LEVIATHAN Rising: An Alternative Space Age

Juumanistra · Jan 4, 2022

Visions of Futures Part #3: Operation Bloody Wanker
Keeping It Real [>] Authorium [>] Institutional Desperation
A branch of public choice economic theory tells us that a bureaucracy will, by its very nature, respond to incentives to maximize utility for itself. As the humans who control the bureaucracy are not always rational, this can lead “utility” to take on some very peculiar definitions. Which also leads to very strange decisions and very strange bedfellows. Which brings us to the subject of this entry and the birth of the PGM-17 Tyr.

By the beginning of 1955, the USAF found itself in an institutional pickle, as the Eisenhower Administration was pushing aggressively for the development a new intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) to “fill the gap” until the first American ICBMs came online. There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm from both the USAF’s engineers and senior leadership for an IRBM program, believing it to be a dead-end that would only distract from the USAF’s own ICBM, Atlas. Notwithstanding such, the Army’s Redstone Arsenal had been working on an IRBM of its own and, even more worryingly, it would be ready several years prior to Atlas. And if the Army’s IRBM design went unchallenged, that could threaten the USAF’s future control of the American missile-based strategic deterrent, as the Army had already begun to argue it should possess the future American ICBM arsenal. So preliminary requirements were hastily defined – identical to those of the Army’s IRBM requirements – and a crash design undertaken to create a new missile, which was dubbed “Thor”. The design was submitted to the Secretary of Defense in October 1955, along with the Army’s Jupiter IRBM and a non-proposal from the Navy intended primarily to show the flag.

Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson vetoed the Navy’s proposal due to its lack of refinement and the USAF’s on the basis that it offered no meaningfully different capabilities to those of the Army’s Jupiter, which was also a more mature design. Wilson further proved unpersuaded by the USAF’s arguments that Thor would be air-deployable to Europe with existing transport aircraft or that it would use the same warhead intended for Atlas and serve as a testbed for it. If the USAF wanted an IRBM, Wilson flatly told the USAF, it could join the Army in the co-development of Jupiter, just as the Navy had been murmuring of doing since August. It would further, in Wilson’s opinion, constitute a waste of taxpayer dollars to fund two IRBMs with an identical suite of operational capabilities.

This snubbing sent shockwaves through the USAF’s Pentagon-based bureaucracy. As this preferencing of the Army was, despite its veneer of fiscal responsibility, without question a punishment. (That the USAF had to investigate what precisely it was being punished over -- which was its perceived intriguing in the selection of Project Vanguard -- is itself worthy of its own Authorium entry.) And because of its being a punishment, the Secretary of Defense’s accountants would be paying an inordinate amount of attention to the USAF’s discretionary funds for any spending on Thor. This was because the service’s traditional response to receiving bad news from a political appointee was funding a project with those same funds, in the hopes that by the time it matured, the project’s merits could be reargued. It appeared that if the USAF wished to participate in the IRBM sphere, it would have to give precedence to the Army, with the horrific precedent such set for the looming fights over control of the nation’s land-based ICBMs.

Or so it seemed, until a call was received from the Royal Air Force’s attaché stationed at the British Embassy.

For several years, the British government had been pushing to engage in greater design cooperation between American and British firms in aerospace projects, especially in the field of rocketry. Both the USAF and the wider Eisenhower Administration had rebuffed those inquiries, believing them to be little more than ploys to bankroll programs the British themselves were not willing to fund and which, in any event, took work away from American aerospace firms. The Embassy had heard – through proper channels, of course – of the USAF’s situation and be remiss not to inform them that the RAF was currently developing an IRBM of its own, Blue Streak, with operational capabilities quite similar to what Thor’s purportedly were. And as, pursuant to the Wilson-Sandys Agreement, IRBM development a British competency, should the USAF wish to collaborate in Blue Streak’s development, the RAF would certainly welcome the USAF’s participation. Though while the United States was already paying a portion of Blue Streak’s development budget per the Wilson-Sandys Agreement, should the USAF wish to ensure its operational needs are met, it would be expected to provide the necessary additional funds.

The subtext of the British proposal was clear. So clear, in fact, a good case could be made it was just “the text”. If it participated, the USAF would be expected to foot the bill for designing and deploying a British missile that it would have, in all likelihood, precious little say over the design of. Such would also take work away from an American firm: Douglas had been the anticipated contractor for Thor. But, on the other hand, Douglas could take the hit, thanks to the Navy continuing to fund the D-671 very high-altitude rocket plane over the USAF’s objection. And, far more importantly, the USAF would get its IRBM that was free of the Army’s control. As while the Secretary of Defense would be watching for line-items related to Thor, those same eyes would almost certainly miss surging “international allied technical assistance” expenditures. And the USAF could hardly be blamed for deepening the American relationship in the project, as the Secretary of Defense himself had said fiscal responsibility demanded supporting already in-development systems. The Memorandum of Understanding committing the USAF to co-development of Blue Streak was signed on December 1, 1955, the day prior to the Navy’s formally signing onto Jupiter.

So just remember, when your plot requires a governmental official to do something profoundly counterintuitive to his or her nominal interests, try applying a parochial careerist’s lens to the situation. It can do worlds of good to justify the behavior you need to occur and ground your character’s actions. And might just provide even more fodder for story-telling.
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Author's Notes
Chapter 10 continues to be glacially worked on, so you get more filler. Maybe also because, after yesterday, Blue Streak was on my mind more than it should've been. Events collide into one another and produce butterflies by the score. I did promise Thor was going to have an unpleasant time of it, though. Probably weren't expecting it to have this much of a hard time. To say nothing of the recipe for dysfunction Blue Streak's development could get if the USAF is fully involved and intending to use the Franken-missile created as TTL's Thor equivalent.

Is this whole premise the kind of thing that seems like a setup for something from Yes, Minister? Absolutely. My mind's eye refuses to let go of the vision of a subplot from the Trident episode of Yes, Prime Minister where ever more elaborate and ridiculous schemes are devised by the Civil Service to get the USAF to pay for Trident and put the kibosh on the PM's plans to pull the plug on it.

Schlock · Jan 4, 2022

I could see this happening all too easily. After all, the USAF and RAF are allies in the perpetual war against their natural enemies, the Army and Navy of their respective nations.

Juumanistra · Jan 7, 2022

Chapter 10: A Case of Reveling in Over-the-top Names in Your Musings (ACRONYM)
In popular mythology, PRISM and Halfway to Everywhere are one and the same. As with much in the popular mythology, however, that is not entirely accurate. They are, in fact, only synonymous. Like MAVEN, PRISM was a classified study by the Department of Rocketry whose contents would, formally, remain classified for decades after its delivery in November 1955. Unlike MAVEN, much of PRISM did not warrant classification: Lightly redacted versions of the report would be leaked by 1957 and, by end of the decade, the Navy would itself release an officially redacted version for public consumption. Those unclassified sections were taken, greatly expanded upon, and published in book form as Halfway to Everywhere in May 1956. PRISM and Halfway to Everywhere also had very different purposes: PRISM was generated to build a bridge to the operating environment envisioned by MAVEN, while Halfway to Everywhere was a propaganda tract written to garner political support for PRISM’s specific goals and – especially – those of its anticipated successor programs.

In some important ways, between MAVEN and PRISM, the latter had the easier task intellectually. For if MAVEN had been the proverbial blind man describing an elephant, PRISM was the case of trying to put together a puzzle without knowing what it was supposed to look like. For PRISM had, from head of the Department of Rocketry, a mandate to put together its “puzzle” of manned spaceflight by further defining its requirements, considering conceptual solutions to its problems, and making programmatic recommendations necessary to allow it to occur within the “achievable” future. But what PRISM lacked in intellectual difficulties, however, was more than made up for in mathematical requirements. As PRISM was expected to produce the basis for a workable space program, complete with specific enough requirements that Requests for Proposals could be solicited from industry.

Complicating PRISM’s work immediately was the fact that its “puzzle box” did not contain all of the pieces that would be required to complete its work. The Department of Rocketry’s own manned spaceflight program was a mish-mashed combination of projects in wildly different states development, with the Launcher Branch’s Tethys rocket in formal development on a flyable final product, the Astronautics Branch’s Project Charybdis rapidly approaching the point of issuing study contracts for designs for the Naval Observatory Orbital Extension, and Task Force LEVIATHAN possessing an entire filing cabinet of half-baked ideas dating back to the days of the LEVIATHAN Group. (There was also the Charybdis-derived Boom-Sat Mark II, but given the murmurings emerging from the MAVEN team, it was quickly determined the less said about that the better.) The Naval Research Laboratory’s Department of Rocketry was not, however, the only Naval entity working on manned very high-altitude aerospace projects. The Bureau of Aeronautics’ ongoing work on the Douglas D-671 attested to that. Similar work could be counted on to be occurring in the other services which was unknown to PRISM and to which it would never be privy, due to its being a very small fish in the very large pond that was the Pentagon. That was also to say nothing of collaborative efforts between the services, such as that by the Navy, Air Force, and NACA on what would become the X-15. And surely the other services were also at least daydreaming about manned spaceflight: Wernher von Braun remained in the employ of the Army, after all, and the Air Force could be counted on to be doing so as much out of spite as anything else.

