Alternate space shuttles

Actually it "might" have been possible we figured over in NSF but not worth it in any sense. Not only up-rating the H1s, (all the way up to the proposed RS-X version of the 90s) but replacing them with other engines was looked at, (we actually found there's issues with 'just' an F1 as you need some throttling and roll control which was duly discussed with the ETS authors :) ) but the second the SpaceX fans noted that the Saturn-1 had EIGHT engines the 'logical' arguments started cropping up pretty regularly :)

Also as noted the Saturn 1 was such a beast anyway adding SRBs was pretty straight forward, unfortunately as David Portree notes it was pretty much 'forgotten' as soon as the Saturn-V came along. (http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-forgotten-rocket-saturn-ib.html)

Now that I look at it again... The way the fuel and oxidizer lines are arranged would need to be re-arranged to fit another engine in. However, am not seeing any particular reason why you couldn't fit in another engine once the propellant feed lines were arranged differently.

So I guess the 9 engine S1B is more plausible than I thought.

There was discussion at one point was replacing the central 4 engines on the S1B with a single F1. This would have been more costly and provided less thrust than uprating the H-1 by 50%. Still, if they are drawing down stocks of surplus Apollo program F1s, the engines would already be paid for, so you might see such an upgrade being done as an interim measure in a TL with continued use of the SIB.

_____

To summarize the thoughts on the alternate Shuttles people seem to find plausible:

1) It seems we all agree that some sort of smaller shuttle (similar to the "Rice shuttle") using some amount of Titan III derived hardware (such as a large Titan III derived liquid boost stage or Titan SRMs) is the most likely alternative to OTL's shuttle.

2) After that a micro-shuttle focused around crew transport and space station servicing (very likely to use the Titan III as its LV) is the next most likely outcome.

3) Then there's a remote possibility of something like the OTL shuttle boosted by a Saturn 1-C or 1-D stage.

4) Then there's Right Side Up and Boeing gets to build the Saturn 1-C based fly-back booster.

I get the impression that the general consensus is that once the shuttle design was frozen, there's really no chance of getting incremental improvements like liquid rocket boosters or the aft cargo bay added. Whatever NASA gets at the start, NASA is stuck with.

fasquardon
 
To summarize the thoughts on the alternate Shuttles people seem to find plausible:

1) It seems we all agree that some sort of smaller shuttle (similar to the "Rice shuttle") using some amount of Titan III derived hardware (such as a large Titan III derived liquid boost stage or Titan SRMs) is the most likely alternative to OTL's shuttle.

2) After that a micro-shuttle focused around crew transport and space station servicing (very likely to use the Titan III as its LV) is the next most likely outcome.

3) Then there's a remote possibility of something like the OTL shuttle boosted by a Saturn 1-C or 1-D stage.

4) Then there's Right Side Up and Boeing gets to build the Saturn 1-C based fly-back booster.

I get the impression that the general consensus is that once the shuttle design was frozen, there's really no chance of getting incremental improvements like liquid rocket boosters or the aft cargo bay added. Whatever NASA gets at the start, NASA is stuck with.

fasquardon
I would flip 3) and 4) in terms of plausibility. The problem is that the S-IC/S-ID is very expensive and out of production, so if they're not planning on making it the centerpiece of their program they are extremely unlikely to choose to use it as the booster for a Shuttle orbiter. According to the information they have at the time, solid rocket boosters are cheaper and just as good, therefore better than Saturn-Shuttle. It's only with hindsight that we long for keeping the S-IC around.

I think incremental improvements to Shuttle from 1981 onwards are possible, but hard. The trouble is that after Challenger NASA wants to replace Shuttle, not merely incrementally improve it, but it doesn't really have the funding to actually do that. There were plenty of proposals for various incremental improvements in the period, like the liquid fly-back boosters, and some of them could probably be funded successfully, but the fact of the matter was that it spent most of its money on programs that didn't pan out like Shuttle C, ALS, NLS, ASRM, X-33, and so on and so forth. NASA had this weird dichotomy in the '90s where they thought Shuttle was basically going to be flying forever (into the 2030s!), but at the same time they didn't have a great deal of interest in trying to improve Shuttle, but instead kept thinking about the big vehicles they wanted to get to Mars and the Moon or some generational leap past Shuttle, or various things of that nature.

