The British Interplanetary Society did a collective project to design a practical moon flight in the late 1930s or mid-40s (clearly overlapping the war years I believe). One major detail I recall was that they decided to assume the rockets would all be solid fuel, since they considered the technical problem of pumps for liquid propellant rockets a tremendous challenge.
Basically if you can do something with a rocket of x efficiency you can do it with a bigger set of rockets of less than x efficiency--sort of. The limit is when the mass ratio is such that auxiliary stuff consumes all your burn-out mass leaving nothing for payload.
Anyway someone might have references to details of this project. IIRC the crew would have been more than three people, and I think they were kind of fuzzy on the details of how the return stage would land on Earth safely. I do think they did the math enough to have some idea how much energy would have to be braked off somehow.
Were I ISOTed to the 1920s and given carte blanche to do what it takes to get a moon rocket that could safely return at least one astronaut from the Moon by 1953, I would take a different tack to be sure. I'd probably concentrate on developing kerosene-hydrogen peroxide engines for one thing.
And am not sure just what colossal resources it would take. Spend enough money and I daresay it could be done though some essential testing might use up a decade or more. Again, if you want to match the feat of a Saturn V Apollo stack, even if you are willing to economize somewhat with the lander and go really bare bones for the reentry capsule, you have to loft something like the OTL Apollo stack mass into Low Earth Orbit and then shove it on to translunar injection speeds. Say, with a wave of the hand and quite questionably, we could get the barebones minimum mass for a lunar orbit rendezvous mission managed by one single astronaut (clearly at great risk of their life of course) down to 20 tonnes, from over 45 for the combined CSM-LM stack. The Soviets of course were striving to do something like this with Korolev and Mishin's Soyuz-LK system to be launched by a single N-1 rocket. The N-1 itself massed more than a Saturn V--it was less efficient as all of its stages were kerosene-oxygen engined, no hydrogen-oxygen upper stages. And the most brilliant approach I have seen in any TL to rejigger this probably doomed enterprise (even assuming the N-1 would ever be made workable, and that the Soyuz-LK setup was workable for a single cosmonaut flag planting moon landing, both of which are open to question to say the least) was urged in the Red Star TL--use two N-1 launches, one to place an LK with descent crasher stage into a low lunar parking orbit first, and the second to send a Soyuz on to the Moon to rendezvous with it. Otherwise the more massive but less efficient N-1 is just not really big enough to send a convincingly robust LOR package to the Moon with enough propellant for its Soyuz to come home again--vice versa, being a bit more modest as to the target mass for a single N-1 to put something in orbit might have enabled the Soviet to maybe actually get a less ambitious version of N-1 operational--realistically probably not before the mid-70s though. The Red Star TL might have jumped the shark a bit in thinking they could have it working before mid 1969. Maybe, with a POD in the very very early 60s and a whole lot of investment the Soviet program did not normally make in NASA style testing. That takes time of course!
And all that comparison is with a Soviet ker-lox state of the art that actually was not bad compared to American--indeed we pretty much abandoned intense development of kerosene-oxygen engines with the F-1 engine, which was awesome and magnificent in itself, and still better in the improved F-1A that never actually flew, but already by 1969 I believe many Soviet ker-lox engines were overall more efficient than the F-1A even--far far less thrust per engine of course, but hey, just use lots of them.
Now to have the Lunar mission match Tintin's deadline of 1953, obviously we have to have a huge project that cannot possibly succeed if it is not started any earlier than say mid-1945--and that's pushing it, assuming someone is motivated to get someone to the moon and back at all costs, and the costs will indeed make Apollo look like an economy class day trip. I have not begun to tackle the financial estimate math, so I cannot honestly say whether we are talking Manhattan Project level budgets (but sustained for nearly a decade), ten Manhattan Projects, or a very large percentage of the cost to the USA of conducting WWII--or conceivably...more! Pretty sure that it has to cost a lot more than Apollo did, duly adjusted for inflation. Throw enough money at the problem and I suppose it can be solved, but we might be talking really massive amounts of money, and on that scale it is not so much a project as repurposing the industry of a major superpower.
