AHC: Big UK Space Program in the 1960s
- Thread starter Antheus
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What counts as "big" the problem is money, any none NASA program (even USSR really somewhat) needs to be cheaper...?
My suggestion would be to not base the rockets out of Australia, ie test them in UK in say Northern Scotland on an engine test pad that can eventually be used for eventual northern polar orbits? This gets you a faster and cheaper program with earlier faster and more successful, cheaper tests?
Black Knight - Black Arrow are both nice and cheap, if not really ideal chemically?
Get a small researcher & communication (and semi hidden spy sat) program going, should be reasonable, maybe sharing common satellite hardware like Soviet programs did a lot of?
If you are going to want to talk to/or take pictures of UK or USSR the polar orbits are not a bad idea anyway, do you need anything else if you can buy into shared US programs once you have good pictures of USSR....?
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Penciling this in a very alternate universe after a different Great War I find the question really is necessity being the mother of invention. And first, does Britain need an independent space program or can it ride another's coattails? Assuming it simply must go it alone, what does it want?
If we can get the Bomber generals to view rockets as an adjunct to their mission, or the Senior Service to figure out that missiles will keep it the biggest fish in the budget battles then we can squeeze out funds to develop the rocket. That is a big hurdle but if we are talking something on the order of an IRBM then I think that is proven doable by the OTL rocket program. We know it needs a lot of loft to get an early big warhead up and out so that seems a decent payload. Men in space are nice but the real payback is the commercial or scientific loads. Would say a commercial communications satellite be enough to keep Parliament pouring in money?
I think the UK can get a Mercury program off the ground but after that stunt it comes down to what we really want to launch and can't do without it in space sort of thinking. The next best payload is a spy satellite. It pushes lots of high tech and touches the paranoia to keep funds flowing until it works. It opens enough slots to chase the other payloads to fill the docket and maintain a program. If I get a program this is the sort of wobbly path it takes, but unless the whole Commonwealth is interested, the program will be modest at best.
If we can get the Bomber generals to view rockets as an adjunct to their mission, or the Senior Service to figure out that missiles will keep it the biggest fish in the budget battles then we can squeeze out funds to develop the rocket. That is a big hurdle but if we are talking something on the order of an IRBM then I think that is proven doable by the OTL rocket program. We know it needs a lot of loft to get an early big warhead up and out so that seems a decent payload. Men in space are nice but the real payback is the commercial or scientific loads. Would say a commercial communications satellite be enough to keep Parliament pouring in money?
I think the UK can get a Mercury program off the ground but after that stunt it comes down to what we really want to launch and can't do without it in space sort of thinking. The next best payload is a spy satellite. It pushes lots of high tech and touches the paranoia to keep funds flowing until it works. It opens enough slots to chase the other payloads to fill the docket and maintain a program. If I get a program this is the sort of wobbly path it takes, but unless the whole Commonwealth is interested, the program will be modest at best.
The Black Arrow rockets were built in the UK, and tested on the Isle of Wight. They only went to Woomera for the orbital launches. Flights from Scotland and Norfolk were considered, but one was regarded as too remote and the other had a risk of dropping stages on a North Sea oil rig. I think their propellant choice was fine: non-toxic, non-cryogenic, high density and very reliable. They just needed a government with more sense and forethought. And the brains to see they were being bullshitted by the US: offers of "free launches!" on Scout rockets evaporated as soon as Black Arrow was cancelled.
marathag
Banned
So why has everyone else ignored HOOH for rocketry? Blue Origin even gave up on that fuel, a decade ago.
Science isn't the issue. It is a matter of money and political will.
As for aliens, that isn't for this forum.
Major scientific breakthroughs are not required - as if RB545, HOTOL, Project Daedalus and, well, the man behind nuclear pulse propulsion was a British expatriate working at Los Alamos - don't count; political breakthroughs, yes. Britain needs to be wealthy enough, confident enough and ambitious enough to still be thinking in great-power terms, which means at least a much tighter Commonwealth if not outright Imperial Federation, probably not long after WWI. Which, well, yes, oops.
Mainly, I think, because LOX is a higher-energy oxidizer, and not all that hard to deal with. Also, high-test hydrogen peroxide has long had a not-entirely-deserved reputation for being unstable. In fact, the higher the purity, the more stable it is. Yes, the systems have to be kept very clean to prevent contaminants from decomposing the H2O2; but those same requirements also apply to LOX, for similar if slightly different reasons.
The usual alternative to H2O2/kerosene is hypergolics, which have been dubbed "explosive cancer" for a reason.
tonycat77
Banned
V-2 enters service earlier, kills a lot more people, makes London go all in on missile tech.
Japanese and Luftwaffe air-to-ground missiles do a lot more damage (Japanese ones were ready by mid-1945, but never saw action), let them sink a couple of carriers or battleships too.
Both of those would make the UK go all in on missile tech.