However, I think there's a possible window of opportunity to change this: Administrator Truly. He was one of the worst administrators in NASA history, but it's because he was a shuttle-hugger whereas the Bush administration wanted bold Moon and Mars plans, and the result was a lot of pointless bureaucratic infighting and unrealistic plans that were more or less designed to be unrealistic. Maybe get Bush and Quayle to scale down their ambitions from being Kennedy 2.0 to being Nixon 2.0 and get on the same page as Truly in terms of focusing on Shuttle and Station. See what you can do to upgrade Shuttle, make it safer, and maybe even fly it more often than six or seven times per year without going to the trouble of building an entirely new vehicle. With that kind of clear leadership and focus from the top, it's possible that NASA, through the 1990s, is more interested in upgrading Shuttle than in doing a bunch of new vehicles. Now, maybe that will go nowhere anyway, but it has a higher chance of getting somewhere than SEI, and that will constrain what whoever succeeds Bush can do. You'll see some money, at least, getting funded into paper projects like the liquid fly-back boosters, but you might, just might, see LRBs or ACC or similar things getting some time of day, too.
 
Now that I look at it again... The way the fuel and oxidizer lines are arranged would need to be re-arranged to fit another engine in. However, am not seeing any particular reason why you couldn't fit in another engine once the propellant feed lines were arranged differently.

So I guess the 9 engine S1B is more plausible than I thought.

There was discussion at one point was replacing the central 4 engines on the S1B with a single F1. This would have been more costly and provided less thrust than uprating the H-1 by 50%. Still, if they are drawing down stocks of surplus Apollo program F1s, the engines would already be paid for, so you might see such an upgrade being done as an interim measure in a TL with continued use of the SIB.

1) What 'surplus' stocks? :) Seriously you'd have to put them back into production to 'use' as we only had a few.

2) IIRC you needed to keep "some" of the H1s anyway to provide roll-control and because the F1s couldn't be throttled enough near the end of the boost burn to avoid over-g conditions. So the 'compromise' was to keep the outer H1s, (as they were gimbled anyway) and shut down the F1 at about the 2/3rds mark.

3) Seriously the "S-1B "9" was a joke even when it came up on NSF... Except for the SpaceX fanboys anyway :) Up-rating the H1s was planned anyway and was done OTL for the Delta launch vehicles.

To summarize the thoughts on the alternate Shuttles people seem to find plausible:

1) It seems we all agree that some sort of smaller shuttle (similar to the "Rice shuttle") using some amount of Titan III derived hardware (such as a large Titan III derived liquid boost stage or Titan SRMs) is the most likely alternative to OTL's shuttle.

Once you force it down NASA's throat :) And sit on the Air Force to keep them from taunting NASA about it for the next decades or so... Titan SRMs are much more plausible than a Titan derived stage and I'd agree with NASA avoiding that toxic mess.

Having said that I've been looking into the idea of "someone" taking the "Astrorocket" (http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld002.htm, http://www.astronautix.com/m/martinastrorocket.html) concept a bit more seriously but it was at the time seen as "it would be nice if we COULD build this but it's probably to feasible with the technology" and frankly combining N2O4/Areozine50 AND beryllium MIGHT have been a bit much even for the Air Force :) But despite a rather hefty GLOW {+2 million pounds} most of it WAS propellant and the rather naive assumption that reentry heating at Mach-7+ wasn't "too much" it put me in mind of "Option 4" which I'll get to below. In general it was at least a concept that had both NASA AND Air Force support early on...

2) After that a micro-shuttle focused around crew transport and space station servicing (very likely to use the Titan III as its LV) is the next most likely outcome.

Unless you can get NASA to reconsider the Saturn-1 but they were focused on keeping something of the Saturn-V so I suppose they would have pushed for an INT design until the law was laid down.... A way to play this though is to point out that it could fulfill both the payload AND support role with the possibility of being pushed into a reusable design at some 'later' point. (Yes I know I keep stating that the Titan doesn't actually have a road to reusability but I might be wrong as it has been pointed out to me that in the book "To Reach the High Frontier" {https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0813122457/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used} there is a Dennis Jenkins essay that points out that Martin DID in fact come up with a "plausible" reusable fly-back Titan that {unlike the one most often pointed to which is obviously an 'artists' concept} which had aft mounted wings, canards and some mid fuselage mounted turbojets so until I can read it myself I will keep an open mind*} "Selling" it is going to be dicey though :)

3) Then there's a remote possibility of something like the OTL shuttle boosted by a Saturn 1-C or 1-D stage.

4) Then there's Right Side Up and Boeing gets to build the Saturn 1-C based fly-back booster.

I'm with Workable Goblin again here, as these would probably be reversed. If they are going to keep the S1C at all they only way to "sell" it is to go the RSU route. Cost is an issue of course and 'selling' it to OMB is going to be fun but that's what make alt-history a challenge! If it was easy anybody, say someone like Turtledove, could do it! ;)

I get the impression that the general consensus is that once the shuttle design was frozen, there's really no chance of getting incremental improvements like liquid rocket boosters or the aft cargo bay added. Whatever NASA gets at the start, NASA is stuck with.

