The author reviews the state of art of nonrocket launch assistance systems (LASs) for spaceflight focusing on air launch options. The author proposes an alternative technologically feasible LAS based on a combination of approaches: air launch, high-altitude balloon, and tethered LAS. Proposed LAS can be implemented with the existing off-the-shelf hardware delivering 7？kg to low-earth orbit for the 5200？USD per kg. Proposed design can deliver larger reduction in price and larger orbital payloads with the future advances in the aerostats, ropes, electrical motors, and terrestrial power networks. 1. Introduction Spaceflight is the mature engineering discipline—54 years old as of 2012. But seemingly paradoxically, it still relies solely on the hardware and methodology developed in the very beginning of the spaceflight era. Modernly, still heavily-used Soyuz launch vehicle systems (LVSs) are the evolutionary improvement of the R-7 rocket which launched the very first Sputnik satellite. Although many advanced rocket concepts were proposed and even implemented (most notably the Space Shuttle), these designs did not stand the test of the time. The comprehensive review on the current state of art in field of rocket propulsion can be found in [1]. Nonrocket-based spaceflight was also heavily researched, but the research did not result in practical systems other than the Pegasus LVS which is scheduled for retirement. The main reason why nonrocket spaceflight schemes were not widely implemented yet is their failure to compete with the purely rocket spaceflight schemes in the field of the orbital delivery of the high-value payloads like communication satellites or interplanetary probes. But baseline rocket cost denies many less valuable yet desirable payload classes like orbital power or industrial plants or machinery for extraterrestrial resources utilization. To ultimately enable these payload classes, an interim prototype of the nonrocket launch assistance system (LAS) should be developed to launch experimental payloads. Therefore, an economically viable system-level design of the LAS delivered in this paper may be key point to the progress in the orbital delivery systems for these additional payload classes. 2. Overview of Previously Proposed LAS A lot of proposals have been made to implement nonrocket LAS and are listed in Table 1. Table 1: Previously proposed launch assistance systems. The Rumanian Space Agency/ARCASPACE [2] has proposed to launch a moon probe from a high-altitude balloon. If the rocket start altitude of 20？km can be reached, a very
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