Over the years I have striven for plausible reasons why humanity ought to spend serious dollars on space exploration and colonization because I just instinctively think it is cool and something human beings ought to be doing, and I come up empty unless I invoke something like a treasure trove of alien technology we are quite sure will pay off handsomely, lying around for the first humans to come along and take it. So I am imagining now that sometime in early 1945, or perhaps earlier, astronomers and radio technicians including wartime radar techs observe a large starship approach the Earth Moon system and proceed to gently crash on the Lunar nearside, in plain observation of telescopes. Maybe the crew of the ship even are signaling, not knowing any Terran languages of course but desperately crying for attention--they know from Earth's radio noise we have at least that much tech and need all the help they can get. I suppose they crash on the Moon instead of Earth because they have no suitable atmosphere entry vehicles and trying to land on Earth would be certain death; fortunately for them they can manage to rig up some sort of life support system sprawled out on the Lunar surface to survive, and they keep up signaling by radio and gradually people on Earth start more or less figuring out how to communicate with them.
I'm imagining they are Hani from C. J. Cherryh's Compact Space stories (anachronistic since Compact society is contemporary with a system of Earth colonies broken up into several rival warring governments in her canon, but maybe they went through some kind of time warp, or we just pretend Compact space got started many centuries earlier. They were fleeing being chased by a fleet of kifish pirates and managed to lose them but in the course of this their Jump drive is shot and their shot-up ship is a mess. If humans don't come and help them within 20 years or so they die. We are their ride to the only habitable world they lucked into finding as their ship failed, and if we can bring them down to Earth they can teach us to make starships. Ok, that's my personal head canon on this. Perhaps, again anachronistically, this hani ship has some male hani on board. Or maybe it is a mahen ship, or someone else who is plausibly nice people).
Meanwhile as a result of this windfall if you can get it, the Cold War starts early. Stalin manages to keep the lid on himself until the Germans and Japanese are defeated but after that It's On. Neither bloc wants to actually go to war again but both fear it is inevitable and both are determined to get to the lunar treasure trove first. Stalin invades Iran in early '46; this does not start WWIII but it does signal Harry Truman and the British Labour government (yes, I want to keep them both, especially Truman) that the wartime alliance is well and truly over--China too will fall, or mostly, barring perhaps some kind of extended Taiwan enclave, maybe both Taiwan and Hainan, and a foothold on Canton and Hong Kong and vicinity--I have zero faith in the ability of the KMT to pull itself out of its tailspin nor will the USA/Commonwealth want to get too deeply entangled in fighting over China--enough to keep an enclave on the mainland maybe, not enough to beat Mao backed by Stalin to control of all China. Maybe Tibet at least is kept out of PRC control. Ironically South Korea is probably secured with much more defenses than OTL and there is no Korean War as such. There is no hot war because neither side wants to if they can avoid it and both hope to get the alien tech first and gain a commanding advantage and don't want to ruin stuff they hope to leverage that way--this probably means the war does break out when one side gets to the Moon first, making the other desperate to win before it is too late for them. Note that if we have a Moon ship, ICBMs are at least potentially a thing already. So the war would be quite terrible, and I would be glad of a scenario that avoids it.
It is not unthinkable to me for instance that instead of a mad race, both sides recognize that they might lose in this race and they can cover the downside risk by agreeing with the other to a cooperative venture, where both pool their resources in some chosen site where both sides have good oversight over the other, and plan a mission with both Soviet and Western bloc crew to keep an eye on each other and agree to share whatever proceeds there are. That way, neither side has to fear the other will just nuke them the moment they get the upper hand and therefore not fear the other side will do their best to exterminate them first to preempt that.
So--a period of near war in the mid-40s, and a rapproachment some years before the moon mission actually happens, and a joint moon mission accommodating both sides. That way resources are pooled, and maybe both sides can even agree not to develop ICBMs against the other.
