WI: The Sea Dragon succeeds Apollo?

While working on my most recent ASB TL I have started focusing on a little known rocket design known as the Sea Dragon

So let us suppose for a moment that Nixon when reviewing his options following Apollo decides that the cost of manned space travel is too high. He deems the shuttle to be nothing but giant sinkhole for money and a "bus to nowhere." The threat of NASA losing all funding and an end to an American manned space program sometime in the early to mid nineties causes the big whigs at the space agency to maybe just maybe find common sense for a moment.

They decide that as much as they need the shuttle, something else is better than nothing. So someone with some knowledge of the Sea Dragon and some damned intelligence in his head puts forward the suggestion that NASA can subsist on a reduced budget and still compete with the Russian space station by using this cheap and large capacity booster platform.

Nixon likes the idea, it is much cheaper than the proposed shuttle, it requires little research to go forward, and has more than enough lift capacity for the purpose of placing a space station in orbit and keeping it supplied and manned.

So what happens if in the early 70's NASA replaces the Saturn V with the sea dragon?

I thought this would be about a Chinese version of Sea Lion.

Noravea said:

I thought this would be about a Chinese version of Sea Lion.

Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure how an amphibious invasion could succeed either a space program or a Greek god.

Difficult because of how much support there was in NASA and the Air Force for the Space Shuttle. Von Braun and his Germans always believed that reusable Space Shuttles were the only way to make a spacefaring future a reality. Even the Saturn V was, to them, a deviation from the plan. It doesn't help, either, that the rising tide of environmentalism makes anything with the word "reusable" in it popular. And, though the Sea Dragon first stage was to be reusable, we must assume that the first few would not be, if only from the sheer difficulty of, well, keeping that massive kerolox stage from being destroyed on impact.

The Air Force in particular wanted several things out of NASA's next program. First, the Air Force always wanted its own astronauts up there doing Department of Defense missions. Second, a spaceplane for retrieval of reconaissance satellites (unofficially, Russian ones as well). Third, the Air Force wanted to get into space without the Navy's help. Hence, any sea-launched system has problems in that regard.

Finally, what exactly will the 500-tonne-to-LEO rocket do in the 1970s? Apollo was scrubbed, and reopening the Lunar Module production lines would still give you spacecraft that would be far too small to justify 500-tonnes to LEO (which translates to something on the order of 100 tonnes on the Lunar Surface, rather than the LM's 10). Giant space stations are a possibility, but for something on that scale, you'd have trouble finding followers. Unless you get Presidential Support for "Super Apollo," Sea Dragon will be a rocket without a mission, rather like the Space Shuttle for the first 15 years of operation.

Start small. Have NASA go with the Excalibur rocket, from the same guy who designed Sea Dragon. Basically a Saturn V-sized 1/10 scale model of the Sea Dragon, to prove several cost-saving features, like the pressure-fed engines. If that can bring cost-to-LEO down, it'll open the way for a return to the Moon at a later point.

Cook said:

Do you seriously think Sea Dragon would ever get Environmental Protection Agency Approval?

Click to expand...

Well, if the global market for satellites stays the same, and you launch everything on a Sea Dragon, the net carbon emissions stay the same, no?

Though the noise would probably deafen hundreds of dolphins and whales.

Polish Eagle said:

Well, if the global market for satellites stays the same, and you launch everything on a Sea Dragon, the net carbon emissions stay the same, no?

Though the noise would probably deafen hundreds of dolphins and whales.

Click to expand...

The shock wave would kill every marine animal for tens of kilometres.
It'd be the biggest dinomite fishing party in history!

I was given to understand that the Sea Dragon was designed to launch from the sea mainly as a cost saving measure, effectively so that they wouldn't need to invest in a large scale launch facility, also the plan was to build them in an old navy yard. So launching from land should be doable. Also, wouldn't getting rid of the need for a large ballast tank to fill up for the purpose of standing it on end save a lot of space?

Although I suppose that it is more than reasonable to see a smaller pressure fed design approved in stead.

Although, if Nixon is intransigent enough, the folks over at NASA would almost have to give in and discard the shuttle. It may not be what they want, but it's better than nothing. Too bad it would take them decades before they could realize that due to shrinking budgets that the shuttle if it had managed to get completed would have been a shadow of what they wanted it to be. Also they would have had to have realized that funding it would have cost them nearly every other project too.

Of course in an ATL AH.COM, folks like me would be pining over the idea of NASA deciding to go for the "clearly superior" shuttle design and how much better off the space program would be today if they had introduced a working reusable space plane.

This of course would be right after looking at the pics from the latest manned mission to mars .

sigh what could have been.

Say it does happen after Apollo instead of Shuttle. Work is in progress, oil crisis hits and as OTL talk about space solar appears (that in OTL suggested the need for Sea Dragon class LVs). Likely that synergy makes Carter administration support Sea Dragon to its fruition.