Worse still for the Department of Rocketry, PRISM had no institutional incentive to inquire as to the state of spaceflight programming elsewhere within the American government. As if either the Army or Air Force were consulted at this juncture, counterprogramming would be inevitable. The Redstone Arsenal team would tackle it simply out of joy for the subject-matter and already had plans on the shelf for sending men to the Moon and Mars courtesy of Collier’s and Mars Project. The Air Force could be expected to design its own space program as well, because space belonged to them, and if they had to fire a man out of a cannon to plant the Air Force’s banner there to prove it, that would at the very least be worth a study contract to Lockheed.

That institutional mentality was where the PRISM team decided its work had to begin, with the organization of a truly American space program from at least four squabbling and fractiously jockeying ones The easiest solution would be to simply take the various programs of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and NACA and consolidate them into a single agency. The problem with that was with that was determining with whom the spoils would reside, as all three of the services as well as NACA could make credible claims -- to varying degrees -- to being the logical home for all space-related endeavors. And that winner of the prize of space would likely have to fight a bloody war of conquest to actually take control of their hard-won territory, as the losers of the fight would vigorously resist giving up as much as they could. (And no one can be counted on to fight harder than a scorned Pentagon bureaucrat.)

An alternative would be to consolidate the programs into an entirely new agency, but it would be born under the ill-omen of having the whole of the Pentagon aligned against it. Assuming, of course, that such an agency was not itself housed in the Pentagon, as the Department of Defense’s very real military needs for orbital access – and very deep pockets – made it the logical place to house a new, integrated space agency. And in any event, the Navy had no real institutional interest in suggesting either option. As teeing-up the question was tantamount to handing control of all space-related activities to the Air Force, given the Air Force’s reaction to Tethys and how the debate over the U.S.S. United States had ended.

What was needed, rather, was something which recognized the fundamental nature of the American government. The services were proud and truculent, which did not lend itself well to coercion. They could, however, be convinced. And the most persuasive thing in the world of Pentagon politics – short of a series of very public firings of flag officers in short succession – was the promise of money. An interagency board dedicated to coordinating space-related activities and armed with the ability to make or break the budgets of its constituent members would do much to solve the problem of coordinating and harnessing the whole government’s efforts in this sphere. And this Astronautical Sciences, Technology, and Research Authority (ASTRA) – as the PRISM whimsically dubbed it – would pose no threat to the existing bureaucratic order, as ASTRA would be a forum in which to coordinate policy, mediate disputes, and if necessary act as an arbitrator for competing proposals. It further would not have any independent programmatic capabilities of its own, existing only to provide funding and resolve disputes between space-facing agencies.

There was another salutary aspect to ASTRA. It neatly resolved the question of whether the nation’s efforts in space should be civilian-led or military-led. As while there was no question that there were legitimate military needs in orbit, there was a general unease with the implications of a military-led space program as well as a general antipathy – even from MAVEN – for the “militarization” of space. ASTRA would allow for the creation of a truly national space program which was civilian-led, without also compromising the services’ respective abilities to undertake space-facing projects necessary for the performance of their own duties.

As good of an idea as ASTRA might be, PRISM could do little more than note so, as it would require a literal act of Congress to adopt. A vision for the Navy’s near- and medium-term space operations offered more fertile soil for immediate implementation. Informed by MAVEN’s own increasingly well-defined vision of the future of space operations, PRISM anticipated that the Navy’s space program would require partition into three constituent components: An entity to launch and operate the Navy’s space-based assets; an entity to develop of space-related systems; and an entity to conduct space-facing scientific research. To accomplish that, PRISM envisioned:

Creation of a Naval Astronautical Service, vested with the authority to maintain and operate the Navy’s rockets, spaecships, space stations, and all of the infrastructure necessary to utilize them, including the physical launching plant and all requisite terrestrial training and support facilities.
Severing the Department of Rocketry from the Naval Research Laboratory structuring and reconstituting it as an independent institution, the Naval Space Research Center, headquartered in the still-unbuilt Goddard Annex to the NRL. The intent would be to give the Navy an in-house space-related research center of comparable size, complexity, and specialization to the NACA research centers and the Atomic Energy Commission’s national laboratories.
Expansion of the Naval Observatory’s and Naval Research Laboratory’s mandates and resources to allow it to be the premiere Naval participants in and patrons of spaceborne scientific and exploration missions.
Establish a Chief of the Naval Space Program on the Navy Staff and place the Naval Astronautical Service, Naval Space Research Center, Naval Observatory, and Naval Research Laboratory into that Chief’s chain of command.

Often remarked upon by future readers would be the striking similarities between what PRISM proposed and the then-ongoing reorganization of the Naval Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships. Which, PRISM’s drafters would be quick to point out, was intentional. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program was likewise a visionary technical program of such importance that a significant reorganization of the Navy was required to fully realize its potential. That the position of Chief of the Naval Space Program was as transparently intended for Robert Heinlein as the Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program was for Hyram Rickover was hoped to be ignored, at least in polite company.

With a much firmer idea of how the Naval Space Program might be organized and function, the PRISM team was left with only the rather simple task of actually design it. PRISM began its programmatic work by outlining a three-stage approach to reaching the operating environment which MAVEN was envisioning, in addition to the satisfaction of MAVEN’s physical requirements:

Stage I of the Naval space program would be dedicated to figuring out basic questions regarding man’s ability to survive during exoatmospheric operations, as such basic astromedical questions of whether a human would be able to stay conscious – or even alive -- in weightlessness remained unanswered. Significant information could be gained from continued biomedical testing with sounding rockets, as well as from very high-altitude aircraft testing like the X-15. A natural progression from there would be -- should the D-671 be delivered on time and with the performance as advertised -- suborbital testing both below and above the Karman line. Such suborbital testing would produce the first American in space by the end of 1960.
Stage II of the Naval space program would be dedicated to developing to learning basic orbital skills and developing the requisite expertise to conduct larger-scale and more ambitious operations. Such skills would include skills in orbital rendezvous and docking, orbital construction, and extravehicular activities, with objectives including gathering astromedical data about the long-term effects of zero-gravity upon astronauts and gaining greater knowledge of space as an environment. This Stage will also be spent testing and validating design concepts for use in future missions, such as orbital propellant depots and nuclear rocket engines. Stage II is anticipated to commence early in 1961, with the delivery of Tethys, and to extend through at least the mid-Sixties.
Stage III of the Naval space program would be dedicated to developing the tools and infrastructure to maintain a permanent orbital presence and practicing the skills necessary to discharge the Navy’s orbital responsibilities as defined by MAVEN. A key feature of this Stage would be the deployment of advanced iterations of orbital structures previously validated in Stage II. The skills sought to be cultivated would include regular inter-orbital flight, on-demand in-orbit refueling, the scheduled maintenance of orbital structures, and routine rotation of crews to and from orbital duty-stations. Stage III’s commencement would be dependent upon the particular successes of Stage II, but was anticipated to not begin until at least January 1, 1966.
The final stage of the Naval space program would be the creation of the MAVENite operating environment itself. This would be the engineering of the Naval Space Station and vehicles necessary to provide PIRANHA and SAINT capabilities, as well as the boosting systems to place them in orbit and all other systems necessary to support them. If MAVEN’s administrative timetables are adhered to for engineering work, this Stage should be reached between Calendar Years 1973 and 1975.

With a general plan devised, more specific programming could be devised. This was, after much slogging and puzzling, were the tasks which made the whole project worthwhile for the PRISM team. As these would be what, it was hoped, would constitute the backbone of the Naval Space Program. To further refine its terms, PRISM opted for a ten-year baseline of what constituted “the achievable” future. It also opted to leave aside discussions of Tethys, as it was already under active development and was assumed to be the launcher of choice for the Naval Space Program. From there, PRISM focused on nine major programs which would fully-fledge the Naval Space Program:

