While it was possible for unmanned Mercury flights to be commanded without a pilot (see Mercury-Atlas 4, unmanned 1-orbit flight), I'm not sure if they were commanded from the ground or from a program loaded into the computer, though I suspect it was an onboard sequencer. I asked my great-uncle, who was in the guidance system design group, and to the best of his recollection there was no ability to over-ride pilot commands. However, the point isn't about a technical struggle for control, but that procedures laid out how an abort would be decided upon and then carried out, and this is a clear situation where the Flight Director would call one, and where the pilot would carry it out.
2001: A Space-Time Odyssey
- Thread starter SpaceGeek
- Start date
another great post, i hope that Gemini will perform Flawless ,and the Landing on the Moon also Perfect,Lets see what will happen next .
While the Russians payed their respects to their American competitor and comrad they had lost, the engineers at OKB-1 proceeded with the next in their lineup of Vostok flights. This was the chance to really showcase the full capabilities of the Vostok in it's current configuration.
Like the earlier Vostok 1, 2 and 5 flights Vostok 7 was a single person spaceflight designed at achieving long duration records in space. Utilizing a slighlty uprated R-7 Boris Volynov's roomy cannonball was fired into a highley elliptical orbit around the Earth with an perigee (lowest point) of just 200 km and an apogee (upper point) of just over 1,000 km. From this distant vantage point Volynov could see the entire world as one gigantic sphere covering nearly his entire feild of view. Unfortunatly film footage of him inside his capsule was cut off from mechanical failure of the television camera which was planned to be broadcast live. The rest of his flight was spent cooped up in the capsule performing intensive bio-medical experiments on himself. But while he acted as a human guinea pig for the scientists in Moscow he was able to observe the world as no one had seen it before.
Vostok 7 would end the spaceflight year with a short tribute to Shepard before it's own orbit decayed and landed safely on the snowy fields of Khazackstan several km off target just 10 days after launch (setting a new spaceflight record). Volynov meanwhile was greeted a heroe's welcome in Moscow as Khrushchev showcased his Spaceflight heroes on Lennin's tomb in Moscow and declared the exploration of space to be the greatest adventure of the century, outpassing the Climbing of Mount Everst. It was clear that if America hoped to make it to the Moon by the end of the decade (let alone beat Russia) they would need a new vehicle to perform Rendezvous, docking, long durations, spacewalks and other activities. That was Gemini and it was already preparing for flight.
Like the earlier Vostok 1, 2 and 5 flights Vostok 7 was a single person spaceflight designed at achieving long duration records in space. Utilizing a slighlty uprated R-7 Boris Volynov's roomy cannonball was fired into a highley elliptical orbit around the Earth with an perigee (lowest point) of just 200 km and an apogee (upper point) of just over 1,000 km. From this distant vantage point Volynov could see the entire world as one gigantic sphere covering nearly his entire feild of view. Unfortunatly film footage of him inside his capsule was cut off from mechanical failure of the television camera which was planned to be broadcast live. The rest of his flight was spent cooped up in the capsule performing intensive bio-medical experiments on himself. But while he acted as a human guinea pig for the scientists in Moscow he was able to observe the world as no one had seen it before.
Vostok 7 would end the spaceflight year with a short tribute to Shepard before it's own orbit decayed and landed safely on the snowy fields of Khazackstan several km off target just 10 days after launch (setting a new spaceflight record). Volynov meanwhile was greeted a heroe's welcome in Moscow as Khrushchev showcased his Spaceflight heroes on Lennin's tomb in Moscow and declared the exploration of space to be the greatest adventure of the century, outpassing the Climbing of Mount Everst. It was clear that if America hoped to make it to the Moon by the end of the decade (let alone beat Russia) they would need a new vehicle to perform Rendezvous, docking, long durations, spacewalks and other activities. That was Gemini and it was already preparing for flight.
another great update , lets see the landings on the moon , maybe the establishment of a Moonbase in a Partnership between NASA/ESA , to explore the moon for its resources , and later on Colonization . Cant hardly wait for the next chapter .
After Vostok 7's stunning high altitude misssion the USSR had another surging wave of prestige and nationalism hit the Communist block. Korolev however, was more concerned with the next scientifically oriented flight, Vostok 8.
Piloted by Pavel Belyayev and Yevgeni Khrunov, Vostok 8 returned humanity to Earth and began the spaceflight year on April 4th 1964. While it was another 1,000 km high apogee mission like Feoktistov's his flight would last be much shorter. Instead of the previous ten day, single person mission, Vostok 8 would conduct another spacewalk test and last only one day with a crew of two. I sent the message loud and clear that Khrushchev and the Soviets was passing the Americans by. The majority of his mission was spent with biomedical probes and scanners covering his entire body as physicians looked for any sign of trouble. But despite all their searching they find none and after 1 day and 6 minutes Belayev and Khrunov returned to after a rough landing in hundreds of km off coarse. He had to endure a severe Siberian night with wolves and other wild animals scratching at his spherical descent module. His heroic re-entry was probabley the most rough since Yuri Gagarin's. Returning another spaceflight hero it was becoming obvious that what Gemini hoped to accomplish was already being accomplished by the Vostok. American engineers estimated the Soviet Union's position to be atleast three years ahead of them.
Despite his the intensive experiments and monitering performed on himself, Belayev was still allowed to enjoy this beautiful view of Arabia from 957 km up.
I caught up to this timeline a few days ago, and started a reply that I'm afraid got disjoined and distracted; I'm hoping a new start will tighten it up!
First of all, I hope you two might get back with Bahamut and continue Red Star, because although on second look this timeline is not quite as improbable as it seemed at first glance, Red Star is clearly stronger. The incident with Shephard here for instance--I have to agree, it is out of character, for him and for NASA, and there's nothing so out of line on the American side in Red Star.
What's up with the French incident by the way? It seems you are walking away from it unresolved. But there's more to untangle there! On one hand, I don't think that shooting down Brezhnev's plane would be more than an awkward, unpleasant incident in the long run--these things happen and don't generally lead to war.
On the other--none of the political shuffling of French leadership in its wake you mentioned included the name of Charles de Gaulle. I broke off my last response when I got bogged down in checking out the state of French politics OTL circa 1961--and OTL de Gaulle had already taken up the French Presidency with emergency powers and the stipulation of a new Constitution (one that would give the President much stronger powers permanently) some years before, in 1958. And by 1961 he had almost put the Algerian crisis, which was the issue that brought him back to power, mostly behind him--much to the disgust and discontent of the rightist factions who called for him in the first place, by acquiescing to Algerian independence with no particular guarantees for the European settlers, who fled Algeria en masse in 1961 when its independence became effective. I didn't confirm or deny that the shooting incident was OTL but I'll take your word for it--the French didn't vacate Algeria until July, and retained certain treaty rights (to missile and nuclear test sites) that were effective for half a decade to come, until 1966.
But here, since by 1961 OTL de Gaulle's name was synonymous with France, at least regarding all foreign policy, whereas he is not mentioned at all here, this implies we are in a timeline that diverged well before 1960, by 1958 at the earliest, and de Gaulle is not President of the Fifth Republic, which might not exist. Perhaps here the French are still struggling to keep control of Algeria, or have made less sweeping agreements, and might try to hang on for years to come, without de Gaulle running things. That implies also that the USA is more entangled with France than OTL by this point, since it was de Gaulle who showed Americans the door--although somewhat later in the decade.
So while the loss of Cmrd Brezhnev might be something everyone decently forgets, I think there's a lot of timeline backstory that needs filling in.
Now, what of Chelomei's moon shot scheme? I had to agree with e of pi, who again presumably knows his stuff, in dismissing the plan as given as unworkable and considerably more risky even than the OTL N-1 scheme. However I have been taking a closer look. Even using pessimistic ISPs for the rockets and assuming a less optimistic 10 percent of fuel mass for the stage structures, I do think that something like the direct landing plan can work out, if the initial mass put in parking orbit is as low as 125 tons! It's marginal as hell because we are talking about Hohmann orbits that are by the way not free-return, and take longer than the OTL Apollo trajectories (or your own ATL N-1 dual launch missions). That is, when I worked it out I assumed Hohmann orbits--it turns out Chelomei OTL apparently had his ship going a bit faster, though clearly more slowly than Apollo. Anyway this assumes the under 4 ton return capsule he proposed is adequate for one man, or even two to live in for nearly two weeks--which is scary but clearly possible, given the extent of some Gemini missions OTL. And that nothing breaks down of course, but that's part of the whole Moonshot game, isn't it? (One reason I raved about the Soviet craft in Red Star was that due to the decision to go with two 75 ton launches, the system had lots of margin for error, more than a frugal and ambitious program would want to have actually).