Now, OTOH, Sea Dragon is a UHLLV, not a crew launcher. So maybe original small crew launch shuttle flying on a Titan III or a modified Delta.

First dragon flies in '80 for ease of comparison. Say that first years have a single launch per year for testing and evaluation. Its still a space station up in one launch; a space telescope to dwarf Hubble in another. Due to lack of modern miniaturization it would take couple of launches for SBSPP demo.

This is really ASB, and I'll tell you why: The public doesn't really support NASA, per se (there's been research--look up Geoffery Landis). That doesn't mean they oppose it, just that most people would rather keep NASA's budget relatively constant, let them do what they do relatively quietly, and spend money mainly on day-to-day concerns.

So. It's '69/'70. Public support for massive space exploration, which was hardly there in the first place even at the best of times, is basically zip, aside from the hardcore crowd. The US is facing a number of major issues--the new social programs instituted by Johnson, the Vietnam War and the problems with the military revealed by it, and so forth--and Nixon, as much as he loved astronauts (and he really, really did), is politically savvy enough to know that NASA budgets are going to have to fall, dramatically, in the future. Even if he didn't want them to do so, Congress is definitely going to cut their budgets (remember, this is the era of William Proxmire). Thus, any plan involving guarantees of massive future exploration--IOW, any program that involves developing UHLLVs, which don't have any economic Earth orbit use--is dead on arrival at Congress (and indeed, the ludicrous Paine plans never got anywhere).

Meanwhile, NASA has what can only be described as a massive love affair with the Shuttle. It is, in their minds, one of if not the most important thing for their future space plans, since it will dramatically reduce the costs of shipping things to and from orbit. All of their plans, studies, designs, and so on emphasize, above all else, the need for this low-cost transportation. Even with their basic constraints, NASA is willing to cut dramatically on the capabilities of the shuttle to get it within the demands of the OMB. Naturally, Congress and the President are going to go with the decision to build the Shuttle--one backed not only by the not-inconsiderable power of NASA itself, but also by the formidable support (or at least grudging acceptance) of the OMB. The Sea Dragon, and other such speculative ventures that would have been useful only for those dead Mars exploration plans, won't have even a toe in the door, let alone a whole foot. They have no chance of being selected.

A minor additional note: NASA actually wanted the basic 65,000 lb. transport for themselves, and went to the double-delta design partially because it had better design constraints than either the Faget-type straight wings (issues with heating at the wing roots, and other things) or lifting bodies (highly coupled design--changing anything requires changing everything). It would be a good idea to read Heppenheimer's Space Shuttle Decision to understand some of the constraints and obstacles the Shuttle faced. It's maybe not the *best* book out there, but it is good, and freely available courtesy of NASA and the NSS.

My point is not that NASA changes its mind all on its own, but rather that when presented with the plans for the shuttle and its projected timetable Nixon decides that it will cost too much, accomplish too little(can't even get us back to the moon) and take too long to build. He tells the guys at NASA that their days are numbered, they are asking for too much, as you said, he knew that the budget for the agency would have to shrink, so he didn't want to waste money on a project he knew would just get cancelled anyway.

So Paine and his buddies are faced with an existential crisis, their agency will cease to conduct manned space missions once they run out of Saturn Vs. This is essentially the situation at the start of Methusilas' timeline, except here someone at NASA remembers about this really cheap heavy booster called Sea Dragon. So he takes it to the boys at the top and says that maybe if they can produce something cheap enough Nixon will come back to the table. So they go to the drawing board and put out a scaled down version (maybe a half or quarter lift capacity) of sea dragon which launches from land.

So Sea Dragon is more or less a quick save by NASA to keep the whole thing going, an ass pull if you will to save the agency.

Sea Dragon would not be either cheap or quick to develop. The first stage engine specced for it was to provide (no joke) 53 times the thrust of the Saturn V's F1, and that engine took seven years to get ready because of combustion instabilities caused by huge pressure waves running around inside the main combustion chamber. The Sea Dragon engine was to have a combustion chamber enormously larger--probably on the order of hundreds. Scale the issues to match: combustion instabilities are something basically solved through trial and error, but they get worse exponentially with the size of the space they have to play with. Engine development starts in 1970, I'd see the rest of the rocket ready by 1979, and the engine might be ready for the turn of the century.

If Nixon really decides to kill the Shuttle, it's hard to speculate on replacements (though I think there's been a number of previous threads on that topic), but I can say for certain that any notion that Sea Dragon would be the one is basically dead on arrival. There's no budget for it, the basic engineering realities are if anything more difficult than the shuttle, the lift capacity is so big it has no real use in any space program imaginable under realistic budgets (no money for multiple payloads that individually mass more than ISS) and...well, isn't that enough?

e of pi said:

Sea Dragon would not be either cheap or quick to develop. The first stage engine specced for it was to provide (no joke) 53 times the thrust of the Saturn V's F1, and that engine took seven years to get ready because of combustion instabilities caused by huge pressure waves running around inside the main combustion chamber. The Sea Dragon engine was to have a combustion chamber enormously larger--probably on the order of hundreds. Scale the issues to match: combustion instabilities are something basically solved through trial and error, but they get worse exponentially with the size of the space they have to play with. Engine development starts in 1970, I'd see the rest of the rocket ready by 1979, and the engine might be ready for the turn of the century.