The Equatorial Orbital Operations Laboratory (EOOL; “yule”), a first-generation space station intended to validate basic principles of orbital construction, the operation of on-orbit structures, and – once in operation – provide a base of operations for near-orbital activities in equatorial orbits of similar inclinations. Intended crew of between 4 and 6, with the station to be fully constructed with fewer than six Tethys launches required. Systems to be derived from earlier work on Naval Observatory Orbital Extension and Boom-Sat Mark II. Station flexibility and expandability is paramount given nature of Stage II space operations. Design should be finalized no later than December 31, 1960, with construction of payloads completed by the end of 1962 and construction to occur by mid-1963.
The Polar Orbital Operations Laboratory (POOL), a second-generation space station intended to implement lessons learned from EOOL and validate more advanced orbital construction techniques and ideas, as well as provide a platform – once completed – for near-orbital operations in polar orbits near those reachable from the POOL’s launch-site. Precise features of the POOL will vary depending upon exact lessons acquired from EOOL but will almost certainly be greater in size and complexity. Of particular interest will be downward-looking telescope mountings for both scientific and photo-reconnaissance purpose. Natural follow-on project for Project Charybdis project team. Stage III-necessary program, with a design-finalization date no sooner than 1966 and deployment no sooner than 1969.
The Reactant Depot Constellation (REDCON), PRISM’s great hope for democratizing orbital access and simplifying future missions. The REDCON would provide ready stores of liquid oxygen and one or more propellants in-orbit, removing the need for a particular spacecraft to be boosted up the gravity well. Oxygen would be provided by a Low-Orbital Oxygen-gathering Magazine (LOOM) that skimmed the upper atmosphere and collected oxygen and other useful gases. Propellant would be boosted up the gravity well and be stored in High-Orbital Propellant Stations (HOPS) that could be docked with and fueled from by orbital spacecraft. Due to the conceptual nature of LOOM and HOPS, significant further technical refinement is required before either is ready for practical engineering. Stage III-desirable program but requiring flying during Stage II to validate basic operational principles and utility.
The Maritime Positioning System (MAPS), the flying iteration of Project BOWDITCH. Estimated constellation of between two and three dozen BOWDITCH-capable units, placed into geosynchronous orbits. Satellite is anticipated to be BOWDITCH 3 iteration, with Doppler-shifting, geodesy, and radio-triangulation navigation capabilities. Delivery date of first satellite estimated for mid-1960. Constellation rollout dependent upon funding but estimated to be completed by no later than the end of 1965.
An Interservice Communications Constellation (ICCON), consisting of at least three Synchronous Communications Relays (SCOREs) in geosynchronous orbit, to allow for global military communications without need to rely upon atmospheric radio transmissions. Two competing proposals are envisioned: One consisting of between three and six “large”, manned SCOREs – the conceptual successors of the Clarkelite concept – and a much larger constellation of unmanned satellites based off of the BOWDITCH 3. Clarkelite-derived ICCON is a Stage III-desirable program; reuse of BOWDITCH hardware would mean the ICCON could be flying in the same timeframe as MAPS.
The Orbital Deployment and Return (ORDER) system to place men in orbit and return them to Earth safely. ORDER would be expected to conform to Tethys’s known performance, not massing more than 8,000 pounds in all-up configuration and carrying a crew of two. Missions to include delivery to and return of crew from orbit, demonstration of orbital rendezvous and docking principles, and validating basic spacecraft operating principles. ORDER most likely to be a ballistic capsule, but all submissions from industry should be investigated. Delivery date should be no later than January 1, 1961.
The Advanced Polar-Launched Local Orbiter (APOLLO) spaceship to undertake orbital missions from the POOL or, if incomplete, then EOOL. Precise mass restrictions are dependent upon future launchers, but APOLLO should be able to undertake independent missions lasting for up to two weeks with a crew of three or four while being possessing a delta-v of at least 25,000 feet-seconds and ability to fuel on-orbit. Mission profiles include flights to and from the EOOL/POOL, GEO, and – with suitable modifications – cis-Lunar space. Modularity and flexibility are paramount given wide array of potential missions. Stage III-necessary program, design should be finalized no later than December 31, 1965 and flown no earlier than 1966.
A Near-Earth Orbital Tug (NEOT; “newt”) with which to maneuver spaceborne objects. A tug is envisioned as being needed as immediately as the construction of the EOOL due to the need to manage spent upper-stages and facilitate the joining-up of payload modules. There will further need to be a family of NEOTs in all likelihood to account for an array of differently sized and massed objects which require handling. Precise specifications will need to be defined as the EOOL’s specifications are finalized. Stage II-desirable program, with design ideally to be flying concurrently with EOOL-construction payloads.
The Tethys-derived Heavier Applications Launcher for Sustained Space Activities (THALASSA), the follow-on and successor to Tethys. The lessons of the Viking program were that significant gains could be attained via iteration on existing designs, and the most likely platform to provide stouter boosting capabilities than Tethys would be an evolution of it. THALASSA was projected to provide a payload of at least 30,000 pounds to a 120-mile orbit at a cost per pound of no more than one-half that of Tethys. It was further assumed that THALASSA would serve as the launcher for APOLLO, POOL, REDCON, and all other Stage III programming.

With its grand vision of major projects fleshed out, the back-end necessary to allow them to be achieved still needed contemplating. The work would need to begin with the proposed Naval Astronautical Service, as it was the Naval Astronautical Service who would be tasked with the actual undertaking of rocketry operations. A launch site would need to be determined, as well as the requisite launching infrastructure built or expanded, plus whatever other build-up would be required to transport rockets to the launch site and otherwise sustain launch operations. Given the prominence of the D-671 program in its Stage I plans, the Naval Astronautical Service would also need to get a seat at the table in its development, as well as procure airframes once a flyable aircraft was delivered. And lastly – but most importantly – it would need pilots, whose experience with the D-671 would create the nucleus of an astronaut corps. There’d also need to be the creation of facilities to train that astronaut corps as well.

The Naval Space Research Center, meanwhile, would need stood up. As envisioned by PRISM, it would be constituted from three great “design centers”, one for Orbital Structures, one for Space Vehicles, and one for Rockets. The Orbital Structures Design Center would continue to be referred to as “Charybdis”, given its origins; the Space Vehicles Design Center would likewise retain its in-house designation of “Scylla”, intended as it always had been for the manned craft program to go with the stations designed by Charybdis. The proposed Rocketry Design Center would also need an internal designation: “Cetus” was settled on, in no small part due to the unspoken ambition of building the truly monstrous rockets that would allow for doing of truly great things.

Beyond the NAS and NSRC, there was also the Naval Observatory and Naval Research Lab and their contributions. Money – and the freedom to spend it -- was what both institutions would require in order to fulfill their roles in the Naval Space Program, though it could reasonably be assumed that a significant portion of the NRL’s time and attention would be focused on managing the rollout of MAPS, at least for the immediate future. The Naval Observatory’s near-term contribution could be expected to be to the EOOL’s optical telescope, which remained an important component of the proposed mission. Beyond those, however, the topic of specific possible missions was tabled for the time being beyond asking for what one PRISM member would (aptly) describe as “the world’s biggest burlap sack of money”.

And figuring out how many burlap sacks of money the Naval Space Program, as thus far envisioned, would require was the point which PRISM had reached. And it was not a pretty scene:

Naval Space Program Projected Costs (CY 1956 to CY 1965 in 1955 dollars)
Naval Astronautical Service: $1,025,000,000.00
* Launch Facility Development: $250,000,000.00
* Terrestrial Tracking Infrastructure: $75,000,000.00
* D-671 Development: $65,000,000.00
* Stage I Program Launches: $25,000,000.00
* Stage II Program Launches: $360,000,000.00
* MAPS Launches: $50,000,000.00
* Service-Related Launches: $150,000,000.00
*NAS Operating Expenses: $50,000,000.00

Naval Space Research Center: $3,200,000,000.00
* Charybdis Development Projects: $1,250,000,000.00
* Scylla Development Projects: $600,000,000.00
* Cetus Development Projects: $850,000,000.00
* Stage III/MAVEN R&D Projects: $250,000,000.00
* Nuclear Rocket R&D Projects: $100,000,000.00
* NSRC Operating Expenses: $150,000,000.00

Naval Observatory: $85,000,000.00
* EOOL Telescope Optics Design: $25,000,000.00
* Astronomic R&D Projects: $50,000,000.00
* USNO Operating Expenses: $10,000,000.00

Naval Research Laboratory: $790,000,000.00
* MAPS Development: $250,000,000.00
* Space-Related Scientific R&D Projects: $500,000,000.00
* NRL Operating Expenses: $40,000,000.00

Naval Space Program Total: $5,100,000,000.00

The Naval Space Program, to even the conservative goal of establishing regular flight to low-Earth orbit in anticipation of the Navy’s future missions, was anticipated to cost more than five billion dollars over its first decade. That figure was, in its own ways, somewhat misleading: It priced in the full development of Tethys, as well as significant work on projects that were not intended to fly prior to 1966, including POOL, APOLLO, and REDCON. It also included projects which might be spun-off and funded separately, such as the roll-out of MAPS, even in the absence of a manned program. So the “real” cost of the manned program might only be half of that estimate. But on the other hand, given how much of the Naval Space Program was concentrated in research and development, costs traditionally could be counted upon to only move one direction and usually more than anticipated. And while none of PRISM’s members had ever doubted that it would cost a princely sum, it had not been thought it would be that princely of a sum. That was a sum that would need a true groundswell of popular support to hope to gain traction with it.

The PRISM team now felt caught between a rock and a hard place. (Given the Department of Rocketry’s love for mythological sea monsters, the more obvious choice was felt to be poor taste.) It had discharged its mission of creating, what it thought, to be a feasible Naval Space Program with a roadmap for future expansion that led all the way to MAVEN’s Naval Space Station and fleet of PIRANHAs. But, while PRISM’s program possessed ample ambition, it also felt incomplete and needlessly small-minded. The reason for that, they settled on, was in the early decisions to focus only on the Navy’s interests and trust the other services – and other governmental agencies – to contribute to the creation of a fully-sized national program through ASTRA. Perhaps that was what PRISM needed to really “pop”: To use the blank slate of potential Naval Observatory and Naval Research Laboratory programming to propose those ASTRA-level missions. A little grandeur couldn't hurt and wouldn't add any costs, either, given that a full ten-percent of the Naval Space Program's existing cost estimates were for as-yet unspecified USNO and NRL space-related research and missions.