However the same crude methods of estimation I used to find that 125 tons is marginally sufficient for a direct mission to and from the Moon led me to conclude that a Spartan LOR strategy could get the job done, barely, for as little as 75 tons! Which is to say, that if Chelomei could be persuaded belatedly to support LOR, and also manages a 125 ton rocket, the LEM he would have margin to create would be a sight to see--some 50 to 100 percent more massive all up than the Apollo LM!
Chelomei does not want to go for any sort of rendezvous strategy of course, not EOR, not LOR. It would indeed then be wise for his throw weight to orbit to be greater than 125 tons. Since IIRC 160 is the goal, he has 35 tons of margin to fall short before direct landing and ascent become completely infeasible--and then another 50 tons before LOR becomes impossible as well. With EOR, his launcher can fall under 65 tons to orbit and still enable a direct landing and ascent with two launches, and as low as 40--a miserable quarter of his target!--and still manage a two-launch LOR.
And since his more modest UR-500, aka "Proton," aimed for 20 tons to orbit and actually achieved it OTL, or anyway came close and could clearly be pushed up to that, that implies that a Spartan LOR mission could be accomplished with 4 Proton launches, and with a bit more comfortable margin with 5 or 6. By now Chelomei's ambitious claims for the single shot strategy would be pretty threadbare, but it could be done with existing OTL tech that actually worked! (Or, God only provide, a ker-lox alternative to Proton, such as Red Star's N-11).
Perhaps these benchmarks are a bit too low because of inefficiencies involved in compositing craft in orbit, but at any rate I think the project is not quite as impossible as I initially believed. If he can manage to make the UR-700 reliably put just 140 tons into orbit, I figure he can go ahead with a version of his favorite plan of a single-launch, direct-descent, direct-ascent to TEI single-spacecraft mission.
Of course I think he'd be wiser to look into LOR since that might, with these mass budgets, allow really spectacular Moon adventures.
And he, and any timeline author who wants to enable him, should have his head examined for daring to suggest launching the whole thing on 5000 tons of hypergolic fuel! The UR-700 he proposed OTL was the mass of seven Proton rockets. Now I gather that over the years, more than seven Protons have failed in various ways, including pad failures, implying that terrible as these events might be for the people immediately present, they don't sterilize all of Khazakstan. But there is no doubt there is a serious danger of a pad explosion--the explosion itself would not be more devastating than an equivalent one of ker-lox or hydrogen-oxygen to be sure! But it would be somewhat more probable, and much more toxic in its aftermath than either alternative. And here, Chelomei is aiming for a single rocket that is nearly twice the mass of either a Saturn V or an N-1!
The thing that gets me about hypergolics for big, scheduled launches is that ker-lox is actually superior, in terms of efficiency, by a bit anyway. So taking these risks, which amount to certainty of a big disaster in the early development of such an ambitious rocket, strikes me as insane when a less devastating alternative that is just as good exists.
Since you've gone and adopted a POD that reaches back to the late 50s if not earlier (judging by the implied alternate development of French politics) I'd like to suggest something I know is of some interest to Michel Van--that Chelomei, Korolev, or some third Soviet clique of designers had hit on the alternative of kerosene-hydrogen peroxide rockets in the 1950s.
Like the hypergolics, hydrogen peroxide poses some risks (much less severe ones of long-term chemical poisoning though) but is liquid at a wide range of what we can call "room temperatures," or more aptly Earth-environmental ones. Pure (well nearly pure, I believe it is technically impossible to get or keep absolutely 100 percent hydrogen peroxide) freezes at about the same temperature as water, but I gather hypergolics too can't afford to get that cold either. It boils at not 100 but 150 C, or rather that is the theoretical boiling point--if you heat it that much it starts to decompose before it boils. Hypergolics, provided they don't get loose, store quietly in suitably clean containers--in perfectly clean ones so does high-test peroxide, but a great many things, just about any dirt or even cracks in an otherwise inert container, can cause HTHP to catalyze and start decomposing; in a sealed container, this means release of both heat--a lot of heat--and oxygen gas, which both raise the pressure along with the temperature and thus raise the rate of catalytic decomposition--leading quite clearly to a chain reaction that can cause the container to explode. This is one of the worst things about HTHP, along with the fact that that same easy catalysis means that any of it splashed onto many surfaces, including any organic matter, will start a fire fed by the oxygen that is hard to put out. So in some respects it is almost as nasty as the hypergolics (which will do the same things if spilled, but won't explode in their isolated containers). But it doesn't form the same cocktail of nasty toxins, and with the same care given to hypergolics (if you want to live!) the peroxide can be handled and stored.
It is almost 50 percent denser than water, and more than most oxidants, it makes up the greater part of the reactants--the optimal mix of HTHP and kerosene, for instance, is 7.35:1 by mass. So, stored in a rocket's propellant tanks, the heavy peroxide is most of the bulk, and despite the lower density of the kerosene, the overall density of the mix is about 4/3 that of water, hence rather low volume tanks are needed.
What is really interesting is that the potentially achievable ISP is quite within the same range as moderately good ker-lox or hypergolics, above 300. Ker-lox, in a superbly efficient engine such as the Russians have achieved by the late 1980s OTL, is significantly more efficient; a very good hypergolic engine can beat the best peroxide one too. But if the safety issues of handling and storing peroxide can be addressed successfully, I believe that because of the somewhat lower reaction temperatures achieved in the combustion chambers, a kerosene-peroxide engine of relatively high efficiency is easier to make than the comparable ker-lox one.
Thus, in the 1950s, I think it could have been a viable competitor for a missile propellant mix, being as storable as hypergolics and capable of similar efficiencies.
There are other nifty tricks HTHP allows. The degree of coking the chamber and nozzle is much less than with ker-lox, because very little of the burning mix is actually hydrocarbon; the flame is remarkably clean and clear.
And thanks to that dangerous tendency of HTHP to decay in the presence of a catalyst, we can use it to ignite the combustion chambers. Just pump a small stream of it through a catalyst and it will decompose into very hot steam and oxygen--as a monopropellant, such rockets have been made that have an ISP around 100--pretty poor as liquid fuel rockets go, but it has been used as a reaction control system. More usefully in a high performance rocket, such a jet is sure to ignite kerosene, or any other fuel just about.
I've had some notions of my own, with no historical precedent whatsoever, of using HTHP and ammonia, which I have discarded. They do lead however to another idea, which is to use ammonia as a pressurant in a peroxide-kerosene rocket! I figure that a pretty modest mass of ammonia, kept under some tens of atmospheres pressure, will be in saturation, some liquid, some vapor. So imagine we have tubes leading to the tops of the kerosene tank, with this high-pressure ammonia gas pressurizing it, and another set to the top of the peroxide tank--here I suppose we should put a barrier of some kind of flexible plastic ballonet material between the two lest they start reacting prematurely. Now, the rocket engines might be simple pressure fed ones--but unlike pressure fed systems that rely on simply letting a highly compressed gas such as helium or nitrogen expand, here we fire a jet of catalyzed peroxide into the liquid ammonia in a sump at the bottom of the rocket! The peroxide itself is already hot, and then it burns some of the ammonia, releasing far more heat--the hot jet serves as a boiler, if we calibrate it correctly the volume of ammonia gas produced matches the volumes of propellants, mostly peroxide, being consumed by the engines. The pressure is kept constant instead of falling as it typically does in inert-gas fed systems; at burnout we have a volume filled with ammonia gas at roughly room temperature but high pressure; it amounts to a few percent of the mass of propellants. Actually if we have some extra peroxide left we can burn off a good amount of the ammonia too.
Or we don't have to be content with pressure-fed systems, which require the rocket stage as a whole to have strong and thus heavy walls; we could instead use catalyzed peroxide to create steam to drive the turbines that actively pump in the propellants; such an engine would be less simple and heavier than a pressure-fed one but somewhat lighter and cheaper than a more efficient but very high temperature turbine, open or closed cycle, fed by the main propellants--here we are using one of them, the major one, to be sure. And perhaps two; we can work our way toward a more typical fuel-burning turbine, as far as we care to, by injecting some kerosene into the power turbines as well. We could still use ammonia, kept colder, to maintain the pressure of the fuel tanks at a lower level--or perhaps steam, running another peroxide jet through a tank of ordinary water, could do that job instead.