That's not just the Shuttle though as it happens a lot with expensive AND high visibility programs. Unless you 'design' upgrading into the mix from the start it is difficult to make major changes. And frankly anything LESS than a 'major' change wasn't going to help the Shuttle. For example while the Liquid Rocket Boosters could have been an upgrade, doing so would have had major political and financial repercussions which did not in fact outweigh the performance benefits. Similarly the Aft Cargo Carrier, Shuttle-C and other 'system' upgrades would have in fact made 'sense' if you can get past the bias' on all sides which unfortunately OTL we couldn't and more so they would have required an enforceable and accepted "National Space Policy" to be made again which wasn't done OTL.

Going back to the Astrorocket mentioned above I'm going to point out it had the same size cargo bay as the "Shuttle" did so my often mentioned 'point' of it not being an Air Force requirement would seem to be shaky but in defense of that contention I will point out that was about the ONLY design that had that large a cargo bay and it wasn't a given requirement for the design study :) Instead it's actually an artifact of the propellants suggested as they are so dense you end up not needing as much space as you have...

Which btw means you CAN consider 'better' propellants for the upper stage, (though I'd rule out LH2 due to need for a much larger upper stage) and/or DIFFERENT upper stages which is something that gets missed in those studies. Understandable because really the 'upper stage' here is the important part for the 'customer' since at the time both NASA and the Air Force are rather focused on "manned" operations. But...

Once again if you can make the argument for a recoverable "booster' that encompess upper stages that are not by default manned the opportunities become greater, assuming you can get the 'blind' (biased) to see that is :)

Randy
 
I think incremental improvements to Shuttle from 1981 onwards are possible, but hard. The trouble is that after Challenger NASA wants to replace Shuttle, not merely incrementally improve it, but it doesn't really have the funding to actually do that. There were plenty of proposals for various incremental improvements in the period, like the liquid fly-back boosters, and some of them could probably be funded successfully, but the fact of the matter was that it spent most of its money on programs that didn't pan out like Shuttle C, ALS, NLS, ASRM, X-33, and so on and so forth. NASA had this weird dichotomy in the '90s where they thought Shuttle was basically going to be flying forever (into the 2030s!), but at the same time they didn't have a great deal of interest in trying to improve Shuttle, but instead kept thinking about the big vehicles they wanted to get to Mars and the Moon or some generational leap past Shuttle, or various things of that nature.

As I noted above even if NASA had wanted to develop the LRBs the political "will" wasn't there and the nature of most of the 'other' upgrades had similar issues. (The Aft-Cargo Carrier, for example wasn't needed because there was no known need for that additional cargo, and so on) And if one is going to make major changes to the "Space Transportation SYSTEM" so the idea was then you might as well go to the 'next' step as a launch system. (Hence NLS, ALS, etc, in fact it was my understanding that NASA didn't push the Shuttle-C because it WAS based on the Shuttle as a system in addition to being a direct 'competitor' to the Shuttle... How? It was an UNMANNED Shuttle :) )

Some of that 'side-tracking' was understandable for example the X-33 was a direct result of the DC-X which SSTO advocates managed to get Congress to back and therefor looked like something they would back if NASA pushed it. Others make sense in context but you really have to understand the deeper context to see. For example the Orbital Spaceplane Program... On the surface it looks like the idea is to replace the Shuttle with a 'mini-shuttle' but in context it was during a time when NASA was being told to look at a "launch system" for ALL future US launches, (sounds familiar :) ) but is being pushed towards a more 'conventional' launch system. (ALS/NLS) As 'incentive' it is hinted that this 'new' system will be allowed to send NASA BLEO, (despite very clear signals from Congress that such authorization is NOT guaranteed or even actually implied... again this sound familiar :) ) "soon".

So NASA inaugurates a program competition designed to give it what it "wants" which is a safe and cost-effective "mini-shuttle" and sits back to wait. Three of the four entrees show off snazzy mini-shuttles just as NASA asked for, while the fourth points out (and submits) that what NASA really NEEDS is an advanced Apollo capsule and not a spaceplane. And frankly they had a point, one of which the eventual "winner" admits in its final report acknowledges. But NASA 'wanted' a spaceplane, (and it WAS in the title of the competition after all) so they choose one of the other three designs... Which strangely enough, to meet the actual 'requirements' set down by NASA morphed from a winged body that only had half the capacity and crew of the 'capsule' into a hypersonic lifting body that landed not on a runway but under parachutes and retrorockets...