Having mentioned nuclear armageddon and the Manhattan Project I suppose I would be remiss not to focus on an Orion--old bang-bang Orion, not the preposterous money pit NASA has committed to since the 2000s--as an option to get to the Moon fast. I am therefore mentioning it but assuming this option is not chosen as Plan A. Indeed we don't know that blowing up A-bombs under a big steel plate on springs to shift a thing the size of a destroyer or even bigger into orbit and thence on to a Lunar landing will actually work. We haven't tried it, and it is probably a very good thing we did not. Anyway we don't know that the pusher plates would really endure such treatment, nor is the problem of how to dispense the charges on a meticulous time table all that easy to solve--given all the time in the world, sure. We are racing to meet a deadline here though. Perhaps it is seriously investigated and maybe some testing takes the place of a lot of bomb tests conducted OTL...but I mention the option only to sideline it, because I want to focus on what chemical rockets can do.
The world has the sketch BIS plan in hand. I used to have links to it and stuff but I forget now where to find it. Anyway I assume that it would have to dwarf a Saturn V, especially if it uses solid fuel. Solid fuel is actually very good in some respects; not only do you avoid the whole problem of how to make pumps, injectors, a combustion chamber and all that jazz, also solids deliver tremendous thrust. Thrust is what you need to get the platform off the ground and on its way to an orbital burn. So a mixed program, in which some kind of liquid fuel throttlable engines are developed for the upper stages but the first stage is a ginormous cluster of basically advanced firecrackers might be in order.
I should note that solid fuel was the American rocketry speciality during WWII. The British had interest in rocket tech of course, but a Victorian era law flatly outlawed rocket experimentation in the British Isles. So the British Rocket Society morphed into the Interplanetary Society and never looked back, and per Arthur Clarke took a stance that we colonials were crass and lacking in vision to remain focused on rockets as such with the American Rocket Society. During the war such pioneers as Parsons and Malina worked on improving and perfecting practical solid fuel systems for stuff like Jet Assisted Take-Off (JATO) for aircraft. The major thing here was formulating solid fuel grains with suitable oomph and also reliability and storability. The state of the art as of 1945 in this field was a big gain over a decade before, but had a long way to go still before we could make stuff like Polaris missiles or the Shuttle SRBs. Again though, I suppose if you throw enough money at a big enough booster stage of dozens or hundreds of fuel tubes and cross your fingers they all work as advertised, even a mediocre solid mix could perhaps get the job done. But being mediocre in specific impulse, the mass will be much higher. Recall a Saturn V approached 3000 tonnes. We could easily be looking at something 10,000 tonnes or more.
Maybe something like Sea Dragon might also be feasible in a quick dirty project. A huge pressure fed propellant tank made of strong thick steel, no mechanical pumps for the pressure fed engine, just valves--perhaps this is another shortcut, and might also be a suitable approach for the upper stages. Again for a single launch mission we would be talking ginormous, whereas Earth Orbit Rendezvous strategies, or still worse Lunar Orbit Rendezvous which was key in slashing the mass of the Apollo stack all up in half or even more, seem dangerously impractical at this early state of the art of avionics. Perhaps suitably trained human crew can, by simply controlling valves, manage to do stuff like docking just by eyeball out of windows. Certainly radars exist, but their electronics is vacuum tube based, which I think would have some difficulty guaranteeing survive the vibrations of launch (oh, and solids are nasty for that--liquid engines can get into resonances like POGO, but solids have their own built in version; the Shuttle launches were rougher rides than their Apollo veteran crews recalled on Saturn rockets). To be sure, once in space there is all the free hard vacuum you could ever want; I suppose it might be possible to design electronics that are useless wire sculptures on the ground but once in space and vented out, can be heated up and work without all that pesky glass, which is also much of the weight! Still even without glass, vacuum tube tech is power hungry and massive versus what we expect of solid state electronics today. So the communications, control and computational tech will be quite primitive compared to what Apollo state of the art could rely on--again it falls down to brainy well trained astronauts with slide rules doing the math by hand, and on the fly!