Meanwhile, one aspect of HTHP that has been developed in some OTL engines is using it as a chamber and nozzle coolant--I would imagine doing so results in autocatalysis of the stuff as it hits the hot walls, but apparently this isn't as disadvantageous as I had assumed, and presumably that flow of oxygen and steam is then fed into the combustion chamber after cooling the critically heated surfaces despite the release of yet more heat from the decomposition process. I was wondering, before reading about that today, whether HTHP engines would need some alternative kind of cooling or need to be ablative, but apparently not!
Now OTL, few people ever considered working with HTHP for ballistic rockets, though quite a few used them, or monopropellant catalytic ones, for other kinds of rockets--quite often for airplane rockets, as liquid, permanently installed JATO units, or for research high-speed engines or for rocket-augmented interceptors; the commonest form of human "rocket belts" that have been demonstrated use a catalyzed peroxide jet (good for about 30 seconds operation). For spacecraft or ICBMs, only the British developed peroxide-kerosene rockets however--the Black Knight sounding rocket, the Black Arrow light orbiter (launching Prospero, the single satellite launched by purely Commonwealth means) and a proposal to use these stages in conjunction with the ker-lox Blue Streak booster stage as an alternative to the French Coralie second stage of the cooperative Europa rocket. The biggest peroxide-kerosene rocket they developed, the Gamma-Eight, is dwarfed by the big rockets the Americans and Soviets are developing here--I figure to make a Ker-peroxide Proton first stage with Gamma-Eights, one would need 38 of the damn things.
Worse, they fell far short of the potential 300+ isp, having isps around 260.
Perhaps that means I have oversold them, and to achieve the competitive ISPs I have been assuming we need more advanced tech than the Soviets could plausibly have in the 1960s. But perhaps it merely means that the British programs were run on very thin and frayed shoestrings, and with serious backing the size and efficiency of the peroxide alternatives could be raised dramatically.
I've been rather fascinated by the possibilities that might have been overlooked with peroxide, as you can see!
At the end of the day, hypergolics have the stronger case because they were indeed developed OTL, on both sides of the Iron Curtain too, and remain mainstays in both Western and Russian rocketry, as well as Chinese and I gather even Indian.
I still think making a 5000 ton rocket with the stuff is folly though. If we can't have peroxide, by all means let us hope this timeline veers back to kerlox!
First of all, I hope you two might get back with Bahamut and continue Red Star, because although on second look this timeline is not quite as improbable as it seemed at first glance, Red Star is clearly stronger. The incident with Shephard here for instance--I have to agree, it is out of character, for him and for NASA, and there's nothing so out of line on the American side in Red Star.
What's up with the French incident by the way? It seems you are walking away from it unresolved. But there's more to untangle there! On one hand, I don't think that shooting down Brezhnev's plane would be more than an awkward, unpleasant incident in the long run--these things happen and don't generally lead to war.
On the other--none of the political shuffling of French leadership in its wake you mentioned included the name of Charles de Gaulle. I broke off my last response when I got bogged down in checking out the state of French politics OTL circa 1961--and OTL de Gaulle had already taken up the French Presidency with emergency powers and the stipulation of a new Constitution (one that would give the President much stronger powers permanently) some years before, in 1958. And by 1961 he had almost put the Algerian crisis, which was the issue that brought him back to power, mostly behind him--much to the disgust and discontent of the rightist factions who called for him in the first place, by acquiescing to Algerian independence with no particular guarantees for the European settlers, who fled Algeria en masse in 1961 when its independence became effective. I didn't confirm or deny that the shooting incident was OTL but I'll take your word for it--the French didn't vacate Algeria until July, and retained certain treaty rights (to missile and nuclear test sites) that were effective for half a decade to come, until 1966.
But here, since by 1961 OTL de Gaulle's name was synonymous with France, at least regarding all foreign policy, whereas he is not mentioned at all here, this implies we are in a timeline that diverged well before 1960, by 1958 at the earliest, and de Gaulle is not President of the Fifth Republic, which might not exist. Perhaps here the French are still struggling to keep control of Algeria, or have made less sweeping agreements, and might try to hang on for years to come, without de Gaulle running things. That implies also that the USA is more entangled with France than OTL by this point, since it was de Gaulle who showed Americans the door--although somewhat later in the decade.
So while the loss of Cmrd Brezhnev might be something everyone decently forgets, I think there's a lot of timeline backstory that needs filling in.
Now, what of Chelomei's moon shot scheme? I had to agree with e of pi, who again presumably knows his stuff, in dismissing the plan as given as unworkable and considerably more risky even than the OTL N-1 scheme. However I have been taking a closer look. Even using pessimistic ISPs for the rockets and assuming a less optimistic 10 percent of fuel mass for the stage structures, I do think that something like the direct landing plan can work out, if the initial mass put in parking orbit is as low as 125 tons! It's marginal as hell because we are talking about Hohmann orbits that are by the way not free-return, and take longer than the OTL Apollo trajectories (or your own ATL N-1 dual launch missions). That is, when I worked it out I assumed Hohmann orbits--it turns out Chelomei OTL apparently had his ship going a bit faster, though clearly more slowly than Apollo. Anyway this assumes the under 4 ton return capsule he proposed is adequate for one man, or even two
to live in for nearly two weeks--which is scary but clearly possible, given the extent of some Gemini missions OTL. And that nothing breaks down of course, but that's part of the whole Moonshot game, isn't it? (One reason I raved about the Soviet craft in Red Star was that due to the decision to go with two 75 ton launches, the system had lots of margin for error, more than a frugal and ambitious program would want to have actually). However the same crude methods of estimation I used to find that 125 tons is marginally sufficient for a direct mission to and from the Moon led me to conclude that a Spartan LOR strategy could get the job done, barely, for as little as 75 tons! Which is to say, that if Chelomei could be persuaded belatedly to support LOR, and also manages a 125 ton rocket, the LEM he would have margin to create would be a sight to see--some 50 to 100 percent more massive all up than the Apollo LM!
Chelomei does not want to go for any sort of rendezvous strategy of course, not EOR, not LOR. It would indeed then be wise for his throw weight to orbit to be greater than 125 tons. Since IIRC 160 is the goal, he has 35 tons of margin to fall short before direct landing and ascent become completely infeasible--and then another 50 tons before LOR becomes impossible as well. With EOR, his launcher can fall under 65 tons to orbit and still enable a direct landing and ascent with two launches, and as low as 40--a miserable quarter of his target!--and still manage a two-launch LOR.
And since his more modest UR-500, aka "Proton," aimed for 20 tons to orbit and actually achieved it OTL, or anyway came close and could clearly be pushed up to that, that implies that a Spartan LOR mission could be accomplished with 4 Proton launches, and with a bit more comfortable margin with 5 or 6. By now Chelomei's ambitious claims for the single shot strategy would be pretty threadbare, but it could be done with existing OTL tech that actually worked! (Or, God only provide, a ker-lox alternative to Proton, such as Red Star's N-11).
Perhaps these benchmarks are a bit too low because of inefficiencies involved in compositing craft in orbit, but at any rate I think the project is not quite as impossible as I initially believed. If he can manage to make the UR-700 reliably put just 140 tons into orbit, I figure he can go ahead with a version of his favorite plan of a single-launch, direct-descent, direct-ascent to TEI single-spacecraft mission.
Of course I think he'd be wiser to look into LOR since that might, with these mass budgets, allow really spectacular Moon adventures.
And he, and any timeline author who wants to enable him, should have his head examined for daring to suggest launching the whole thing on 5000 tons of hypergolic fuel!
The UR-700 he proposed OTL was the mass of seven Proton rockets. Now I gather that over the years, more than seven Protons have failed in various ways, including pad failures, implying that terrible as these events might be for the people immediately present, they don't sterilize all of Khazakstan. But there is no doubt there is a serious danger of a pad explosion--the explosion itself would not be more devastating than an equivalent one of ker-lox or hydrogen-oxygen to be sure! But it would be somewhat more probable, and much more toxic in its aftermath than either alternative. And here, Chelomei is aiming for a single rocket that is nearly twice the mass of either a Saturn V or an N-1!The thing that gets me about hypergolics for big, scheduled launches is that ker-lox is actually superior, in terms of efficiency, by a bit anyway. So taking these risks, which amount to certainty of a big disaster in the early development of such an ambitious rocket, strikes me as insane when a less devastating alternative that is just as good exists.