If Nixon really decides to kill the Shuttle, it's hard to speculate on replacements (though I think there's been a number of previous threads on that topic), but I can say for certain that any notion that Sea Dragon would be the one is basically dead on arrival. There's no budget for it, the basic engineering realities are if anything more difficult than the shuttle, the lift capacity is so big it has no real use in any space program imaginable under realistic budgets (no money for multiple payloads that individually mass more than ISS) and...well, isn't that enough?

Click to expand...

Do you have a source for this objection? I haven't found it mentioned anywhere that such a problem would exist with the sea dragon, also as I specified, in this case NASA would go with a scaled down version precisely because such a large payload capacity would be considered a bit excessive.

Although I just had the thought that perhaps the airforce would be more inclined to support a Sea Dragon design because it's drastically upscaled payload capacity would mean that you could put a hell of a lot more weight into GTO and polar orbits which as I recall the USAF and DoD had a special interest in doing.

Although cost and schedule overruns weren't enough to stop the shuttle from being developed.

Dan Reilly The Great said:

Do you have a source for this objection? I haven't found it mentioned anywhere that such a problem would exist with the sea dragon, also as I specified, in this case NASA would go with a scaled down version precisely because such a large payload capacity would be considered a bit excessive.

Click to expand...

It follows from knowing about the history of the development of large rocket engines. One of Glushko's signature design styles, for instance, was multiple combustion chambers in a single engine so that combustion instability (and similar problems) were minimized. The RD-170 (used on the boosters for Energia) actually generated more thrust than an F-1, but had 4 combustion chambers and so didn't have anywhere near the issues with combustion instability.

Anyways, if you want a source, here you go. Usenet discussion, but it involves people who seem to know what they're talking about.

truth is life said:

It follows from knowing about the history of the development of large rocket engines. One of Glushko's signature design styles, for instance, was multiple combustion chambers in a single engine so that combustion instability (and similar problems) were minimized. The RD-170 (used on the boosters for Energia) actually generated more thrust than an F-1, but had 4 combustion chambers and so didn't have anywhere near the issues with combustion instability.

Anyways, if you want a source, here you go. Usenet discussion, but it involves people who seem to know what they're talking about.

Click to expand...

thanks for the source, actually, think I'll use the info for my own TL.

You know, one way the SeaDragon got that efficiency's by having a vast payload - maybe improbably big for circumstances. That also means most overall launch capacity'd be mostly wasted in early decades.

Might that be another reason to build smaller ones, at least at first, maybe planning to scale up if cargo needs went up?

Oh, and, one way to get Shuttle cancelled would be to have some science or engineerning advisor or NASA skeptic point out, rightly, that the spaceplane type was then untested. Nixon might then insist on a X-plane testing round first, and the hard heating problems'd show their ugly head. That'd be it for Shuttle for a good, long time.

Dan Reilly The Great said:

While working on my most recent ASB TL I have started focusing on a little known rocket design known as the Sea Dragon

So let us suppose for a moment that Nixon when reviewing his options following Apollo decides that the cost of manned space travel is too high. He deems the shuttle to be nothing but giant sinkhole for money and a "bus to nowhere." The threat of NASA losing all funding and an end to an American manned space program sometime in the early to mid nineties causes the big whigs at the space agency to maybe just maybe find common sense for a moment.

They decide that as much as they need the shuttle, something else is better than nothing. So someone with some knowledge of the Sea Dragon and some damned intelligence in his head puts forward the suggestion that NASA can subsist on a reduced budget and still compete with the Russian space station by using this cheap and large capacity booster platform.

Nixon likes the idea, it is much cheaper than the proposed shuttle, it requires little research to go forward, and has more than enough lift capacity for the purpose of placing a space station in orbit and keeping it supplied and manned.

So what happens if in the early 70's NASA replaces the Saturn V with the sea dragon?

Click to expand...

There's a simple way of (somewhat) connecting Sea Dragon and the shuttle.

POD: autumn 1971. One of the shuttle option NASA administrator Fletcher requested featured a very large pressure-fed booster, together with the Orbiter and external tank we know today.
The pressure fed was the most efficient booster that could be recovered; the Saturn S-IC was too fragile, and NASA hated solid rocket motors.

So: have a pressure-fed booster for the shuttle. Then build a full rocket from it, with or without a pressure-fed second stage.

The shuttle booster was the best chance any pressure fed rocket ever had with NASA.

Much later a private company also tried the pressure-fed rocket, with some success.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/bealba2.htm