Therefore any sort of rendezvous approach seems incredibly risky to me. Perhaps we should forget the idea of a single Tintin rocket going to the Moon and back by itself, and think in terms of a staged program of building a space station, then assembling parts of a moon ship at the station, then using that ship with propellant shipped up gradually to actually go to the moon. But again this trades off making a truly monstrous sized rocket ship to launch from Earth with a long fussy series of rendezvous and orbital construction projects. I think 8 years is just not enough time.
I mentioned Korolev and Mishin's concept of a moon landing mission in the USSR--I didn't mention Vladimir Chelomei and his various rival concepts. Chelomei's own notion of a moon mission involved sending a single cosmonaut up on a really gigantic hypergolic fueled upgrade of his "Proton" rocket, the UR-500 (or was it 700?) This monster would have dwarfed even the N-1. It would send this cosmonaut in a small conical capsule, looking much like a slightly scaled down Apollo capsule, along to translunar injection with a stack of rockets to first brake the capsule-return rocket complex to a direct landing on the Moon, no parking orbits or rendezvouses--just shoot the thing straight to the Moon and hope to Marx and Lenin that the landing engines all work for the soft landing. Then when whatever degree of flag planting and what not this single lone cosmonaut could manage were accomplished he climbs back into the little capsule and his remaining stack of Earth return engines launch the capsule on a trajectory back to Earth for an Apollo-like reentry.
I am not recommending the hypergolic engine system. To be sure, it has its advantages but that stuff is incredibly toxic and we would be using it in quantities again suitable to counterweight a naval cruiser. Anyway the designs must be frozen some years before the 1940s end; even kerosene-liquid oxygen engines were cutting edge and mediocre in performance compared to what they would be a decade later. Perhaps indeed liquid fuel will be limited to alcohol and liquid oxygen, which at least the German V weapon program got practically operational! That means throwing even more propellant mass at the problem of course. OTL, Chelomei was optimistic about his rockets and Glushko the engine designer was much more enthusiastic about working on hypergol systems, but in fact the Proton rocket, supposedly to be available well before 1965, was plagued with trouble and not formally certified as functional by Soviet officials until well into the 1970s--and to this day they blow up every now and then, despite half a century of shakedown. In 1947 or '48, there will be no reason to assume a hydrazine-nitric acid (well, N2O4 oxidant) hypergol engine will be particularly advantageous over going for ker-lox, and alternatives like kerosene peroxide, or just sticking with alcohol-oxygen, will seem quite as competitive. For the next generation maybe, to meet the 1953 deadline...no.
So I mentioned the Chelomei proposal for a moonship just to illustrate the general outline of what a quick, dirty, money no object 1953 moon shot might look like. A truly gigantic monster of a rocket stack, launched on a solid fuel battery that would outthrust two or three Saturn V, maybe more, switching over to massive amounts of alcohol-oxygen, kerosene oxygen if we are lucky, engine systems for orbit and subsequent push on to a lunar transfer path, necessarily pushing considerably more mass, not less, than Apollo's 45 tonnes of crewed ships to what is probably also a daredevil direct crash dive with fingers crossed the engines do not fail, under manual control for an eyeball guided landing near the target. If the crew is more than one, as it should be, and they have some kind of equipment like space suits--just figuring out how suitable space suits can be made with late 1940s tech is pretty daunting--and a moon rover of some kind, we could be looking at two or even three hundred tonnes of ship approaching the Moon--it would be a heck of a lot lighter when it touches down of course!
