I just listened to the latest episode of the 'The History of England' Podcast, which talked about that strange journey of Charles Steward and go incognito to Spain in 1623 together with George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham.
Now... They travelled through France for a bit. So what if they had...
That reminds me... Doctor John Clark, of Ignition! fame, worked at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station at Dover, New Jersey as chief chemist. Will he show up here? ;)
Well, I was more talking about the interesting concept of an Atlas flyback booster combined with a Centaur derived shuttle. Yes, it has its problems, but it is an interesting concept from the 60s. And Scott just got 4 bucks from me for the document... :p
Von Braun could easily have launched Explorer I (or whatever name it would have been with Project Orbiter) with the first Jupiter C rocket in 1956.
The problem was that the Redstone (first Stage of the Jupiter C) was based on A-4/V-2 and had former Nazi scientists and engineers working on it...
Politics.
Its a rewrite of my 'Seeing Further', which involves Alien artifacts on Mars. While clearly there, Nixon still has the Space Task Group and people thought that they have years to get to Mars, as the Soviets can't even go to the Moon. So NASA, while waiting for a decision, pitches the...
The Wet/Dry workshop concept was developed during the 1950s to use existing rockets that had expanded their fuels as stations by opening up the tanks, meaning that they were 'wet' during ascent. A dry workshop is 'Dry' during ascent, the best example is Skylab.
As I said, SLS lite, the Math...
I've been doing some work on a rewrite of 'Seeing Further' and decided to go with a near OTL STS shuttle (save for a pair of jet engines in the wing roots for more cross range), and needed an HLV for a Mars mission (nuclear). So I've done some math and design for an SLS lite, by merely sticking...