given to making the Redstone Transport Missile reusable. In any case, it would have been extremely hard to reuse the Redstone Transport in an operational scenario because, unlike the C-130, it could not self-recover.

There are also questions about whether troops would still be fit for combat after the trajectory sequence shown here.

As shown in the following following drawing, the Redstone Transport recovery mode and design of the upper stage bore an uncanny resemblance to the Kistler K-1 which came along almost 40 years later. The most notable difference is the use of two retrorockets, which the K-1 lacked, for final touchdown braking.

The similarity of the Redstone Transport and the K-1 may be more than coincidence. The K-1 was designed by Kistler chairman George Mueller. Decades earlier, Mueller ran the Apollo program as NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight. In that position, Mueller of course worked closely with von Braun. Although Mueller did not work on the Redstone, it seems like that he would have discussed the Redstone with von Braun from time to time, possibly including the Redstone Transport program.