Consultation with other agencies would be needed for that kind of detailing, however, as it had been PRISM’s lack of specific expertise that had caused it to elide past defining those missions in the first place. NACA and the National Science Foundation were obvious starting places. Perhaps the Atomic Energy Commission’s national laboratories were also a place that would have ideas, as they could serve as a bridge to the wider scientific community.

Perhaps it was even time to call Huntsville, Alabama.
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Author's Notes
And the long-awaited Chapter 10 reveals the ambitions of a Naval Space Program that's...surprisingly underwhelming, given who's writing it. I mean, practically speaking, the Navy wants Gemini and a space station by 1966! (With another space station and the entirely too on-the-nose APOLLO waiting in the wings.) But it does benefit from being actually being feasible and might even be a bit pessimistic on the costs, which makes it rather more credible than, say, Project Horizon. (Which would be talking about sending a dozen men to the Moon for ~$6,000MM in 1958 dollars, IIRC.) We also see what the Navy's -- or at least its self-declared space boffins -- is thinking in terms of its place in a national space program. Ideas that, if enacted, promise a TTL NASA that is very different in character from the OTL one. ASTRA has a better acronym, for starters, and that's really all that matters, right?

We might even almost be to the point where the TTL-versions of development projects can start taking center-stage, with fleshing out of Tethys, D-671, and the horrible miscegenation that is Tyr/Blue Streak. To say nothing of a Little Man from the Electric Boat Shipyard asking questions about why the lunatics want access to nuclear reactors. I thank my readers for enduring the setting-dressing so that the toys can be played with Soon™.

UrbanNight · Jan 7, 2022

Juumanistra said:
And that winner of the prize of space would likely have to fight a bloody war of conquest to actually take control of their hard-won territory, as the losers of the fight would vigorously resist giving up as much as they could.

I am now picturing the Army, Navy, and USAF literally deploying troops to various federal buildings to secure territory and its associated intelligence and administrative power by right-of-conquest:

*FLAG* "I claim this filing cabinet in the name of the United States Navy!"

Juumanistra · Jan 7, 2022

UrbanNight said:
I am now picturing the Army, Navy, and USAF literally deploying troops to various federal buildings to secure territory and its associated intelligence and administrative power by right-of-conquest:

*FLAG* "I claim this filing cabinet in the name of the United States Navy!"

Given how nicely the services played with one another pre-Treaty of Palm Beach, the odds are fifty-fifty about that being necessary.

Juumanistra · Jan 8, 2022

Chapter 11: It’s Probably Just An Out-of-Focus Log
While Task Force LEVIATHAN was busy bootstrapping a vision for the Naval Space Program through MAVEN and PRISM, elsewhere in the Department of Rocketry, a bureaucratic journey of a thousand miles was beginning with a single step. On April 18, 1955, the Communications Branch established the Nuclear Energy for Space Systems Information Exchange (NESSIE). And what a momentous journey it was to be.

The Communications Branch of the Department of Rocketry had, since the Department’s formal reorganization, been something a red-headed stepchild. While the Astronautics, Launchers, and Satellites Branches all retained active and important projects – the NOOE, Tethys, and Project BOWDITCH respectively – the new year had seen the Communications Branch’s only major responsibility being the ongoing Moon-related work from Project PAMOR, with Project Siren having been assigned to the Satellites Branch. The Communications Branch’s work with the Stump Neck antenna had, in 1954, validated the usage of communications satellites by using the Moon as one, with transcontinental testing slated for later in the year. But it did not take a genius to see which way the winds were blowing in the Department of Rocketry: BOWDITCH was rapidly consuming all of the Satellites Branch’s resources as it grew more ambitious to take full advantage of Tethys’s capabilities. And, as BOWDITCH’s mass increased and proposed orbit grew higher, the Moon’s use as a communications satellite diminished due the relative ease of recycling BOWDITCH’s subsystems into a dedicated artificial communications satellite.

If the Communications Branch wished to survive, something would have to be done to secure it a major program within the Department that was not as susceptible to obsolescence as Operation Moon Bounce looked to become as BOWDITCH continued to mature. As it just so happened, the work in earlier in the year on the Boom-Sat Mark II had highlighted a pressing institutional need in the Department of Rocketry’s lack of ability to meaningfully interface with the atomic energy and atomic weaponry bureaucracies. For as keen on nuclear rocketry as the Department was – and as keen as the Navy’s leadership appeared to be for boom-sats – there had thus far been precious little work done to actually secure access to atomic information given the ramshackle nature of the Department’s organization and its scarce resources beyond those already committed to its rapidly growing set of responsibilities. Acquiring that atomic information would nominally have been the domain of Task Force LEVIATHAN, but given its own monumental workload with MAVEN and PRISM, no qualms were had by the Department’s leadership in the Communications Branch taking on the task.

NESSIE would spend much of the rest of the year standing itself up, bringing staff with the necessary expertise and clearances in-house, and beginning the rather arduous task of ingratiating itself to the Atomic Energy Commission, its various national laboratories, and the Atomic Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships. It also meant a significant amount of digesting technical reports was required, as while the Department of Rocketry had been aware that nuclear rocketry was a topic of discussion, no small amount of theoretical work had been undertaken in both the United States and abroad. More pertinently, the AEC and Air Force were collaborating on the very initial stages of a project to produce a nuclear-thermal ballistic missile upper-stage for an ICBM. Should the Navy – through the Department of Rocketry, Atomic Reactors Branch, or both – desire at the table, it was a matter that would need pursuing early in the new year before too many of the administrative foundations of such a project had been set in stone.

Beyond discovering a very promising program that was likely to provoke another Pentagon territorial temper tantrum, given the Department of Rocketry’s recent experiences, NESSIE also discovered another item during its spooling-up period that was noteworthy. For it was a classified technical report which conclusively demonstrated that the Department of Rocketry was not the most creative – or insane, depending upon who was asked – rocketeering entity in the United States government.

That title went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Where Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett proposed sending a payload to orbit surfing atop a wave of sequential atomic explosions.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
In the Mythological Cryptozoology Department, that gives us LEVIATHAN, NESSIE, Charybdis, Scylla, and Cetus by my count. I'm going to run out of sea monsters at current rate. Beyond the entirely fictitious Scottish sea monster cum bureaucracy, though, this is pretty much all OTL. And more territorial pissing matches are exactly what this timeline needs, right?

...right?

Adelkman · Jan 9, 2022

Juumanistra said:
In the Mythological Cryptozoology Department, that gives us LEVIATHAN, NESSIE, Charybdis, Scylla, and Cetus by my count. I'm going to run out of sea monsters at current rate.

Just save "Typhon" for something truly amazing and we're good (an actual nuclear vector missile?). Still, great TTL so far.

Juumanistra · Jan 9, 2022

Adelkman said:
Just save "Typhon" for something truly amazing and we're good (an actual nuclear vector missile?). Still, great TTL so far.

Typhon's already claimed by the RIM-50 Typhon, which is a shame, because the Typhon Combat System would've been suitably amazing had it worked as intended. What with it being proto-AEGIS by the mid-to-late Sixties. There's only so much you can accomplish with vacuum tubes and late-Fifties electronics manufacturing, though, and the TCS was most certainly beyond that.

Much like the P6M, I'd love to find a way to allow Typhon reach its potential, but that's orders of magnitude harder. As the P6M, when it was cancelled, was basically a ready-for-service aircraft. The TCS never actually got within spitting distance of working as intended. And, as fun as it would be to imagine Typhon but with megawatt-emitting orbital radar installations added to the mix, that doesn't begin to cure the far more basic problems with shipborne radar and missile portions of the TCS.

The Orbital DEW Line concept will certainly make an appearance again in the future, though. Even if in typical fashion it never reaches the lofty zeniths originally envisioned with manned stations that need multi-megawatt reactors to power their radars.

RanulfC · Jan 12, 2022

Juumanistra said:
Chapter 10: A Case of Reveling in Over-the-top Names in Your Musings (ACRONYM)

I am reminded that at one point in my military career we would sit around (being bored is an occupational hazard at times

) and make up complete sentences using as few "actual words" as possible out of acronyms. Much like the "hobby" of making up realistic "conspiracy theories" it fell out of favor as that actually became a common occurrence

Very good chapter but one question? Was the use of "docketing" and "docketed" intentional?

Juumanistra said:
Stage II of the Naval space program would be dedicated to developing to learning basic orbital skills and developing the requisite expertise to conduct larger-scale and more ambitious operations. Such skills would include skills in orbital rendezvous and docketing, orbital construction, and extravehicular activities, with objectives including gathering astromedical data about the long-term effects of zero-gravity upon astronauts and gaining greater knowledge of space as an environment. This Stage will also be spent testing and validating design concepts for use in future missions, such as orbital propellant depots and nuclear rocket engines. Stage II is anticipated to commence early in 1961, with the delivery of Tethys, and to extend through at least the mid-Sixties.
>snip<

The Reactant Depot Constellation (REDCON), PRISM’s great hope for democratizing orbital access and simplifying future missions. The REDCON would provide ready stores of liquid oxygen and one or more propellants in-orbit, removing the need for a particular spacecraft to be boosted up the gravity well. Oxygen would be provided by a Low-Orbital Oxygen-gathering Magazine (LOOM) that skimmed the upper atmosphere and collected oxygen and other useful gases. Propellant would be boosted up the gravity well and be stored in High-Orbital Propellant Stations (HOPS) that could be docketed with and fueled from by orbital spacecraft. Due to the conceptual nature of LOOM and HOPS, significant further technical refinement is required before either is ready for practical engineering. Stage III-desirable program but requiring flying during Stage II to validate basic operational principles and utility.