Japanese and Luftwaffe air-to-ground missiles do a lot more damage (Japanese ones were ready by mid-1945, but never saw action), let them sink a couple of carriers or battleships too.
Both of those would make the UK go all in on missile tech.
Having a British space program that plays in the same sandbox as the United States and Soviets in a world that broadly tracks OTL is an ASB proposition. There are ways to get there, if you really want it, but they involve things that have the practical effect of butterflying away both World Wars as we know them. Britain's certainly capable of having the equivalent of the Ariane I flying years before the founding of ELDO and once you've got the capability to throw a few tons of payload into LEO, the question then becomes whether you want a manned spaceflight program rather than whether it's possible to have one. (And we probably want one, because everything's better with a British accent.)
But that requires getting Blue Streak off the ground and that does face real hurdles. There is the most obvious one in the Treasury, which is the common enemy of all British aerospace projects in the Fifties and Sixties. But Blue Streak is itself a money-pit beyond just the half-billion pounds necessary to get the thing flying and acquire enough of them to satisfy the deterrent role, between the need for hardened silos and the fact that a storable-fuel "upgrade" program -- that is more likely than not an entirely new rocket engine development program -- will be required even before the first operational missile is delivered. And to confound this even more, there's also a ticking clock, as Blue Streak needs to be mature and operational by the time Polaris starts demonstrating its progress, because once that happens the Royal Navy will be able to make the same arguments it did OTL and, if not already bought-and-paid for, the Treasury will want to wash its hands of Blue Streak. Which would be a problem because Polaris, despite being a great IRBM, is not a great building block for a launcher. At least not without a significant redesign, which runs into the buzzsaw of the Treasury once more.
My personal pet solution to the problem is to have the USAF pay for it, with Blue Streak filling the role of OTL's Thor. It's not as far-fetched as it might seem, as at the time Thor was given the developmental greenlight, there was a prior agreement between the U.S. and U.K. regarding the special relationship's division of labor for ballistic missiles, with the former to focus on ICBM development while the latter would focus on IRBM development, with the U.S. chipping in 10-15% of what would become Blue Streak's budget. And I believe there was at least some high-level discussion of pursuing Blue Streak in response to the recommendations of the Killian Commission, but it was abandoned in short order due to Not Made Here-ism and a lack of confidence in the British ability to effectively manage the project.
At any rate, once you have Blue Streak, you've got a decent foundation to build-on as a booster, given its dimensional and thrust similarities with the early Titan first-stages while being powered by essentially the same engine as the early Atlas's half-stage. Give it a decent second-stage -- license-built Centaur is never a bad choice -- and you've got yourself an alternative Black Prince that's capable of lasting for decades with incremental improvement. And if you make things a properly Commonwealth exercise, you can even net yourself James Chamberlin to design you a Fancily Accented Gemini capsule in the process. (Or just straight-up license Gemini too, as it's realistically not going to be until the early-to-mid-Seventies before the money's going to be there for even a modest manned program, even if you're licensing everything to minimize developmental costs.)
H2O2 does have a good deal to recommend it in comparison to other hypergolic fuels. But the stuff is only really useful in distressingly high concentrations and, while it can be well-mannered under very specific conditions, you can never really trust it to behave. Because the stuff's an effective monopropellant in its own right, decomposes into stuff that it readily explodes with, and is prone to runaway decomposition if not treated with the utmost respect. If somebody ever suggests you procure 5,000 gallons of 90% concentration H2O2 for the purposes of dropping a rat into "to see what happens", you ought to run the opposite direction as fast as possible. (This is, apparently, an idea that somebody at the Pentagon floated to the Naval Air Rocket Laboratory in the early Fifties.)
More practically, H2O2 has floundered because it's a fairly low-performing fuel. Keroxide engines have got an optimal vacuum specific impulse of 320-330s -- which comes from Astronautix, so should be taken with a grain of salt, but is almost certainly close enough for our purposes -- which is inferior to that of kerolox's ~350s. And once the usual engineering and application losses start to bite, the performance drop really stings. Black Arrow's pump-fed Gamma 8 had a sea-level ISP of 228s or thereabouts, which is playing in the same sandbox as pressure-fed kerolox engines, with an oxidizer that is far more temperamental than liquid oxygen. While for upper-stage applications, the 260-270s from the Gamma 2 is having to contend with the elephant in the room that are hydrolox systems. As specific impulse matters even more for upper-stages and the gains from hydrolox are such that it's still a markedly superior choice even with all of LH2's handling problems.