Since you've gone and adopted a POD that reaches back to the late 50s if not earlier (judging by the implied alternate development of French politics) I'd like to suggest something I know is of some interest to Michel Van--that Chelomei, Korolev, or some third Soviet clique of designers had hit on the alternative of kerosene-hydrogen peroxide rockets in the 1950s.
Like the hypergolics, hydrogen peroxide poses some risks (much less severe ones of long-term chemical poisoning though) but is liquid at a wide range of what we can call "room temperatures," or more aptly Earth-environmental ones. Pure (well nearly pure, I believe it is technically impossible to get or keep absolutely 100 percent hydrogen peroxide) freezes at about the same temperature as water, but I gather hypergolics too can't afford to get that cold either. It boils at not 100 but 150 C, or rather that is the theoretical boiling point--if you heat it that much it starts to decompose before it boils. Hypergolics, provided they don't get loose, store quietly in suitably clean containers--in perfectly clean ones so does high-test peroxide, but a great many things, just about any dirt or even cracks in an otherwise inert container, can cause HTHP to catalyze and start decomposing; in a sealed container, this means release of both heat--a lot of heat--and oxygen gas, which both raise the pressure along with the temperature and thus raise the rate of catalytic decomposition--leading quite clearly to a chain reaction that can cause the container to explode.
This is one of the worst things about HTHP, along with the fact that that same easy catalysis means that any of it splashed onto many surfaces, including any organic matter, will start a fire fed by the oxygen that is hard to put out. So in some respects it is almost as nasty as the hypergolics (which will do the same things if spilled, but won't explode in their isolated containers). But it doesn't form the same cocktail of nasty toxins, and with the same care given to hypergolics (if you want to live!) the peroxide can be handled and stored.It is almost 50 percent denser than water, and more than most oxidants, it makes up the greater part of the reactants--the optimal mix of HTHP and kerosene, for instance, is 7.35:1 by mass. So, stored in a rocket's propellant tanks, the heavy peroxide is most of the bulk, and despite the lower density of the kerosene, the overall density of the mix is about 4/3 that of water, hence rather low volume tanks are needed.
What is really interesting is that the potentially achievable ISP is quite within the same range as moderately good ker-lox or hypergolics, above 300. Ker-lox, in a superbly efficient engine such as the Russians have achieved by the late 1980s OTL, is significantly more efficient; a very good hypergolic engine can beat the best peroxide one too. But if the safety issues of handling and storing peroxide can be addressed successfully, I believe that because of the somewhat lower reaction temperatures achieved in the combustion chambers, a kerosene-peroxide engine of relatively high efficiency is easier to make than the comparable ker-lox one.
Thus, in the 1950s, I think it could have been a viable competitor for a missile propellant mix, being as storable as hypergolics and capable of similar efficiencies.
There are other nifty tricks HTHP allows. The degree of coking the chamber and nozzle is much less than with ker-lox, because very little of the burning mix is actually hydrocarbon; the flame is remarkably clean and clear.
And thanks to that dangerous tendency of HTHP to decay in the presence of a catalyst, we can use it to ignite the combustion chambers. Just pump a small stream of it through a catalyst and it will decompose into very hot steam and oxygen--as a monopropellant, such rockets have been made that have an ISP around 100--pretty poor as liquid fuel rockets go, but it has been used as a reaction control system. More usefully in a high performance rocket, such a jet is sure to ignite kerosene, or any other fuel just about.
I've had some notions of my own, with no historical precedent whatsoever, of using HTHP and ammonia, which I have discarded. They do lead however to another idea, which is to use ammonia as a pressurant in a peroxide-kerosene rocket! I figure that a pretty modest mass of ammonia, kept under some tens of atmospheres pressure, will be in saturation, some liquid, some vapor. So imagine we have tubes leading to the tops of the kerosene tank, with this high-pressure ammonia gas pressurizing it, and another set to the top of the peroxide tank--here I suppose we should put a barrier of some kind of flexible plastic ballonet material between the two lest they start reacting prematurely. Now, the rocket engines might be simple pressure fed ones--but unlike pressure fed systems that rely on simply letting a highly compressed gas such as helium or nitrogen expand, here we fire a jet of catalyzed peroxide into the liquid ammonia in a sump at the bottom of the rocket! The peroxide itself is already hot, and then it burns some of the ammonia, releasing far more heat--the hot jet serves as a boiler, if we calibrate it correctly the volume of ammonia gas produced matches the volumes of propellants, mostly peroxide, being consumed by the engines. The pressure is kept constant instead of falling as it typically does in inert-gas fed systems; at burnout we have a volume filled with ammonia gas at roughly room temperature but high pressure; it amounts to a few percent of the mass of propellants. Actually if we have some extra peroxide left we can burn off a good amount of the ammonia too.
Or we don't have to be content with pressure-fed systems, which require the rocket stage as a whole to have strong and thus heavy walls; we could instead use catalyzed peroxide to create steam to drive the turbines that actively pump in the propellants; such an engine would be less simple and heavier than a pressure-fed one but somewhat lighter and cheaper than a more efficient but very high temperature turbine, open or closed cycle, fed by the main propellants--here we are using one of them, the major one, to be sure. And perhaps two; we can work our way toward a more typical fuel-burning turbine, as far as we care to, by injecting some kerosene into the power turbines as well. We could still use ammonia, kept colder, to maintain the pressure of the fuel tanks at a lower level--or perhaps steam, running another peroxide jet through a tank of ordinary water, could do that job instead.
Meanwhile, one aspect of HTHP that has been developed in some OTL engines is using it as a chamber and nozzle coolant--I would imagine doing so results in autocatalysis of the stuff as it hits the hot walls, but apparently this isn't as disadvantageous as I had assumed, and presumably that flow of oxygen and steam is then fed into the combustion chamber after cooling the critically heated surfaces despite the release of yet more heat from the decomposition process. I was wondering, before reading about that today, whether HTHP engines would need some alternative kind of cooling or need to be ablative, but apparently not!
Now OTL, few people ever considered working with HTHP for ballistic rockets, though quite a few used them, or monopropellant catalytic ones, for other kinds of rockets--quite often for airplane rockets, as liquid, permanently installed JATO units, or for research high-speed engines or for rocket-augmented interceptors; the commonest form of human "rocket belts" that have been demonstrated use a catalyzed peroxide jet (good for about 30 seconds operation
). For spacecraft or ICBMs, only the British developed peroxide-kerosene rockets however--the Black Knight sounding rocket, the Black Arrow light orbiter (launching Prospero, the single satellite launched by purely Commonwealth means) and a proposal to use these stages in conjunction with the ker-lox Blue Streak booster stage as an alternative to the French Coralie second stage of the cooperative Europa rocket. The biggest peroxide-kerosene rocket they developed, the Gamma-Eight, is dwarfed by the big rockets the Americans and Soviets are developing here--I figure to make a Ker-peroxide Proton first stage with Gamma-Eights, one would need 38 of the damn things.Worse, they fell far short of the potential 300+ isp, having isps around 260.
Perhaps that means I have oversold them, and to achieve the competitive ISPs I have been assuming we need more advanced tech than the Soviets could plausibly have in the 1960s. But perhaps it merely means that the British programs were run on very thin and frayed shoestrings, and with serious backing the size and efficiency of the peroxide alternatives could be raised dramatically.
I've been rather fascinated by the possibilities that might have been overlooked with peroxide, as you can see!
At the end of the day, hypergolics have the stronger case because they were indeed developed OTL, on both sides of the Iron Curtain too, and remain mainstays in both Western and Russian rocketry, as well as Chinese and I gather even Indian.
I still think making a 5000 ton rocket with the stuff is folly though. If we can't have peroxide, by all means let us hope this timeline veers back to kerlox!
On Charles de Gaulle.
the 1961 to 1963 were most turbulent years of french Fifth Republic.
OAS has war of Terror in France and Algeria
President de Gaulle and his prime minister have allot of fires to control
like the Generals' Putsch in 21-26 April 1961 or OAS try to assassinat President de Gaulle in Pont-sur-Seine, with car bomb in september 8, 1961!
we have a lot POD on France and it will play a role in this TL but we Work them one after the other, be patience.
On Chelomei's moon shot scheme (LK-700), you right Shevek23
but this was political decision to take Chelomei plan in 1961, who was in time possessed on the Idea of NTO/UDMH engines
while the USSR rocket engine manufacture number one Glushko was strangely also possessed on the Idea of NTO/UDMH engines.