Secondary:

Juumanistra said:
The Naval Space Research Center, meanwhile, would need stood up. As envisioned by PRISM, it would be constituted from three great “design centers”, one for Orbital Structures, one for Space Vehicles, and one for Rockets. The Orbital Structures Design Center would continue to be referred to as “Charybdis”, given its origins; the Space Vehicles Design Center would likewise retain its in-house designation of “Scylla”, intended as it always had been for the manned craft program to go with the stations designed by Charybdis. The proposed Rocketry Design Center would also need an internal designation: “Cetus” was settled on, in no small part due to the unspoken ambition of building the truly monstrous rockets that would allow for doing of truly great things.

I'm not sure "Rockets" would be used given that encompasses everything from aircraft mounted to ICBM's and the rest. Launch Vehicles would be more direct and specific and would be more in-line with the other two departments?

Juumanistra said:
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
And the long-awaited Chapter 10 reveals the ambitions of a Naval Space Program that's...surprisingly underwhelming, given who's writing it. I mean, practically speaking, the Navy wants Gemini and a space station by 1966! (With another space station and the entirely too on-the-nose APOLLO waiting in the wings.)

Well as one who has had to engage in the branch of "speculative fiction" known as "performance reporting" for the military I'm sure we can all understand the truism that while actual fiction has to make sense, reality is under no such constraint

I'm not sure that two-man would be that intuitive at the time as yes it's a 'step-up' from a single person vehicle the actual 'break-down' was to move from one man (Mercury) to three-man (Apollo) and only went to two-man (Gemini) when it was clear there was a lot more 'intermediate' work to be done. Most early proposals beyond a single person were in fact broken down into a three person crew, (example TASSEL: Three Astronaut Space System Experimental Laboratory, 1960) so as to (as was common military practice btw) break down the 24 hours of a day into three 'shifts' of 8 hours each. So I'd suspect that they'd do the same this early on and go straight for at minimum of a three man crew. (MOL and Blue Gemini btw were based ON Gemini so therefore a two person crew was the only actual option)

Well given that "APOLLO" has now been used publicly it's doubtful that it would be used in any other context, (such as for an ASTRA, and yes nice acronym there... Almost as good as "National Aerospace Sciences Agency" IMHO, Lunar landing program

) to "avoid confusion" between a proposed and actual program

Juumanistra said:
But it does benefit from being actually being feasible and might even be a bit pessimistic on the costs, which makes it rather more credible than, say, Project Horizon. (Which would be talking about sending a dozen men to the Moon for ~$6,000MM in 1958 dollars, IIRC.)

That actually might work against it

Part of the reasons both Horizon and LUNEX were 'low-balled' was because the authors understood the pre-Sputnik (and more importantly the pre-Gagarin) lack of official (and more importantly monetary) support for "space" activities. It literally took Kennedy making the whole thing an official "National Priority" (and then him dying to get it 'sustained' as long as it was) to free up enough money to fly full-steam-ahead with the major upgrades and contracts it took to get Gemini and Apollo in the actual pipeline. (Heck never mind the money, how'd anyone be able to stand being 'stacked' in the Horizon Lunar vehicle for a three day trip to the Moon?

) "Sticker-shock" for the Air Force's ICBM program was setting in by mid-1956 and Congress and the Administration were going back and forth on cutting and 'streamlining' efforts while trying to get the more 'outspoken' DoD "space" advocates to shut-the-heck-up. (The afore mentioned "memo" on ranking officers NOT talking about "space" related topics on pain of administrative punishment

)

Juumanistra said:
We also see what the Navy's -- or at least its self-declared space boffins -- is thinking in terms of its place in a national space program. Ideas that, if enacted, promise a TTL NASA that is very different in character from the OTL one. ASTRA has a better acronym, for starters, and that's really all that matters, right?

Of course that's what matters

Randy

RanulfC · Jan 12, 2022

Juumanistra said:
Chapter 11: It’s Probably Just An Out-of-Focus Log

That title went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Where Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett proposed sending a payload to orbit surfing atop a wave of sequential atomic explosions.

I was rather surprised to find out that the "basic idea" had been around since the late 1800s, originally proposed using dynamite chargers to propel a "flying platform"

Juumanistra said:
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
In the Mythological Cryptozoology Department, that gives us LEVIATHAN, NESSIE, Charybdis, Scylla, and Cetus by my count. I'm going to run out of sea monsters at current rate. Beyond the entirely fictitious Scottish sea monster cum bureaucracy, though, this is pretty much all OTL. And more territorial pissing matches are exactly what this timeline needs, right?

...right?

You're doing a timeline that involves the various branches of the US military.... "Territorial Pissing Matches" is I think established somewhere in our authorizing documents if I'm not mistaken... Probably based on European models of the same

More seriously, very much so in the case of the 'proto-Orion" concept as whichever service (if any... aka OTL) gets control of such a concept is essentially going to be in almost total control of nuclear weapon production from start to finish. One of the reasons the AF wanted "Orion" so badly was that "little" side-effect outcome.

Randy

Kloka · Jan 12, 2022

I just got The Dream Machines as a late Christmas present. I’ll let you guys know if I find any cool rocket ideas within.

Juumanistra · Jan 13, 2022

RanulfC said:
I am reminded that at one point in my military career we would sit around (being bored is an occupational hazard at times ) and make up complete sentences using as few "actual words" as possible out of acronyms. Much like the "hobby" of making up realistic "conspiracy theories" it fell out of favor as that actually became a common occurrence

Yes, the real world has had a horrible case of Life Imitating Art when it comes to acronyms, especially in the space-related world. NASA's pretty bad in this area, but the heavyweight champions are hands-down the ESA. They've taken the art of backronyming to all new heights.

RanulfC said:
Very good chapter but one question? Was the use of "docketing" and "docketed" intentional?

I believe that's a Freudian slip, though I think I already said I'm a lawyer by day somewhere else in the thread. I'll fix it after finishing this response.

RanulfC said:
I'm not sure "Rockets" would be used given that encompasses everything from aircraft mounted to ICBM's and the rest. Launch Vehicles would be more direct and specific and would be more in-line with the other two departments?

The internal logic of things was that the Cetus Design Group would work on all propulsion systems for the Naval Space Program and that, because of the Naval Space Program's being only in the rocket business -- because anything else might trespass on the sovereign dominion of the Bureau of Aeronautics or the USAF -- it helps delineate things and reduce the fallout from the inevitable eruption from the Pentagon's various organs. So while it's intended primarily for launch vehicles, it was also anticipated to be in the business of payload propulsion systems as well, as it's more natural (to the PRISM drafters) that the guys working on nuclear-electric propulsion than in the shop integrating contractor designs for APOLLO and PIRANHA. Besides, there have to be some jobs left for the Pentagon's mandarins: How many names for bureaucratic entities are actually adopted as originally proposed?

RanulfC said:
I'm not sure that two-man would be that intuitive at the time as yes it's a 'step-up' from a single person vehicle the actual 'break-down' was to move from one man (Mercury) to three-man (Apollo) and only went to two-man (Gemini) when it was clear there was a lot more 'intermediate' work to be done. Most early proposals beyond a single person were in fact broken down into a three person crew, (example TASSEL: Three Astronaut Space System Experimental Laboratory, 1960) so as to (as was common military practice btw) break down the 24 hours of a day into three 'shifts' of 8 hours each. So I'd suspect that they'd do the same this early on and go straight for at minimum of a three man crew. (MOL and Blue Gemini btw were based ON Gemini so therefore a two person crew was the only actual option)

It is partially due to the tools available in the toolbox. PRISM's assuming that it won't need to do basic astromedical pathfinding with its first orbital craft, as that'll all be done by the D-558-III Skyflash's testing, because the blood thing actually flies higher than the anticipated operational orbit of the early Tethys flights. So there's no real purpose is purpose-building a single-seater in their anticipated fiscal environment. (Which, to be fair, is an entirely appropriate assessment. Because post-Sputnik's BEAT THE RUSSIANS NAO monetary firehose is not predictable.) But, at the same time, you've only got eight-thousand pounds of throw-weight that needs to be able to take crew up and bring them back down. PRISM's making the assumption that you're not going to be able to get more than two on the upward-leg of the trip, at least not without some fudging of the numbers. When the RFP is inevitably sent out, it will be duly drafted to reflect that the "crew of two" is a minimum requirement but that no one's wed to it should one of the myriad number of aviation firms have an idea to devise something capable of meeting the other requirements that's got more room for people. As, at the end of the day, ORDER's job-list is to fly a few times to demonstrate multiple men in a sealed environment won't succumb to space madness while in orbit and it's possible to do basic rendezvous and docking, and then move straight-on to shuttling crew to and from EOOL.