However, I think there's a possible window of opportunity to change this: Administrator Truly. He was one of the worst administrators in NASA history, but it's because he was a shuttle-hugger whereas the Bush administration wanted bold Moon and Mars plans, and the result was a lot of pointless bureaucratic infighting and unrealistic plans that were more or less designed to be unrealistic. Maybe get Bush and Quayle to scale down their ambitions from being Kennedy 2.0 to being Nixon 2.0 and get on the same page as Truly in terms of focusing on Shuttle and Station. See what you can do to upgrade Shuttle, make it safer, and maybe even fly it more often than six or seven times per year without going to the trouble of building an entirely new vehicle. With that kind of clear leadership and focus from the top, it's possible that NASA, through the 1990s, is more interested in upgrading Shuttle than in doing a bunch of new vehicles. Now, maybe that will go nowhere anyway, but it has a higher chance of getting somewhere than SEI, and that will constrain what whoever succeeds Bush can do. You'll see some money, at least, getting funded into paper projects like the liquid fly-back boosters, but you might, just might, see LRBs or ACC or similar things getting some time of day, too.

Interesting point but I'll note that it wasn't so much Bush and Quayle, (talked big but gave no support and as I noted Congress was dead set against VSI from the moment it was born) but NASA who pitched "IPP-2" (and lets be honest it was an INITIAL proposal and for all the complaints it was a 20 YEAR PLAN so no duh it cost a 'lot"...over 20+ years!) hoping that (the non-existent) Presidential support would carry it past Congress... (No real coincidence we saw pretty much a repeat 10 years later with even less Presidential support but surprisingly a bit more Congressional support since the NASA plan THEN didn't assume much beyond getting a new launch system)

I'll raise you Truly and add in O'Keefe as he'd be the one to make it work. (In the budget :) ) But I admit the times all wrong, (89-92 and 2001 to 2005) but as Administrators go he was one of the better ones IMHO.

The problem with the Shuttle at this point, (late-80s-early-90s) is simply it's already far past any point of being the vehicle/system is was promised to be. And really the only way to get it to the point where its 'safer-and-more-cost-effective' is to look specifically at replacing the Orbiter. I'm not sure Truly was a "shuttle-hugger" but he. like most of the astronaut corps, dislike anything that might 'take-away' Shuttle, (specifically MANNED=Shuttle) flights so was opposed to concepts like the Shuttle-C.

In reality this would have been the point at which the suggestion of separating the cargo and crew, (one of my pet peeves is the "lesson learned" from the Shuttle was this but in reality the LESSON has and remains don't put crew on cargo flights when you don't have to which is actually a whole different kettle of fish) should have been supported. Yes you're going to have to fight Congress to get a 'new' Orbiter but in reality at this point the basic argument for moving US launch capacity TO the Shuttle is pretty much proven AND you now have the opportunity to actually FIX the system as a whole. (Despite the Air Force "abandoning" the Shuttle after Challenger the fact was they had pretty much learned to at least tolerate it at that point and it would have been easier and cheaper to 'fix' the Shuttle than develop the Titan-IV and EELVs and they knew it)

So, while the "Return to Flight" program is ongoing Truly is honest with Bush on what NASA and the US need and bites the bullet on coupling 'launch' with manned space flight, (taking the hit from the Space Advocacy groups and Astronaut Corps) and pitches turning the "STS" into an actual Space Transportation SYSTEM with all that implies. Managing to convince Bush and Quayle to support replacing the Orbiter with a smaller "Shuttle" and recoverable engine package that can also be used to launch Shuttle-C cargo and upper stage combinations to drastically reduce the cost of access. Can he sell it?

Randy
 
Ok, have to post this one for an "alternative" Shuttle:
North American Rockwell "Advanced Logistics Vehicle" model at Secret Projects and Farthestreaches:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,6157.msg314791.html#msg314791
https://www.farthestreaches.com/spaceprgshuttle3.html#05072017
sts_a.jpg
 
Ok, have to post this one for an "alternative" Shuttle:
North American Rockwell "Advanced Logistics Vehicle" model at Secret Projects and Farthestreaches:

Well--something that goofy sure makes me feel better about some of my own suggestions!

Seriously, if this isn't a silly joke someone made for his boss's kid's birthday, what is it?

The nose makes me reject it as a possibility. If it did not have that sort of Cessna type cockpit, I could squint and see a biconic entry body with the rotor assembly stowed in the cargo bay, to be deployed as high subsonic lift on the biconic body dropped below full weight lift, autogyroing to a soft landing.