He even refused in that time R&D on LOX/Hydrogen !
the UR-700 malfunction will be chemical hell on earth.
on using HTHP and ammonia,
i have no ida if that work, i'm not engineer on rocket engine..
the 1961 to 1963 were most turbulent years of french Fifth Republic.
OAS has war of Terror in France and Algeria
President de Gaulle and his prime minister have allot of fires to control
like the Generals' Putsch in 21-26 April 1961 or OAS try to assassinat President de Gaulle in Pont-sur-Seine, with car bomb in september 8, 1961!
we have a lot POD on France and it will play a role in this TL but we Work them one after the other, be patience.
On Chelomei's moon shot scheme (LK-700), you right Shevek23
but this was political decision to take Chelomei plan in 1961, who was in time possessed on the Idea of NTO/UDMH engines
while the USSR rocket engine manufacture number one Glushko was strangely also possessed on the Idea of NTO/UDMH engines.
He even refused in that time R&D on LOX/Hydrogen !
the UR-700 malfunction will be chemical hell on earth.
on using HTHP and ammonia,
i have no ida if that work, i'm not engineer on rocket engine..
Last edited:
First off, Thanks for the Reply. I haven't forgotten about RedStar and you'l see an update very shortly. The whole point of the Mercury Atlas-10 was selected at all was because of a mounting Soviet lead in space. There would be even more pressure than in OTL for a three day Mercury mission. Such a mission would be very risky (just looking at how much of a close call Mercury Atlas-9 was). I'm doing this because I'm trying to be realistic with the fact that people are going to die in this TL. I can't go through this without having some very unfortunate accidents.
The next post will actually deal with that one, I haven't forgotten. This will have some interesting consequences for the French as you will soon see. That will have a serious effect on the Soviet side however and that was the real intention behind it. This TL requires multiple PODs to get to where it needs to go. The Technology was there IOTL but, boy does allot of Politics need reweaving to work.
No, No, No. Charles de Gaulle is still very much a part of the France, I'm sorry if I didn't mention him but I didn't try to imply anything like that. I can't say much more without spoiling it. You'l just have to wait for the next post.
Well neither am I am afraid, unlike say e of pi.
To the general public here, some months ago I PM'd a number of people with a wild idea I had for making an alternate private space launch initiative parallel to OTL's OTRAG but using a different fuel mix--namely ammonia and hydrogen peroxide. Michel was kind enough to reply at some length, as were a few others. Reflecting on his replies, and looking more closely at plain old kerosene-peroxide instead, my thinking went in another direction. Michel I have meant to send some updates but perhaps I forgot, because then along came the Red Star timeline and I was caught up in trying to figure out the N rockets instead.
So if I never pm'd you with this change of thought of mine--no, I gave up on ammonia as the main fuel, because of low ISP and other reasons...but the idea of using ammonia as a cheap and yet dynamic alternative gaseous pressurant seemed interesting. Here we have a substance that can be kept (at moderately high pressure) as both liquid and gas, in saturation, at approximately environmental temperatures--but with the application of heat, converted into gas in a controlled manner, thus one of the drawbacks of OTRAG's simple pressurization system (the pressure drops as the fuels are expended) can be sidestepped. If we want the pressure to be low, ammonia is more tricky because it has to be cold for that, but not liquid oxygen cold--indeed not quite cold enough to freeze either kerosene (or turn it to wax, more like) or hydrogen peroxide.
I was originally rejecting the idea of the engines having turbopumps, but I think you were right; turbopumps driven by catalyzed peroxide jets might be cheap enough to stand out.
Of late I've been thinking of ATLs where it is the Soviet space effort that uses kerosene-peroxide, but perhaps here or in Red Star it can be, as was my original inspiration, some private entrepreneur in the West who, in the context of the space race of the 1970s and 80s, looks for a cheap if somewhat dirty path to orbit for low-cost payloads. I hope not quite as dirty as OTL OTRAG, which proposed to use hydrazine and kerosene!
Perhaps largely a Commonwealth thing, a private effort including some former workers on the Black Knight disgruntled by Her Majesty's Government cavalierly dropping it, and Australians keen to see the desert launch sites revived.Here introduction on what happen in France
with look back on hottest years of Cold War:
1961 was the year where the world almost caught in the nuclear fire of World War III.
In February with death of Leonid Brezhnev by french pilots, had led to the first crisis of that year. The French Prime Minister and Minister of Defense resigned from office in disgrace,
While the USSR in U.N. demanded a harsh and thorough inquiry in the affaire. Meanwhile Brezhnev's closed casket funeral occured as he was burried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis outside Lenin's tomb.
President De Gaulle and his new Prime minister George Pompidou didn't have many options. With the both the French-Algerian civil war on their hands and now teetering on the edge of a war with USSR.
Lucky, France had the Atomic bomb and was part of NATO which gave France some protections against any "violent" Soviet reaction.
Even with all support the french gave to the U.N. inquiry the Affaire let to deterioration of French-Soviet relations and drove the French closer into NATO alliance.
The U.N. Report on the shooting down of the IL-18 with Brezhnev was published in April
and conclusively showed it was caused by a combination of lack of communication between the Soviets and French along with pilot error.
(ironically in September the U.N. started another Report about the shooting down of airplane with the UN Secretary General on board, by Belgium mercenaries )
But the Soviets had other problems.
on the 17th of April the Bay of Pigs invasion happened in Cuba, the next major crisis in that year. The moment Fidel Castro announce that the invasion failed, in Algeria a nuclear Coup was attempted by four french Generals.
On May 25th, Kennedy gave his "we choose go to the moon" speech. Which led Khrushchev to take LK-700 project to counter the American's Apollo program.
Then the East Germans started with the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13. THE crisis in that year. At it's zenith on October 27, US and Soviet tanks held a standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin.
During the tensest hours, the World watched as they stood on the edge of Nuclear War which, luckily, did not happen. Thankfully nothing even aproaching the crisis period of this year would happen in the rest of the Cold War.
with look back on hottest years of Cold War:
1961 was the year where the world almost caught in the nuclear fire of World War III.
In February with death of Leonid Brezhnev by french pilots, had led to the first crisis of that year. The French Prime Minister and Minister of Defense resigned from office in disgrace,
While the USSR in U.N. demanded a harsh and thorough inquiry in the affaire. Meanwhile Brezhnev's closed casket funeral occured as he was burried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis outside Lenin's tomb.
President De Gaulle and his new Prime minister George Pompidou didn't have many options. With the both the French-Algerian civil war on their hands and now teetering on the edge of a war with USSR.
Lucky, France had the Atomic bomb and was part of NATO which gave France some protections against any "violent" Soviet reaction.
Even with all support the french gave to the U.N. inquiry the Affaire let to deterioration of French-Soviet relations and drove the French closer into NATO alliance.
The U.N. Report on the shooting down of the IL-18 with Brezhnev was published in April
and conclusively showed it was caused by a combination of lack of communication between the Soviets and French along with pilot error.
(ironically in September the U.N. started another Report about the shooting down of airplane with the UN Secretary General on board, by Belgium mercenaries )
But the Soviets had other problems.
on the 17th of April the Bay of Pigs invasion happened in Cuba, the next major crisis in that year. The moment Fidel Castro announce that the invasion failed, in Algeria a nuclear Coup was attempted by four french Generals.
On May 25th, Kennedy gave his "we choose go to the moon" speech. Which led Khrushchev to take LK-700 project to counter the American's Apollo program.
Then the East Germans started with the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13. THE crisis in that year. At it's zenith on October 27, US and Soviet tanks held a standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin.
During the tensest hours, the World watched as they stood on the edge of Nuclear War which, luckily, did not happen. Thankfully nothing even aproaching the crisis period of this year would happen in the rest of the Cold War.
Last edited:
Lucky, France had the Atomic bomb and was part of NATO which gave France some protections against any "violent" Soviet reaction.
It did have the bomb, but in 1961, no more than a few deployable warheads.
I suppose that would be a psychological comfort, if nothing else.
It did have the bomb, but in 1961, no more than a few deployable warheads.
I suppose that would be a psychological comfort, if nothing else.
france in more Detail
To understand the situation of 1961-1963, you first have to know this:
France was in a Civil-war with their colony Algeria from 1954 to 1962,
primarily with Algerian Muslims in the National Front of Liberation (NFL) against the Fourth French Republic.