And it's the EOOL and shifts which are relevant to this, even if they're skulking in the background. My understanding had been that the Navy's traditional shift pattern was four six-hour watches. So in the back of PRISM's mind is that number, which is what they're assuming will be the baseline for EOOL (growing as it did out of Krafft Ehricke's four-man space station). And there's a desire to right-size ORDER to supporting a station of four crew and, if they don't think they're going to get three into a Gemini-scale capsule, they are positive they'll not get four. So part of their own unwritten thought process is the assumption they'll be supporting EOOL with two ORDERs, each in turn which can carry two astronauts.

But one of the fun things that's coming up is going to be when the Navy does get to do its equivalent of the USAF's first Man In Space Soonest tender and everyone with an interest in space will be throwing out their proposals for both ORDER and EOOL. And given how contractors can, at times, consider minimum requirements to be mere suggestions at best, well...

RanulfC said:
Well given that "APOLLO" has now been used publicly it's doubtful that it would be used in any other context, (such as for an ASTRA, and yes nice acronym there... Almost as good as "National Aerospace Sciences Agency" IMHO, Lunar landing program ) to "avoid confusion" between a proposed and actual program

APOLLO was probably the most forced of the acronyms and it was for a noble purpose. Beyond the lamp-shading, of course. To go down the rabbit-hole a bit, one of the stories in What Childish Fantasy!: A What-If Anthology is the obligatory It's Really OTL DBWI. Because allohistorical works have to rhyme, that chapter uses the Greek names of OTL programs Roman ones. So you've got Wernher von Braun playing around with progression of the Zeus C -> Hera I -> Hera V -> Cronus I -> Cronus V program, the Hermes Program, the Gemini Program (Castor and Pollux are Greek, after all, and easily gotten to), and then...the Apollo Program, because of course that's the one that's the same in Greek as Roman mythology. The writer determined that the craft being used for the mission was similar to APOLLO and lampshaded it with that TTL-DBWI going to the Moon with the Artemis Program.

In short, I have way too much fun coming up with these sorts of nested references that aren't so much a rabbit-hole but an entire rabbit-warren.

Re: TTL's NASA, in the earliest drafts of my notes it's referred to as the National Aeronautical and Astronautical Sciences Agency (NAASA), to delineate its fundamentally different nature as a payload-only entity and have an acronym that is different from the OTL iteration. Another idea was the Astronautical Sciences, Technology, and Research Organization, which would evolve into a proper NASA-analogue with its own flying abilities and the Navy's obligations in space too. So that you could have a proper ASTRO Patrol. That was decided against because this is a timeline about the Navy conquering space, but it was still tempting nonetheless.

RanulfC said:
That actually might work against it Part of the reasons both Horizon and LUNEX were 'low-balled' was because the authors understood the pre-Sputnik (and more importantly the pre-Gagarin) lack of official (and more importantly monetary) support for "space" activities. It literally took Kennedy making the whole thing an official "National Priority" (and then him dying to get it 'sustained' as long as it was) to free up enough money to fly full-steam-ahead with the major upgrades and contracts it took to get Gemini and Apollo in the actual pipeline. (Heck never mind the money, how'd anyone be able to stand being 'stacked' in the Horizon Lunar vehicle for a three day trip to the Moon? ) "Sticker-shock" for the Air Force's ICBM program was setting in by mid-1956 and Congress and the Administration were going back and forth on cutting and 'streamlining' efforts while trying to get the more 'outspoken' DoD "space" advocates to shut-the-heck-up. (The afore mentioned "memo" on ranking officers NOT talking about "space" related topics on pain of administrative punishment )

I think this is an important piece of context that really bears highlighting. Projects LUNEX and Horizon were both, to varying degrees, service-based flag-planting vehicles which were never really serious about what they were wanting to do. They also both had not real military idea what to do with the Moon other than that their service's flag fly over it. I think LUNEX was the more honest of the two -- in that the USAF wanted to do it, but had no earthly idea what it'd practically entail -- while Horizon was straight-up cynical Pentagon politics. (I mean, there's more of the Collier's "Man Will Conquer Space!" article in Apollo than there is Horizon, which is telling.)

What I've labored on is creating a different context entirely. The Navy's people are tackling this as a serious military question, attempting to identify what will be done in space, what the Navy should be doing, and how to go about doing it. It's why MAVEN and PRISM look so different from LUNEX and Horizon, as they're not being treated as PR exercises or make-work. Which also changes the logic of cost-estimation, as if you lowball things to the extent LUNEX did and it doesn't stand-up to independent audit, you've just destroyed your credibility in representing this is a serious product of military thought. And also because no program survives cost-inflation on the scale of going from LUNEX to Apollo would, at least in normal budgetary times. (Which, even if they don't know what Peak Apollo Money is, they know going to the Moon is going to take more than $1,750MM the USAF estimated in LUNEX.) So better to at least try to keep your costs where you think they'll actually be and just deal with sticker-shocked Congresscritters.

Whether that's actually enough, though, is another question. At least not without an outside intervention or two. ...beyond Sputnik, at that.

RanulfC said:
You're doing a timeline that involves the various branches of the US military.... "Territorial Pissing Matches" is I think established somewhere in our authorizing documents if I'm not mistaken... Probably based on European models of the same

The Pentagon would be a lot harder to make fun of it they had the self-awareness to put out a Regulation on Resolution of Inter-Service Disputes Regarding Bureaucratic Duties, Jurisdictions, and Responsibilities that was The Guide to Territorial Pissing Matches written in Pentagonese. It'd be amazed.

RanulfC said:
More seriously, very much so in the case of the 'proto-Orion" concept as whichever service (if any... aka OTL) gets control of such a concept is essentially going to be in almost total control of nuclear weapon production from start to finish. One of the reasons the AF wanted "Orion" so badly was that "little" side-effect outcome.

Well, the purpose of bringing up that 1955 study was -- more than anything else -- to get Team Heinlein's eyes on the prize nice and early. Whether their funding situation lets them do anything with it for the foreseeable future is something else, at least in the absence of Taylor and Dyson shopping it for General Atomics, which won't be for a few years yet. But yeah, Stan Ulam was thinking about since the Manhattan Project was still underway, and operating principles go back even further as you illustrate.

Re: control of nuclear weapons, what I'll say is this: That might actually be a feature and not a bug. Sort of. As, if you do fly Orion, the service that controls will require a complete nuclear weapons assembly line to service their atomic rockets. That production line does not, necessarily, have to be the same one which furnishes the American strategic and tactical nuclear weapons pipeline. An entirely separate assembly line for pulse-units opens up possibilities to mitigate the concerns of a runaway arms race by subjecting that assembly line to a different arms control regime -- one whose requirements would not otherwise be tolerable for strategic weaponry -- and perhaps provide grounds for actual agreement between the Americans and Soviets on that front. (You still have the problem of building that assembly line out of loose bits that don't implicate your strategic bomb-building methods, but that's essentially an engineering problem. And a financial one, as "we want to build an entirely separate nuclear production line from fuel enrichment/creation to bomb-assembly" is not something that's going to be cheap.)

marathag · Jan 13, 2022

Juumanistra said:
Typhon's already claimed by the RIM-50 Typhon, which is a shame, because the Typhon Combat System would've been suitably amazing had it worked as intended. What with it being proto-AEGIS by the mid-to-late Sixties. There's only so much you can accomplish with vacuum tubes and late-Fifties electronics manufacturing, though, and the TCS was most certainly beyond that.

When I worked at Sperry-Univac, a co-worker had worked on that program before he had transferred over to the computer side of then huge Sperry conglomerate. Everyone there kind of joked the the pressure of trying to get that program working drove him more than a little nuts. Real trailblazer effort

RanulfC · Jan 13, 2022

Hmmm, now this is interesting when you look at OTL versus TTL:
"Still a third military proposal for manned space flight came forth during the contentious first half of 1958. In April the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics presented to ARPA the results of its manned satellite study, cleverly acronymized "MER I" (for "Manned Earth Reconnaissance"). This approach called for an orbital mission in a novel vehicle - a cylinder with spherical ends. After being fired into orbit by a two-stage booster system, the ends would expand laterally along two structural, telescoping beams to make a delta-wing, inflated glider with a rigid nose section. The configuration met the principal MER I requirement: the vehicle would be controllable from booster burnout to landing on water. Fabric construction obviously implied a new departure in the design of reentry vehicles. At ARPA's direction the Bureau of Aeronautics undertook a second study (MER II), this one to be done jointly on contract by Convair, manufacturer of the Atlas, and the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. [101] The Convair-Goodyear study group did not make its report until December. At that time it reasserted the feasibility of the lifting pneumatic vehicle but relegated the inflation of the craft to the post-entry portion of the mission. By December, however, Project Mercury already was moving ahead steadily under NASA. Funds for a MER III phase (model studies) were not forthcoming from the Defense Department, and the intriguing MER concept became a little-known aspect of the prehistory of manned orbital flight.

MER, sometimes referred to as "Project MER," was by far the most ambitious of the manned space flight proposals made by the military in 1958. Its emphasis on new hardware and new techniques meant it really had little chance for approval then. Conversely, Project Adam was not ambitious enough for the time and money involved. Of the three military proposals, Man-in-Space-Soonest came closest to full program approval. But by August the Air Force's hopes for putting a man into orbit sooner than the Soviet Union, or than any other agency in this country, were fading rapidly before the growing consensus that manned space flight should be the province of the civilian space administration."
"This New Ocean" Chapter 4-7 (https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch4-7.htm)

Randy

RanulfC · Jan 13, 2022

Juumanistra said:
Yes, the real world has had a horrible case of Life Imitating Art when it comes to acronyms, especially in the space-related world. NASA's pretty bad in this area, but the heavyweight champions are hands-down the ESA. They've taken the art of backronyming to all new heights.