How do a couple of stunts using captured V-2s translate into a meaningful British space program? The fundamental problem with a British space program has been a lack of funding and, while notching a few aerospace firsts might garner a bit of political support, the British electorate is not going to tolerate for long a government that chooses to pump hundreds of millions of pounds into the aerospace sector to launch a space program at a time when rationing is still on and those are scarce pounds that could be expended building-out the Post-War Consensus's welfare state. You can kinda-sorta elide your way past that with Blue Streak because Britain remains a great power and, by the Government's own logic, it needs ballistic missiles with which to deliver its nuclear weapons, even if those are pounds that the Government would prefer to spend on other things. But for much beyond that requires the rolling a lot of 6s/10s/20s (depending upon what dice system you think history's using) and even then you're still not going to accomplish a ton.
I believe "explosive cancer" specifically refers to UDMH/N2O4, with the dinitrogen tetroxide in particular providing the "cancer" part of the equation. The various flavors of hydrazine and nitric acid tend to just explode or melt your face, killing you horribly long before you could develop cancer. While the more exotic hypergolics -- like any of the ones involving a fluorine-based oxidizer -- tend to kill you even more horribly even faster than hydrazine/nitric acid.
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To build on my earlier post. Someone gets popular, and governmental, support behind Smith's Megaroc and the UK's Operation Backfire V2 tests continue. The MoS is 'persuaded' to release some funds. Maybe Churchill wins in '45, he's always appeared susceptible to an insane idea delivered to him.
A stretched V2 lofts some mildly insane volunteer (I favour 'Winkle' Brown, he's tried everything else, I think he'd be willing and [most importantly] he's small) aloft on a brief sub-orbital flight (as passenger, they can't actually do much) to ~300km.
A few more flights and some inspirational photos follow and the UK is bitten by the space bug. Perhaps some volunteer 'pilot' is killed (quite likely really) and there is popular (and newspaper) pressure to continue their legacy. Either way Britain sees a massive boost in prestige and the Space Race starts a decade early. Bigger and better rockets are built, 'God Save The Queen' is broadcast from an orbiting satellite for the coronation/FoB.
I actually used a version of this asbackground for my Whoniverse campaign world and the mildly dystopian Earth-6 (well dystopian for Britain); given the Whoniverse has crewed missions to Jupiter by 1980 they had to start earlier, even with recovered alien tech to play with
A stretched V2 lofts some mildly insane volunteer (I favour 'Winkle' Brown, he's tried everything else, I think he'd be willing and [most importantly] he's small) aloft on a brief sub-orbital flight (as passenger, they can't actually do much) to ~300km.
A few more flights and some inspirational photos follow and the UK is bitten by the space bug. Perhaps some volunteer 'pilot' is killed (quite likely really) and there is popular (and newspaper) pressure to continue their legacy. Either way Britain sees a massive boost in prestige and the Space Race starts a decade early. Bigger and better rockets are built, 'God Save The Queen' is broadcast from an orbiting satellite for the coronation/FoB.
I actually used a version of this asbackground for my Whoniverse campaign world and the mildly dystopian Earth-6 (well dystopian for Britain); given the Whoniverse has crewed missions to Jupiter by 1980 they had to start earlier, even with recovered alien tech to play with
All this is true.
And of course now we are moving into the era of reusable rockets. And some propellants are far less amenable to reuse of engines than others. There is a good reason methalox is so popular with rockets in development.
The problem is money.
The UK had HUGE money issues in the 50s and 60s and while the stabalized a bit in the 70s this was more due to them learning to live with the money they had then the situation getting better. This resulted in cut backs to many military programs and public works programs and so on and so forth. You are going to need a HUGE POD to get the money for any space program much less a reasonable one.
The UK had HUGE money issues in the 50s and 60s and while the stabalized a bit in the 70s this was more due to them learning to live with the money they had then the situation getting better. This resulted in cut backs to many military programs and public works programs and so on and so forth. You are going to need a HUGE POD to get the money for any space program much less a reasonable one.
Actually, you may be onto something there. France kept its space program and Europeanised it into ESA. Britain abandoned it based on US promises that didn't materialise. So the solution is simple: have the UK and France win Suez. In OTL UK and France took two divergent paths: France moved away from the US, UK moved closer. If UK won Suez then it may have the confidence to keep TSR2 and Black Arrow.
I thought methalox was big with SpaceX because you can manufacture it on Mars, raising the possibility of ISRU refuelling?
That's part of it, but another big part is that you can run methane through your engine and there's no coking problem (essentially the formation of polymers and carbon deposits in cooling channels, blocking them and, obviously, making the engine not cooled effectively) because it's a simpler molecule. Plus you get noticeably better ISP than kerosene (again, because it's a simpler molecule with a higher proportion of hydrogens to carbons).
Yes, but with hindsight it's actually easy to save huge amounts of money from UK budgets and UK spend huge amounts on lots of developments that almost get into service...... even in terms of a space program UK basically did have a full small space program and then cancelled it just as it started to work.
A cheaper program based in UK not Australia would I think be quicker and cheaper due to saving huge amount of time on shipping and time? And be perfectly adequate for a small space program that would do everything they would want in terms of unmanned LEO satellites that would get most of the payoff from any (none superpower space race) space program?