At the same time the French Algerians were fighting as the (literally translated) Organization Army Secret (OAS) who fought the NFL and French authorities.
OAS commited acts of terrorism with various assassinations, bomb attacks in France and Algeria, just as the NFL did.
After 4 years of Civil-war, the Fourth French Republic collapsed in the May revolts of 1958.
The Military threatened with a coup d'état, if General Charles de Gaulle didn't not take over the political power.
Parliament elected de Gaulle as a new leader, who promply declared the French Fifth Republic.
In 1960 the French military detonated their first nuclear bomb in the Algerian desert.
On the 8th of January 1961, the French held a referendum on Algerian self-determination, It was approved by 75.0% of voters overall and 69.5% in Algeria.
The Brezhnev Incident.
9th of February 1961, the French Air force shoots down an unidentified aircraft that entered French-Algerian airspace, believing it's a Weapon transport for NFL.
But was instead a soviet aircraft with Head of state of the USSR on board: Leonid Brezhnev.
The news shocked France while the Soviets were outraged about this "act of barbarism".
While french minister of foreign affairs Maurice Couve de Murville deeply apologized for the tragedy.
France prime minister Michel Debré and minister of Armies Pierre Guillaumat resigned from office in disgrace.
President de Gaulle assigned Georges Pompidou as new prime minister and Pierre Messmer as new minister of Armies.
The Soviet Union politbureau wanted retaliation from France. while the U.N. tried negotiation.
France had the Atomic bomb, but that was more a psychological comfort, not much more.
President de Gaulle was force to take a step, he abhorred, a closer cooperation with NATO.
But it offers the best protection, the Soviet would not dare attack NATO.
in April came the U.N. report on the "Brezhnev incident", which was caused by combination of lack of communication between the Soviets and French along with error by the pilots.
The Four Generals nuclear coup d'état
next crisis came on 21 april 1961.
4 former Generals: Andrè Zeller and Raoul Salan, Maurice Challe and Edmond Jouhaud, organized putsch for anti-communist military junta.
Their Plan: Gain control of Algeria's major cities, then assault the military nuclear center to obtain nuclear warheads
and extort the french government in Paris to surrender.
on 22 April the Generals could with help of French Army rebels and OAS to take control over Algeria's major cities.
but they failed to obtain nuclear weapon, the Bomb "Gerboise Verte" was move to test side and "destroyed" before the putschist arrived.
without the nuclear option, the first military units surrender to President de Gaulle.
On 26 April, the 4 generals surrendered and were taken in custody. Maurice Challe was condemned to the guillotine. While Zeller, Salan, Jouhaud got fifteen years of prison.
Salan and Jouhaud escaped and joined OAS, Salan was later arrested and condemned to the guillotine for his crimes under OAS.
To understand the situation of 1961-1963, you first have to know this:
France was in a Civil-war with their colony Algeria from 1954 to 1962,
primarily with Algerian Muslims in the National Front of Liberation (NFL) against the Fourth French Republic.
At the same time the French Algerians were fighting as the (literally translated) Organization Army Secret (OAS) who fought the NFL and French authorities.
OAS commited acts of terrorism with various assassinations, bomb attacks in France and Algeria, just as the NFL did.
After 4 years of Civil-war, the Fourth French Republic collapsed in the May revolts of 1958.
The Military threatened with a coup d'état, if General Charles de Gaulle didn't not take over the political power.
Parliament elected de Gaulle as a new leader, who promply declared the French Fifth Republic.
In 1960 the French military detonated their first nuclear bomb in the Algerian desert.
On the 8th of January 1961, the French held a referendum on Algerian self-determination, It was approved by 75.0% of voters overall and 69.5% in Algeria.
The Brezhnev Incident.
9th of February 1961, the French Air force shoots down an unidentified aircraft that entered French-Algerian airspace, believing it's a Weapon transport for NFL.
But was instead a soviet aircraft with Head of state of the USSR on board: Leonid Brezhnev.
The news shocked France while the Soviets were outraged about this "act of barbarism".
While french minister of foreign affairs Maurice Couve de Murville deeply apologized for the tragedy.
France prime minister Michel Debré and minister of Armies Pierre Guillaumat resigned from office in disgrace.
President de Gaulle assigned Georges Pompidou as new prime minister and Pierre Messmer as new minister of Armies.
The Soviet Union politbureau wanted retaliation from France. while the U.N. tried negotiation.
France had the Atomic bomb, but that was more a psychological comfort, not much more.
President de Gaulle was force to take a step, he abhorred, a closer cooperation with NATO.
But it offers the best protection, the Soviet would not dare attack NATO.
in April came the U.N. report on the "Brezhnev incident", which was caused by combination of lack of communication between the Soviets and French along with error by the pilots.
The Four Generals nuclear coup d'état
next crisis came on 21 april 1961.
4 former Generals: Andrè Zeller and Raoul Salan, Maurice Challe and Edmond Jouhaud, organized putsch for anti-communist military junta.
Their Plan: Gain control of Algeria's major cities, then assault the military nuclear center to obtain nuclear warheads
and extort the french government in Paris to surrender.
on 22 April the Generals could with help of French Army rebels and OAS to take control over Algeria's major cities.
but they failed to obtain nuclear weapon, the Bomb "Gerboise Verte" was move to test side and "destroyed" before the putschist arrived.
without the nuclear option, the first military units surrender to President de Gaulle.
On 26 April, the 4 generals surrendered and were taken in custody. Maurice Challe was condemned to the guillotine. While Zeller, Salan, Jouhaud got fifteen years of prison.
Salan and Jouhaud escaped and joined OAS, Salan was later arrested and condemned to the guillotine for his crimes under OAS.
Last edited:
Sorry for the slowness of the Forum. Michel Van and I live on different sides of the world and I also have Red Star to attend to. This is a full explanation of the Cold War+Space Race from January 20th 1961-October 16th 1964. Enjoy
The inauguration of President John F. Kennedy was a major turning point in the history of the United States. The first Catholic President he saw major developments take place in the Cold War between the Capitalist west a Communist East now divided by the Sino-Soviet split. After taking charge of the Presidency on January 20th 1961 a new year and new era had begun, the era of the 1960s.
And then of coarse there was the confrontation between the Soviet Union and France after the Brezhnev incident in February, 1961. Possibley the closest we had ever gotten to Nuclear War the incident served to draw France closer to NATO and the United States. The use of Nuclear weapons by the French lead the possibility of war to die down although tensions between the two nations would be incredibley sour for many more years to come.
The utter failure and embarresment of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion administration along the new technological and propaganda acheivements of Vostok 1 (obviously far ahead of the still suborbital Mercury program) started the 1960s with America at a disadvantage. The successful launches of Alan Shepard and John Glenn did little to mitigate the American public's dissapointment after the day long orbital flight of Vostok 2 on August 6th 1961. Just a week later the Soviets began construction of the Berlin Wall, escalating the tension of the already heated crisis year. It seemed just as humanity was reaching into space, we were close to destroying ourselves. Was this the resolution to the Fermi Paradox? Whenever a civilization is advanced enough to attempt space travel, it destroys itself. Kennedy came out of the conflict looking like he was soft on the Soviet Union.
Another one of Kennedy's influencial political occured in that same fateful year of 1961.Turkey and the United States agreed to deploy fifteen nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey starting on June 1, 1961. Nikita Khrushchev quickly countered with the deployment of countless operational ICBM with retalitory strike capability, the R-16. After it's first successful test flight in 1960 the missile had been put into widespread production with hundreds planned, replacing the now obsolete R-12 intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missile (IRBM). By 1962, the Soviets had over one hundred ICBMs (although still less than the 170 US ICBMs). Confident the
1962 was significantly less of a crisis year than previously. While the Soviet Union threatend the United States with it's new ICBM fleet should they invade cuba.
The year began farely well in 10 February 1962 as Gary Powers was released in a prisoner exchange despite being convicted in the Soviet Union of espionage and his sentence of three years of imprisonment plus seven years of hard labor. He had previously flown a Lockheed U-2 over soviet airspace in a reconaissance/spy mission before beign shot down by Soviet Anti-aircraft missiles and captured. In return for the release of Powers, the Americans returned the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. That same month John Glenn began orbiting the Earth in his Mercury Atlas-6 flight.
The Vostok 3 and 4 missions quickly expelled the idea that the US was catching up by performing a "rendezvous" a spacewalk and by sending five people into space at once (3 in Vostok 4, 2 in Vostok 3). The crew of Vostok 4 also set a three day duration record (well beyond the 5 hour American record). JFK's plan to land on the Moon by the end of the decade might happen, but who knows what the Russians would be doing by then.