Well historically that was a US military 'trait' and it seems to be creeping back in so we may take the 'title' back yet

Juumanistra said:
I believe that's a Freudian slip, though I think I already said I'm a lawyer by day somewhere else in the thread. I'll fix it after finishing this response.

No biggie I was just wondering if it was terminology from the period which would NOT surprise me in any way

It being one of those 'weeks' already I was re-reading the cited "TASSEL" report and finding it "odd" that there was this general idea of "rendezvous" in orbit but that personnel and supply transfers would require suiting up and doing spacewalks rather than 'docking'...

Juumanistra said:
The internal logic of things was that the Cetus Design Group would work on all propulsion systems for the Naval Space Program and that, because of the Naval Space Program's being only in the rocket business -- because anything else might trespass on the sovereign dominion of the Bureau of Aeronautics or the USAF -- it helps delineate things and reduce the fallout from the inevitable eruption from the Pentagon's various organs. So while it's intended primarily for launch vehicles, it was also anticipated to be in the business of payload propulsion systems as well, as it's more natural (to the PRISM drafters) that the guys working on nuclear-electric propulsion than in the shop integrating contractor designs for APOLLO and PIRANHA. Besides, there have to be some jobs left for the Pentagon's mandarins: How many names for bureaucratic entities are actually adopted as originally proposed?

All of them.. and they have the documentation (in triplicate) to prove it in these file cabinets right here... Start from the top drawer on the left and work your way down and to the right. We'll be back to check on your progress after lunch... on Tuesday... Maybe

The only reason I asked is because "rockets" already steps on a large number of 'internal' let alone external toes and while it might be a 'catch-all' at the moment it's a bit TOO broad for an arguably Navel oriented 'report', even as a suggestion. "Astronautical" propulsion maybe.. (Because after all if it's 'nautical' it's Navy right? Shut up Air Force you didn't come up with "aeronautical" either so just sit down and be quite!

)

Juumanistra said:
It is partially due to the tools available in the toolbox. PRISM's assuming that it won't need to do basic astromedical pathfinding with its first orbital craft, as that'll all be done by the D-558-III Skyflash's testing, because the blood thing actually flies higher than the anticipated operational orbit of the early Tethys flights. So there's no real purpose is purpose-building a single-seater in their anticipated fiscal environment. (Which, to be fair, is an entirely appropriate assessment. Because post-Sputnik's BEAT THE RUSSIANS NAO monetary firehose is not predictable.) But, at the same time, you've only got eight-thousand pounds of throw-weight that needs to be able to take crew up and bring them back down. PRISM's making the assumption that you're not going to be able to get more than two on the upward-leg of the trip, at least not without some fudging of the numbers. When the RFP is inevitably sent out, it will be duly drafted to reflect that the "crew of two" is a minimum requirement but that no one's wed to it should one of the myriad number of aviation firms have an idea to devise something capable of meeting the other requirements that's got more room for people. As, at the end of the day, ORDER's job-list is to fly a few times to demonstrate multiple men in a sealed environment won't succumb to space madness while in orbit and it's possible to do basic rendezvous and docking, and then move straight-on to shuttling crew to and from EOOL.

Again the re-reading of that TASSEL report kind of brought home the 'thinking' of the time in that one of the main reasons for 'three' crew was to have someone on 'duty' at all times because at the time (late '50s through early '60s OTL as well) "communications" was actually a problem with the orbital vehicle being "out-of-contact" with the ground for large segments of time due to a lack of surface stations. (Granted the Navy is going to quickly consider using ships as communications stations and relays the ability of most 'normal' ships to support such is rather minimal and there fore you need to get into the idea of dedicated support ships which cost you even more money....)

Mini-track was never as 'good' as it was hoped to be specifically because it was never as integrated or efficient as it was envisioned to be and it took OTL Apollo levels of spending for the US (and near such for the USSR) to get a truly world-wide tracking and data system up and running. The less you have financially and support wise the less you have capability and technology wise...

And a lot of the utility is "baked-in" from the start in that (for example) OTL the Soviets had bigger boosters and therefore bigger capsules whereas the US was limited on boosters and therefore limited on capsule space. Hence Vostok could take one, two or three with a bit of stuffing (albeit the latter was a one-time stunt the two-person "Voshkod" was arguably 'operationally' possible for longer use) while Mercury was never going to be able to take more than one person* no matter how much you 'rebuilt' it so the US was 'stuck' until the planned "Apollo" capsule came on-line. (*Arguably Gemini OTL was a pretty hefty rebuild of Mercury but that's also a minimum and given different priorities and assumptions a "two" person orbital crew may not make a lot of sense)

The @9Klbs for Gemini was actually "in-the-ballpark" figured to be what the minimum (original) Apollo configuration was going to be, so two to three isn't going to seem that much of a stretch I suspect. ("Fun" part is a "bigger" initial spacecraft means that the US is going to find out all about SAdS sooner rather than later

)

Juumanistra said:
And it's the EOOL and shifts which are relevant to this, even if they're skulking in the background. My understanding had been that the Navy's traditional shift pattern was four six-hour watches. So in the back of PRISM's mind is that number, which is what they're assuming will be the baseline for EOOL (growing as it did out of Krafft Ehricke's four-man space station). And there's a desire to right-size ORDER to supporting a station of four crew and, if they don't think they're going to get three into a Gemini-scale capsule, they are positive they'll not get four. So part of their own unwritten thought process is the assumption they'll be supporting EOOL with two ORDERs, each in turn which can carry two astronauts.

Well as long as you don't require extensive 'creature comforts' for the astronauts, (you know, like breathing and such) then stuffing four or five in a "Gemini" sized capsule should work just fine....

(Again I point to the ridiculous "Horizon" crew layout ... I found out btw that it was based on the work done on packing soldiers into a "Redstone" nose cone for 'transport' no less

)

Naval "tradition" is flexible as you'd more likely see the standard 3/8 on-shore with the 4/6 being ship-board rotation. (The 4/6 is for the same reason as the 3/8 but shorter to help keep those on duty more 'alert' during those 'boring' stretches between the "sheer terror" bits. 2/12 is harder to maintain for any length of time

)

Kind of another thing I wanted to bring up was in the context of what I noted above about 'getting around' on-orbit and in context with the Ehricke space station... I'd not noted it before even though I have some pretty good notes on the concept but even with the 'docking' cones on the original concept I hadn't notice but the crew has to get out and 'walk' into the station as there's no transfer capability between those 'shuttles' and the station! Then again I also noted there's a quad of "RCS" nozzles on the nose/bottom of that Atlas/Station and where they are getting the RCS "propellant" from

Juumanistra said:
But one of the fun things that's coming up is going to be when the Navy does get to do its equivalent of the USAF's first Man In Space Soonest tender and everyone with an interest in space will be throwing out their proposals for both ORDER and EOOL. And given how contractors can, at times, consider minimum requirements to be mere suggestions at best, well...

Well they ARE 'only suggestions' unless you tell them you really, really, really, (and by that we're not paying you a dime for anything OTHER than the requirements) mean it... At which point they only offer a half a dozen or so 'suggestions' for why you really, really, really need gold-plated tweezers for this concept...
Man in space soonest? Oh not a problem... Wait what? You want them to survive? grumble, grumble, grumble.. WHAT? And do "something useful" as well? Look if you're going to put these wild and irrational "requirements" on the contract...

Juumanistra said:
APOLLO was probably the most forced of the acronyms and it was for a noble purpose. Beyond the lamp-shading, of course. To go down the rabbit-hole a bit, one of the stories in What Childish Fantasy!: A What-If Anthology is the obligatory It's Really OTL DBWI. Because allohistorical works have to rhyme, that chapter uses the Greek names of OTL programs Roman ones. So you've got Wernher von Braun playing around with progression of the Zeus C -> Hera I -> Hera V -> Cronus I -> Cronus V program, the Hermes Program, the Gemini Program (Castor and Pollux are Greek, after all, and easily gotten to), and then...the Apollo Program, because of course that's the one that's the same in Greek as Roman mythology. The writer determined that the craft being used for the mission was similar to APOLLO and lampshaded it with that TTL-DBWI going to the Moon with the Artemis Program.

Ya trust me the military and government have a good 'lock' on those "alternate names for everything" memes

Speaking of IIRC "Castor" and "Pollux" were the "alternate" names of the Recruit and Sargent solid rocket motors when used by anyone but the Army

Now having fun with that concept I (not able to recall WHICH motor I was doing it for but..) I once proposed a "Sirius" Rocket Unit.
Which when combined with the 'standard' military designation writing system becomes: Rocket Unit, Sirius or ...

Juumanistra said:
In short, I have way too much fun coming up with these sorts of nested references that aren't so much a rabbit-hole but an entire rabbit-warren.