Given the need for gigantism up to this point, a booby prize of sorts is that the return stage back to Earth from the Lunar surface is probably not such a big deal. Again it has to dwarf the ascent stage of the LM--not just because it has to do the whole job of boosting back to Earth, not just ascend to low lunar orbit, but mainly because with no rendezvous on the way back this capsule is in fact the Earth return capsule--Apollo's LOR strategy (and Korolev's proposed LK-/Soyuz) avoided sending the return capsule through the demanding lunar landing and relaunch stages, so the ascent vehicle and thus descent vehicle could be made much lighter. Here we have to launch the same capsule that is somehow going to survive reentry from nearly 12 kilometers per second speed on atmospheric entry--also, since again our avionics are in a deeply primitive state, the initial launch from the Moon surface toward Earth is liable to involve some errors, and we will need to bring along some hefty amount of midcourse correction propellant too. Life support capsule for the return, heat shield of some kind, maneuvering propellant--it all adds up and the landing stage has to be robust enough to land all this crap and the ascent fuel too softly on the Moon. This is why the package is so damn heavy compared to Apollo, and we have to launch it all the way to the Moon from Earth with primitive rockets too, hence they have to be even more massive!
We should also take note of the reentry problem, which I seem to recall the BIS project fudged a bit. Rocket braking is clean out, unless you want to turn a 10,000 tonne ship into a million tonne ship. Somehow or other the capsule must use the atmosphere to brake it down to parachuting speeds. Now to us this is old hat, but in 1945 no one had yet done the research on practical design of ballistic entry systems yet. It was on the agenda of course since such things are needed for ICBMs, but all the homework was yet to be done.
I believe Konstantin Tsiolkovski actually included the general form of the solution in his visionary early 20th century research on space travel; he proposed I believe a form of ablative cooling relying on water, which would boil under the heat of reentry and blast out as steam through little vent grille holes. If all else fails, this is probably feasible with a suitably high temperature steel entry shield/tank, but again it is wasteful of mass in the extreme--this alone might add 50 or a hundred tonnes or more to the stack sent to the Moon! The practical solution is to use other ablative materials, solid ones layered outside the main structure. Shaping the capsule and its trajectory of entry are also critical. I presume the ablative used would be less high tech than the Apollo system--but then again, wood is actually a fairly good ablative material, and some Chinese capsules have used it--from the last time I took a look at it, they were heavier than the Apollo system would have allowed them to be--but still lighter than a water based system would be I suppose.
I began this with some confidence that if money were truly no object, it could perhaps be done. I am left with more perhaps than ever, because not everything can just be scaled up until it works after all. It could be that a suitable mass of solid fuel launch elements for instance has a probability approaching certainty that some imperfection in some of the fuel tubes will cause a disastrous misfire of some kind.
So--I think it can be done, but it would require a motivation at least comparable to that behind the Manhattan Project, or more, and would be risky as all hell and withal would dwarf the Saturn V since we need to throw mass at problems Apollo whittled down with finesse.
On this note I will also pass with some withering contempt on the idea that the Gemini landing alternatives were easy peasy low lying fruit that would have got the job of Apollo done with a fraction of the cost. If you take a look at the details of even the most modest form of the proposal, which is to use a Gemini with a beefed up heat shield and a transstage for maneuvering to serve the function of an Apollo CSM, and for a single astronaut to descend to the moon in an open space buggy, basically a glorified walker with fuel tanks and engines, to touch down, plant a flag, say some posturing prepared speech on the radio, maybe bend over and pick up one or two pounds of moon rocks, then fly back up to the Gemini and with his partner burn for home, even just to do this stunt a lot more than a simple Titan II booster would be required! This barebones mission would still have required a Saturn 1B to send it on its way, at least. The one someone showed a picture of, of an entire Gemini capsule being landed so it can then later boost back up to go home, would have been very nearly as massive as the full Apollo stack and would surely have required a full Saturn V to send it to the moon. It would not represent any significant savings of money or time--some, but considering that even this deluxe form of Lunar Gemini would have very curtailed lunar stay time and operational capability versus the Apollo stack, we pay almost the full price in both money and time for a very cutrate outcome!
Anyway the Gemini, much admired by astronauts though it was, is also a decade more advanced technology than anyone can expect in 1953, and its launch systems ditto. This option is not on the shelf for 1953. In fact the mission profile I described is pretty much its mission profile, but much cruder, and therefore far more massive.
! Sorry, I'm going to punish myself for that.