1963 Saw major progress towards preventing Nuclear War with the signing of the "Partial Test Ban" Treaty on August 5th. This agreement by the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union prohibited the testing of Nuclear Weapons everywhere except underground. The only other notable event was, of coarse, the events of November 22nd. John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. There has been some speculation over whether communist countries or even CIA were involved in the assassination, but those theories remain controversial. Kennedy's vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President of the United States. This all came just a month after the death of famous American Astronaut Alan Shepard on his Mercury Atlas-10 flight. The Soviets had sent three women on another daylong spaceflight (Vostok 6) while a single person mission (Vostok 5) set an eight day duration record (barely long enough to reach the Moon and return).
1964 was a year of mixed results. On March 30th A military-led coup d'etat overthrew the democratically elected president Joa Goulart in Brazil. Goulart's proposals, such as land reform and bigger control of the state in the economy, were seen as "communist", though he was just from the labour party.
On the otherhand, on April 20th US President Lyndon Johnson in New York, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow did announce simultaneously plans to cut back production of materials for making nuclear weapons.
While this was another step forward for peace, things quickly turned south when US President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed that North Vietnamese naval vessels had fired on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4th. Although there was a first attack, it was later proven that American vessels had entered North Vietnamese territory, and the second attack is proved unfounded. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident lead directly to the open involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Another step backwards was the detonation of the first Nuclear Weapon by the Peoples Republic of China on October 16th, 1964. Just two days earlier First Deputy Premier (and Stalinist) Alexander Shelepin, and KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny were arrested for plotting to conspire against Khrushchev. Their sentence was suprisingly light spending only 17 years in prison (and barred from political activity of any kind). Khrushchev would continue his activities as leader of the Soviet Union for years to come.
The Joint Vostok 8 and 9 mission was just another indication that the Americans were falling behind in the space race. Another "Rendezvous" (comming within 4.5 km with no manuevering thrusters) was successful while the techniques for EVA/spacewalks was perfected. The newly upgraded R-7 also allowed the spacecaft to visit the lower Van Allen belt (setting a new altitude record of 1,000 km). NASA meanwhile, was struggling to get the Gemini through development with the launch of the unmanned Gemini 1 into LEO on April 12th.
The inauguration of President John F. Kennedy was a major turning point in the history of the United States. The first Catholic President he saw major developments take place in the Cold War between the Capitalist west a Communist East now divided by the Sino-Soviet split. After taking charge of the Presidency on January 20th 1961 a new year and new era had begun, the era of the 1960s.
And then of coarse there was the confrontation between the Soviet Union and France after the Brezhnev incident in February, 1961. Possibley the closest we had ever gotten to Nuclear War the incident served to draw France closer to NATO and the United States. The use of Nuclear weapons by the French lead the possibility of war to die down although tensions between the two nations would be incredibley sour for many more years to come.
The utter failure and embarresment of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion administration along the new technological and propaganda acheivements of Vostok 1 (obviously far ahead of the still suborbital Mercury program) started the 1960s with America at a disadvantage. The successful launches of Alan Shepard and John Glenn did little to mitigate the American public's dissapointment after the day long orbital flight of Vostok 2 on August 6th 1961. Just a week later the Soviets began construction of the Berlin Wall, escalating the tension of the already heated crisis year. It seemed just as humanity was reaching into space, we were close to destroying ourselves. Was this the resolution to the Fermi Paradox? Whenever a civilization is advanced enough to attempt space travel, it destroys itself. Kennedy came out of the conflict looking like he was soft on the Soviet Union.
Another one of Kennedy's influencial political occured in that same fateful year of 1961.Turkey and the United States agreed to deploy fifteen nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey starting on June 1, 1961. Nikita Khrushchev quickly countered with the deployment of countless operational ICBM with retalitory strike capability, the R-16. After it's first successful test flight in 1960 the missile had been put into widespread production with hundreds planned, replacing the now obsolete R-12 intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missile (IRBM). By 1962, the Soviets had over one hundred ICBMs (although still less than the 170 US ICBMs). Confident the
1962 was significantly less of a crisis year than previously. While the Soviet Union threatend the United States with it's new ICBM fleet should they invade cuba.
The year began farely well in 10 February 1962 as Gary Powers was released in a prisoner exchange despite being convicted in the Soviet Union of espionage and his sentence of three years of imprisonment plus seven years of hard labor. He had previously flown a Lockheed U-2 over soviet airspace in a reconaissance/spy mission before beign shot down by Soviet Anti-aircraft missiles and captured. In return for the release of Powers, the Americans returned the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. That same month John Glenn began orbiting the Earth in his Mercury Atlas-6 flight.
The Vostok 3 and 4 missions quickly expelled the idea that the US was catching up by performing a "rendezvous" a spacewalk and by sending five people into space at once (3 in Vostok 4, 2 in Vostok 3). The crew of Vostok 4 also set a three day duration record (well beyond the 5 hour American record). JFK's plan to land on the Moon by the end of the decade might happen, but who knows what the Russians would be doing by then.
1963 Saw major progress towards preventing Nuclear War with the signing of the "Partial Test Ban" Treaty on August 5th. This agreement by the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union prohibited the testing of Nuclear Weapons everywhere except underground. The only other notable event was, of coarse, the events of November 22nd. John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. There has been some speculation over whether communist countries or even CIA were involved in the assassination, but those theories remain controversial. Kennedy's vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President of the United States. This all came just a month after the death of famous American Astronaut Alan Shepard on his Mercury Atlas-10 flight. The Soviets had sent three women on another daylong spaceflight (Vostok 6) while a single person mission (Vostok 5) set an eight day duration record (barely long enough to reach the Moon and return).
1964 was a year of mixed results. On March 30th A military-led coup d'etat overthrew the democratically elected president Joa Goulart in Brazil. Goulart's proposals, such as land reform and bigger control of the state in the economy, were seen as "communist", though he was just from the labour party.
On the otherhand, on April 20th US President Lyndon Johnson in New York, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow did announce simultaneously plans to cut back production of materials for making nuclear weapons.
While this was another step forward for peace, things quickly turned south when US President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed that North Vietnamese naval vessels had fired on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4th. Although there was a first attack, it was later proven that American vessels had entered North Vietnamese territory, and the second attack is proved unfounded. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident lead directly to the open involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Another step backwards was the detonation of the first Nuclear Weapon by the Peoples Republic of China on October 16th, 1964. Just two days earlier First Deputy Premier (and Stalinist) Alexander Shelepin, and KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny were arrested for plotting to conspire against Khrushchev. Their sentence was suprisingly light spending only 17 years in prison (and barred from political activity of any kind). Khrushchev would continue his activities as leader of the Soviet Union for years to come.
The Joint Vostok 8 and 9 mission was just another indication that the Americans were falling behind in the space race. Another "Rendezvous" (comming within 4.5 km with no manuevering thrusters) was successful while the techniques for EVA/spacewalks was perfected. The newly upgraded R-7 also allowed the spacecaft to visit the lower Van Allen belt (setting a new altitude record of 1,000 km). NASA meanwhile, was struggling to get the Gemini through development with the launch of the unmanned Gemini 1 into LEO on April 12th.
very good update, lets see Gemini functionally in perfection, and the moon landing recovery of many materials ,and the construction of the moonbase . Cant hardly wait for the next chapters.
The CIA involvement
Soon after the Khrushchev-Chelomei meeting, the CIA got contacted by top spy Oleg Pennkovsky
His message was that the Soviets were planning something big in space race. Sadly due to lack of technical understanding by Oleg Pennkovsky, the CIA misunderstood the information
especially what Pennkovsky described as an "organ pipe rocket", so the CIA ignored the Information.
In 1963 the CIA noticed on reconnaissance satellite picture, a increase of activity at Chemolei OKB-52 factory, also the begining of construction work on Baikonur.
But the most of picture showed cloud cover, so the CIA needed more information, sadly Oleg Pennkovsky was not longer available, as he was executed for spying.
The CIA needed information fast, but President Johnson refused the authorization of U-2 flights over the USSR.
the Spies the CIA sent into the USSR to investigate, got caught by the KGB and were exchanged in Berlin...
So the CIA looked for other options like the A-12 Oxcart, a Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft. It had made its first Mach 3 test flight on July 20th 1963.
another possibility was manned spy satellites, taking better pictures as automatic Corona satellite.
