AHC: Sea Dragon Rocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to have the United States build and fly (manned) at least one Sea Dragon rocket between 1965 and 1980. Bonus points if there's a whole production run of them at least 10 strong. Double bonus points if they really hold to the low prices ($60 or so per kilogram to LEO) they were planned for.
 
I love that thing. Flying battleships, whether it be Sea Dragon or Orion, are just the tops.

Meeting the price goal should be easy, since paper rockets are always cheap. :)

The real problem is finding a reason why the US would want so much launch capacity. Satellites are much more sensible than a manned observation platform. ICBMs are cheaper and more defensible than nukes in orbit and cheaper and way more workable than nukes on the moon. If its a vanity prestige project you want, Apollo and the moon is fine, you don't need Gigantor the rocket.

If the Soviets somehow beat us to the moon, then maybe as a vanity project we decide either to go to Mars or to create a Space City or a moonbase. If so, then the launch capacity of a Sea Rocket might make sense.

If you accelerate the discovery and dissemination of the knowledge of dinosaur-killing comets, and then actually discover a comet or asteroid that everyone is convinced will hit earth, then you could get Sea Dragons built that way. But you need the comet/asteroid to be years and years away from hitting, so there's time to build the rockets, and even today we can't really predict cometary and asteroidal orbits verey accurately that far in advance (correct me if I'm wrong).

If the military decides to go hard for the Thor/rods from God idea then Sea Dragon might be necessary to support that, but I just don't see that happening. Bombs are cheaper.

If we discover some kind of evidence of extraterrestrial life, then that might be enough to get us to move massively into space exploration, and therefore to build the Sea Dragon. If we discover an artefact of some kind drifting through the system, that would do it for sure. But some kind of SETI success might be enough, just because it would make space seem more important.

Not really related, but the idea of a Sea Dragon ICBM with like five hundred warheads is really, really cool. Not sure why anyone would do that. It would be called the Sea Hydra, obviously.
 
King David's Spaceship

Another thought: in past threads we've speculated about accelerating rocket development. The snag has always been guidance and control and life support.

But if you have an enormous amount of mass to work with, would it be possible to brute engineer your guidance and control and life support issues? Use people and extra fuel in place of sophisticated guidance, for instance.

If so, then by accelerating rocket development slightly, you might make it possible for a combatant power in *WW2 to decide that it needs a manned space station over Nazi Germany for observation purposes and use a Sea Dragon design to get it. Or the same thing in the early Cold War, before electronics development has made spy satellites feasible.
 

Archibald

Banned
Here's a try...

Change in the Apollo mode. John Houbolt gets killed late July 1961; while on the way to a high-ranking meeting on Apollo, his aircraft catch fire on the runway because noone noticed that fuel had spilled on the tires during refueling.
(the incident was real, with a happy ending thanks to the FAA watchdogs)

With Houvolt dead NASA never buy Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. The agency keep Direct Ascent as its prefered mission profile.

von Braun direct ascent shemes used the NOVA rocket; scrap that and replace it with a half-size Sea Dragon.
Not too difficult: NOVA would have been horribly expensive and complex to build. Sea Dragon beat the pants out of NOVA (two engines instead of 20 or 24, no huge enormous pad, cheap to build).
 
Sea Dragon beat the pants out of NOVA (two engines instead of 20 or 24, no huge enormous pad, cheap to build).

Ah, but see it's the exact issue with "just" two engine that makes me not buy the Sea Dragon. The F1 had huge issues with combustion instability inside the combustion chamber, uneven burning causing run away pressure waves that bounced back and forth and grew until the engines blew up. It took seven years to solve, and if the F1 hadn't been in development long before the actual Apollo program (Early firings occurred as early as 1957!), it would never have been ready.

The Sea Dragon calls for two engines a good order of magnitude bigger. The combustion chamber on the first stage is about the size of a house and such combustion issues scale with the size. Stabilizing the Sea Dragon's engines may be impossible. What I might consider possible would be using the F1 itself in a cluster on a Sea Dragon-type rocket in the 100 metric ton range. This can then serve the same role as the Saturn V, and if it's cheaper to build and operate may get more than one production run.

Thus, you might see more moon missions, possibly things like the LEM taxi/truck variants, DoD usage of the booster, all sorts of good stuff. Develop a Dragon in the 20-30 ton range and you've got commercial options. Of course, this is all assuming that the launch costs are as low as predicted, which may not be close to true.
 
My proposal

US NAVY get the US spaceflight program under there Control
in 1950 US armed forces were fighting about who controls it: USAF, US NAVY and ARMY
in the End USAF got it (while the ARMY part became part of NASA)


all we need is a President who consider NASA incapable to bring an "Men on Moon"
and give US NAVY the program and give the order to build a big launch rocket to
Aerojet section of Robert C. Truax...
 
Ah, but see it's the exact issue with "just" two engine that makes me not buy the Sea Dragon. The F1 had huge issues with combustion instability inside the combustion chamber, uneven burning causing run away pressure waves that bounced back and forth and grew until the engines blew up. It took seven years to solve, and if the F1 hadn't been in development long before the actual Apollo program (Early firings occurred as early as 1957!), it would never have been ready.

The Sea Dragon calls for two engines a good order of magnitude bigger. The combustion chamber on the first stage is about the size of a house and such combustion issues scale with the size. Stabilizing the Sea Dragon's engines may be impossible. What I might consider possible would be using the F1 itself in a cluster on a Sea Dragon-type rocket in the 100 metric ton range. This can then serve the same role as the Saturn V, and if it's cheaper to build and operate may get more than one production run.
I agree - having lots of 'little' engines (bigger than an F-1!!) would allow engine-out capability. If that one big one goes, you're dead.
 
I agree - having lots of 'little' engines (bigger than an F-1!!) would allow engine-out capability. If that one big one goes, you're dead.
I suspect that Sea Dragon would have used something like several M-1 engines coupled with 6-8 AJ-260 solid fuel boosters on it's first stage, with say 2 on it's 2nd stage, and a M-1 as it's third stage engine...
(The AJ-260 rocket boosters would have been 260 inches in diameter, and were so big, that in NASA's case, on site manafacture may have been the only option, as they were too big to ferry...).
But would Nasa, have allowed Aerojet a de facto monopoly on rocket engines...?
 
Top