The former is why we do this the latter an occupational hazard we endure

Juumanistra said:
Re: TTL's NASA, in the earliest drafts of my notes it's referred to as the National Aeronautical and Astronautical Sciences Agency (NAASA), to delineate its fundamentally different nature as a payload-only entity and have an acronym that is different from the OTL iteration. Another idea was the Astronautical Sciences, Technology, and Research Organization, which would evolve into a proper NASA-analogue with its own flying abilities and the Navy's obligations in space too. So that you could have a proper ASTRO Patrol. That was decided against because this is a timeline about the Navy conquering space, but it was still tempting nonetheless.

Hey I've found out that "Space Technology And Research" lab is a lot older than DC comics would have you believe and it keeps popping up for some odd reason

Juumanistra said:
I think this is an important piece of context that really bears highlighting. Projects LUNEX and Horizon were both, to varying degrees, service-based flag-planting vehicles which were never really serious about what they were wanting to do. They also both had not real military idea what to do with the Moon other than that their service's flag fly over it. I think LUNEX was the more honest of the two -- in that the USAF wanted to do it, but had no earthly idea what it'd practically entail -- while Horizon was straight-up cynical Pentagon politics. (I mean, there's more of the Collier's "Man Will Conquer Space!" article in Apollo than there is Horizon, which is telling.)

Wanted to get into the rest but I've run out of time today...
I'll continue the "vigorous discussion" tomorrow, take care

Randy

Juumanistra · Jan 13, 2022

Visions of Futures Past #4: The Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane
Surface-to-Orbit [>] The Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane
Good ideas can originate from the strangest places.

In early 1958, an engineer and a salesman from Boeing were having a drink after work. The salesman was part of the team that had the unenviable job of attempting to find customers for Boeing’s shiny and new tanker, the KC-135 Stratotanker. Governmental sales were through the roof, principally to the USAF, and all of Boeing’s production capabilities were allotted for years to come, but the sales group still was expected to drum-up leads and conceive of pitches to market the Stratotanker. “Why can’t you refuel a rocket in flight?” the salesman would drunkenly rue; with the Navy’s interest in “space gas stations”, if you could do that, he might actually get his foot in the door! With the amount of alcohol being consumed, the sentiment was promptly drowned and forgotten about. At least by the salesman

But not by the engineer, who happened to be assigned to Boeing’s Space and Communications Division and whose day job was specifically involved in working on the Dyna-Soar program. And it was a good question. While rockets couldn’t be refueled in flight because they weren’t designed that way, could you design one that could be? And might you, in fact, be able to make it of interest to the Navy?

Eager to find out, an attempt to do just that was attempted. The result was the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane, which would reach orbit via the process of “dynamic in-flight staging”, as the concept called it. The vehicle itself was a lifting-body design that would take-off horizontally with power provided by a set of onboard jet-engines. The Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane would initially be loaded with LOX and jet-fuel. Upon climbing to its operational altitude of 30,000-feet, the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane would dock with a tanker aircraft – depicted in concept art as a KC-135 – and take on the flight’s propellant, assumed to be RP-1. Once filled-up, the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane would boost up to an orbit of approximately 70 miles, consuming a fraction of its propellant and the entirety of its LOX. Once in that new orbit, it would dock with a LOOM and take on another tank’s worth of LOX. It would then boost itself to a final altitude of 120 miles, where its mission would be undertaken and payload delivered. Once complete, it would return to Earth via a powered descent and land horizontally like a conventional aircraft.

The Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane had much to recommend it, as HOTOL spacecraft have always cast a spell upon atomic midshipman, and its leveraging of in-development hardware from both Boeing and the Navy’s parts-bins was intriguing. It garnered enough interest from Boeing – considered in the Rocket Wars to firmly be a USAF shop – to pony up enough to develop a short report on the concept for presentation to the Navy. The pitch, made the following year, was to be an ill-fated one. The Naval Astronautical Service was, while warm to the idea, highly skeptical of its practicality: Orbital fluid-transfers were a subject of keen interest, but the absence of any practical experience with them precluded meaningful work on the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane. And, for better or worse, the Navy was firmly committed to its own programmatic strategy for the next several years in any event, anticipating that the concept could not get any real attention until 1963 at the earliest. While Boeing and the Navy would indeed return to the concept starting in the mid-Sixties, Boeing’s entry in the Reusable Orbital Logistics Rocket competition would be a fundamentally different creature from the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane.

The USAF, meanwhile, had no interest in principle in the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane. By 1960, it was widely understood that the USAF wanted no part of any idea that referenced – even in passing – the usage of any Naval Space Program asset or project. With the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane’s explicit reliance on a propulsive fluid accumulator, it was considered dead-on-arrival with the USAF’s procurement boffins. Not that the USAF would have in any way been interested in the first place, as by this time, it was institutionally committed both to LUNEX and the Space Launching System. There was no place for a brand-new launcher in the race to beating the Soviets to the Moon, especially when it was reliant upon the Navy’s ideas. As the Soviets had to be beaten to the Moon to prove how absolutely and utterly wrong the Navy and its ideas about space were.

Not that any of this didn’t stop Boeing from trying to circle discussion back to the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane whenever an opportunity presented itself. This was done most often in the context of Dyna-Soar, though with little evident success. The Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane would last turn-up in official correspondence in 1962 and from there it would become a mile-marker on the conceptual evolution of the HOTOL spacecraft.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
So, when you setup an in-universe document to have great significance -- as Halfway to Everywhere has -- you need to, annoyingly, actually have something significant to say with it. Actually finding what that is has proven harder than anticipated and why we're doing more filler today, getting back to the spirit in which Visions of Futures Past was originally intended, highlighting in-universe paper-only ideas and technological dead-ends while also doing a bit of foreshadowing. (One should absolutely read the term "Reusable Orbital Logistics Rocket" with the Jaws theme playing.) I do think I've finally gotten Halfway to Everywhere sorted, though, so Chapter 11 should be the next threadmarked post. ...probably. Hopefully.

Otherwise, lets just enjoy the Black Horse a couple of decades earlier, even if it's more complicated and not going anywhere. Yet.

Dathi THorfinnsson · Jan 14, 2022

So, Sirius is a Rocket of Unusual Size, is it?
Or, on second thought, you probably were suggesting it worked for the competition.

FellowTraveller5 · Jan 14, 2022

Juumanistra said:
Otherwise, lets just enjoy the Black Horse a couple of decades earlier, even if it's more complicated and not going anywhere. Yet.

Overly complicated, yes. Just drop the second tanker, put a kick stage on the payload, and the concept is good to go as is.

Polish Eagle · Jan 14, 2022

FellowTraveller5 said:
Overly complicated, yes. Just drop the second tanker, put a kick stage on the payload, and the concept is good to go as is.

Indeed, the "plane" part of it can survive a once-around 70-mile orbit and return to its runway.

But it gives LOOM/PROFAC something to do, and perhaps an excuse to develop high-Isp propulsion much sooner (Hall Effect or something similar for carting payloads up from 70 miles).

Juumanistra · Jan 14, 2022

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
So, Sirius is a Rocket of Unusual Size, is it?
Or, on second thought, you probably were suggesting it worked for the competition.

I mean, given who's heading-up rocketry for the Army, it's entirely possible it's working for the competition. Von Braun's going to bat for anybody that gives him a decent budget and the hope of shooting for the Moon.

FellowTraveller5 said:
Overly complicated, yes. Just drop the second tanker, put a kick stage on the payload, and the concept is good to go as is.

@Polish Eagle hit the nail on the head. The over-complication is a necessary element of the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane's brief, as it's got to attract the attention of the Navy, as it's an otherwise unsolicited proposal that is a nakedly self-serving one to try and sell other, existing hardware. And the way it was chosen to do that was to make use of the Navy's keen interest in propulsive fluid accumulators, even if it is perhaps not the most efficient system. As the Twin-Tankered Aerospaceplane also never got past the napkin-math-level of engineering, there is also a concern about technological feasibility: Given the state of rocket engines in 1958 when it's being envisioned, there's at least an argument that can be made that the net mass penalty from multiple in-flight refuelings is lower than a single-refueling and the mass of the kick-stage.

Polish Eagle said:
Indeed, the "plane" part of it can survive a once-around 70-mile orbit and return to its runway.

But it gives LOOM/PROFAC something to do, and perhaps an excuse to develop high-Isp propulsion much sooner (Hall Effect or something similar for carting payloads up from 70 miles).

The PROFAC concept already demands a high, full-stop, ISP engine: The 1960 Convair iteration was looking at a 2,000s MHD plasma thruster for orbital stationkeeping.

Additionally, the issue of hauling stuff up to true LEO raises a discussion that may or may not ever be narratively relevant that I find interesting with the PROFAC, so I'll touch on it now. I've found two conceptual iterations for the PROFAC from the early Space Race, one attributed to S. T. Diametredes in 1959 from the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and one from 1960 when he was working with Convair. To take its payload to LEO depotage, the 1959 iteration carries its own boosting engines and periodically hefts itself into a higher orbit, where it docks and unloads its LOX and LH2. The 1960 iteration just has docking ports, that an orbital tanker drops down to, fills-up at, and then boosts up to a higher orbit. The "up versus down" transfer of fluids debate strikes as an interesting engineering one that will invariably occur TTL, even if the propulsive fluid accumulator concept never goes anywhere.

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