If you put the passengers in fireproof suits, five point harnesses, and heavy crash cages, hit the deck at a shallow angle every time, and don't mind losing your passengers and crew every couple hundred flights (at least one NASCAR driver dies on the track every year, just not usually in a Winston Cup race), this would work fine.
Fireproof suits, full restraints, acceleration couches, and crash cages seem to be perfectly reasonable additions to a man-rated cabin system.
But you're going to hit the deck straight on at somewhere north of 100 m/sec. If you stop in 2 meters, you'll pulling 255 g. If you want the load around 100 g, you need 5 meters. If you want the load around 20 g, the maximum I would allow to ensure passenger survival, you need a full 25 meters. That assumes the vehicle collapses uniformly, like one of John's nosecones. That won't happen; some of the plumbing and ironmongery will resist destruction and send your g load through the ceiling and your pipes through your passengers. If you set a design criterion that this not happen, your designer is *really* going to hate you.
You seem to forget how big an SSTO or TSTO upper stage big enough to carry passengers really is. It's a *BIG* vehicle -- 10m of tank length is probably the small end of the range. It should not be terribly difficult to make that tank collapse uniformly, like one of John's nosecones. It doesn't matter that the propulsion section, which will hit first, will not collapse uniformly, because absorbing the impact energy is the job of the tankage -- you simply ignore the length of the propulsion section. You just need to keep the pipes from going through the passenger cabin, which should just be a matter of placing thing appropriately and guarding the cabin correctly.
Your G spec is conservative to the point of absurdity. People have taken sustained accelerations higher than that in centrifuges and rocket sleds, and we're talking about a transient acceleration delivered in the optimum orientation. 50 gees or higher peak acceleration is not unreasonable. You need the passengers and/or cargo to survive a crash, not be completely uninjured.
Rather than design a vehicle that crashes safely, why not design one that doesn't crash?
Because experience has shown that it is not possible, and making a vehicle that virtually never crashes (like a jet airliner) requires decades of experience and billions of dollars.
-p
Mars or Bust! www.marssociety.com
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