Sadly Robert McNamara had canceled this USAF project Dyna Soar on the 10th of December 1963, not his first mistake !
The decision was heavy criticized by CIA and USAF general Curtis LeMay and other high ranking Generals along with President Johnson.
While USAF got the Manned Orbiting Laboratory for manned spy satellites, it would take until the year 1970 before was ready to launch and the A-12 and it's advanced version the RS-71, were still in test phase because of engine problems.
To fill the gap, they proposed Blue Gemini a one men Gemini capsule, were the left seat is replaced by a reconnaissance camera.
it not gave the resolution like A-12 flight, but to get clear picture taken by USAF pilot on board.
But Blue Gemini got into problems too, first with NASA who got top priority on Gemini hardware, next the problems with Titan II rocket and NAA not managing to get the Gemini Paraglider working on time.
in 1966 as A-12 got operational as R-12, Blue Gemini was stopped, an it's pilots Charles Bassett and Elliot See return to NASA.
The CIA director decided to deploy the R-12 (and later RS-71) from Iran (Baikonur. overflight) and from Great Britain (overflight at OKB-52 factory)
The results were intriguing, it show that OKB-52 factory had a big increase on workers and Material, transported by truck and trains
while the soviets were building a new gigantic launch complex at Baikonur
most disturbing were several large building identified by engineer as Assembly halls for rocket with the size of 100 meters !
Were the Soviets building something bigger than the Saturn V currently under development at NASA ?
But the price the CIA payed was high,
on December 28th 1967, R-12 (60-6929) crashed during take off at RAF Mildenhall, better know as "the Mildenhall Forest incident" aka "Britain's Roswell", a famous UFO event.
It fueled more oil on fire of UFO hysteria in Britain, since the R-12 fly over Suffolk.
all flights of R-12 were suspended, the RS-71 finally taking over
The new RS-71 pictures from January 1968 were even more disturbing
as gigantic rocket on way to the Launch pad, some thing looking like a rocket built from big organ pipes.
Note:
On 10 May 1970 came the biggest disaster off all, a RS-71 (61-7969) was lost over USSR !
Soon after the Khrushchev-Chelomei meeting, the CIA got contacted by top spy Oleg Pennkovsky
His message was that the Soviets were planning something big in space race. Sadly due to lack of technical understanding by Oleg Pennkovsky, the CIA misunderstood the information
especially what Pennkovsky described as an "organ pipe rocket", so the CIA ignored the Information.
In 1963 the CIA noticed on reconnaissance satellite picture, a increase of activity at Chemolei OKB-52 factory, also the begining of construction work on Baikonur.
But the most of picture showed cloud cover, so the CIA needed more information, sadly Oleg Pennkovsky was not longer available, as he was executed for spying.
The CIA needed information fast, but President Johnson refused the authorization of U-2 flights over the USSR.
the Spies the CIA sent into the USSR to investigate, got caught by the KGB and were exchanged in Berlin...
So the CIA looked for other options like the A-12 Oxcart, a Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft. It had made its first Mach 3 test flight on July 20th 1963.
another possibility was manned spy satellites, taking better pictures as automatic Corona satellite.
Sadly Robert McNamara had canceled this USAF project Dyna Soar on the 10th of December 1963, not his first mistake !
The decision was heavy criticized by CIA and USAF general Curtis LeMay and other high ranking Generals along with President Johnson.
While USAF got the Manned Orbiting Laboratory for manned spy satellites, it would take until the year 1970 before was ready to launch and the A-12 and it's advanced version the RS-71, were still in test phase because of engine problems.
To fill the gap, they proposed Blue Gemini a one men Gemini capsule, were the left seat is replaced by a reconnaissance camera.
it not gave the resolution like A-12 flight, but to get clear picture taken by USAF pilot on board.
But Blue Gemini got into problems too, first with NASA who got top priority on Gemini hardware, next the problems with Titan II rocket and NAA not managing to get the Gemini Paraglider working on time.
in 1966 as A-12 got operational as R-12, Blue Gemini was stopped, an it's pilots Charles Bassett and Elliot See return to NASA.
The CIA director decided to deploy the R-12 (and later RS-71) from Iran (Baikonur. overflight) and from Great Britain (overflight at OKB-52 factory)
The results were intriguing, it show that OKB-52 factory had a big increase on workers and Material, transported by truck and trains
while the soviets were building a new gigantic launch complex at Baikonur
most disturbing were several large building identified by engineer as Assembly halls for rocket with the size of 100 meters !
Were the Soviets building something bigger than the Saturn V currently under development at NASA ?
But the price the CIA payed was high,
on December 28th 1967, R-12 (60-6929) crashed during take off at RAF Mildenhall, better know as "the Mildenhall Forest incident" aka "Britain's Roswell", a famous UFO event.
It fueled more oil on fire of UFO hysteria in Britain, since the R-12 fly over Suffolk.
all flights of R-12 were suspended, the RS-71 finally taking over
The new RS-71 pictures from January 1968 were even more disturbing
as gigantic rocket on way to the Launch pad, some thing looking like a rocket built from big organ pipes.
Note:
On 10 May 1970 came the biggest disaster off all, a RS-71 (61-7969) was lost over USSR !
Huh. I'm surprised they're done testing the engine, considering it's only been 6 years or so. Unless they haven't actually tamed the engine and only think they have? That could certainly be the case with an abbreviated test program--one too short to actually show the issues, required to meet the challenge of the American Saturn V with its pre-existing F-1s? If that's the case...I'd hate to live in Baikonur or just downrange over the first few launches, since I'd give them maybe 10-15% chances of success.
It could be a Mock up
like Saturn V SA-500F used to check precise fits and operations of facilities, before a flight model was ready.
or the RD-270 R&D start way back in 1961, instead of 1963.
the source explaine
in fact the first part of RD-270 engine tested in December 1964 OTL
but V.Glushko work on RD-270 was delay to Ministry to 1966, because not important to the N1 program.
Glushko original plan was make 550 test: with 45 test model and later with the 200 production engines !
from october 1967 to 1972 were Fine-tuning of the engine was supposed to largely completed. (5 years)
but he manage to make 27 test with 22 test engine from 1976 until 1969, as UR-700 development was stop by Ministry.
to compare to F-1
the Prototype had serious problems with propellant injector, that a prototype explode during testing in 1962
the make 2.471 ignition and burn test on F-1 to get bug out. between 1959 to 1966
with not meddling by Ministry and a go on RD-270 from 1961 on
the first testing would be happen around 1963 and would have be almost complete in january 1968
only missing the fine tuning to engine…
if one or two of this UR-700 explode near Baikonur or just downrange ,
i really prefer a vacation in Pripyat, near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,
the radiation is beneficial, compare to rain of 4497 tons acid and 269 tons highly toxic stuff...
The RD-270 was started in 1961 IOTL, so there's not really a way to move it up there.
As for the test program...
So Glushko's original plan was a test of roughly the same scale as with the F1, which we'd expect. Instead, it's now apparently been cut down to the same size he was able to test it at IOTL--a mere 27 firings. I doubt it's that the engine didn't have any issues with combustion instability, not at 270 bar and a F-1-scale injector plate, instead I think it's a dangerously low level of testing, acceptable only because the engine IOTL was merely a backup to the N-1.
ITTL, as noted, it may start in 1961 for development, but that's the same date it started work IOTL to the best of my knowledge--I can't find anything about it only starting in 1963. If they've also cut it down to a similarly negligent test program here as they did IOTL, then maybe it'd be ready for flight in 1968, but...it'd be more likely to explode due to an uncaught issue than work in my book--particularly a worry since from what I can tell looking at the design, there's no margin for a single engine failure. In order to balance the thrust, losing any engine on the core means shutting the entire core down--a loss-of-mission, though maybe a safe abort. Meanwhile, on the boosters, any engine out of one means having to shut down an engine on all the other boosters to maintain stability--otherwise, the center of mass will shift wildly as two boosters burn fuel faster while the other starts lagging behind. Three-engines out, however, is probably not a recoverable condition, so we're back at any single RD-270 failure meaning an abort.
So, in summary, the engine can't have had much more testing than OTL and also be ready in 1968, even with more focus and money. Not enough to eliminate the likely reliability questions of a combustion stability, and any single engine failure on any core is a loss of mission, and 4,000 tons of propellant scattered over Kazakhstan. Makes me really hope that's a fit-testing mockup, not a full rocket...