The scale still seems all wrong, not enough room for SSMEs for instance.
 
Well--something that goofy sure makes me feel better about some of my own suggestions!

Seriously, if this isn't a silly joke someone made for his boss's kid's birthday, what is it?

The nose makes me reject it as a possibility. If it did not have that sort of Cessna type cockpit, I could squint and see a biconic entry body with the rotor assembly stowed in the cargo bay, to be deployed as high subsonic lift on the biconic body dropped below full weight lift, autogyroing to a soft landing.

The scale still seems all wrong, not enough room for SSMEs for instance.

Your actually mostly right, (not the toy) it's a biconic reentry vehicle concept. The nose, (and landing gear) were based on Dynasoar with the original concept looking like Gemini with a cylindrical instead of conical 'aft' like in Big Gemini. No "cargo bay" IIRC it had an aft mounted docking assembly and everything transferred through there. "Trans-stage" like service module instead of SSMEs as it was designed to be launched on some type of booster.

Landing mode is correct (glide more than autorotate really hence the skids and nose wheel) and a later iteration used 'single-blade' rotors to save room.

Randy
 
I would flip 3) and 4) in terms of plausibility. The problem is that the S-IC/S-ID is very expensive and out of production, so if they're not planning on making it the centerpiece of their program they are extremely unlikely to choose to use it as the booster for a Shuttle orbiter. According to the information they have at the time, solid rocket boosters are cheaper and just as good, therefore better than Saturn-Shuttle. It's only with hindsight that we long for keeping the S-IC around.

I've been doing digging into the costs of a Saturn IC (and the other Apollo era hardware). I am having trouble finding primary sources that give costings on the individual elements of a Saturn V launch. (Such as the costs of the launch itself, the costs of each stage etc.)

That disclaimer in mind, from the secondary sources I have found, it does seem that there was scope to really drive down costs on the S-IC and S-ID. For example, the F1A engine looks like it would cost around half what an F1 engine cost (I have seen secondary sources give the cost of the F1 engine as $6.9 million in 1969 dollars, while the F1A looks like it would have cost around $3.9 million in the same year). And since the F1A engine had much better thrust than the F1 engine, one could turn the S-IC/S-ID into a 3 or 4 engine stage (depending on what payloads and upper stages you were putting on top of it), which would drive costs down even further.

So the S-IC/S-ID could be worth returning to production, depending on the situation.

On the other side of the scales, the flyback S-IC would have rather large technical risks. Boeing's proposals seem to involve more than a bit of handwaving, so while I suspect it would have been possible to make a flyback version of the booster, I have a feeling that development costs would have risen above Boeing's promises.


(@Archibald, @RanulfC, @Shevek23, @anyone who obsessively collects technical pdf files: Speaking of digging into the costs of the S-IC, does anyone know where to find the 1992 Rocketdyne study on putting the F-1A back into production, it is refereed to here and I've been hunting for it ever since.)


If they are going to keep the S1C at all they only way to "sell" it is to go the RSU route. Cost is an issue of course and 'selling' it to OMB is going to be fun

Was the OMB really so important? Sure they wore NASA down, but in the end they lost and Nixon and Weinburger approved an impractically large shuttle that required impractically high flight rates to pay off its costs.

1) What 'surplus' stocks? :) Seriously you'd have to put them back into production to 'use' as we only had a few.

I thought there were a handful of unused S-ICs around? With 5 engines apiece, those would last NASA a few years, as it's hard to see them launching more than 2 uprated Saturn IBs a year.

Unless you can get NASA to reconsider the Saturn-1 but they were focused on keeping something of the Saturn-V so I suppose they would have pushed for an INT design until the law was laid down....

I found this interim earth orbit program study to be a fascinating insight into NASA's thinking about their space station program. The document is full of helpful costings of how much different boosters would cost and how much it would cost to restart different production lines.

According to this study, the "vehicle acquisition cost" (which I am assuming does not include the cost of launching said vehicle) of a Saturn 1B was $50 million in 1971 money.

By contrast, if NASA had developed the Titan IIIM, each LV would have cost NASA $25 million.

Now, the Saturn 1B was more capable than the Titan IIIM, but even it was a tad undersized for the space station missions NASA was looking at (where a LV that could get 50,000 lbs to a 250 nautical mile orbit was desirable, since such a LV could carry both crew and station resupply together as a combined payload) and it would have struggled to launch all but the most minimalist of glider-type shuttles. And while there were options to uprate the Saturn 1B, they seem to have been dismissed as too expensive (though that's not looked at at all in the IEOP study).

It's worth noting that the Titan IIIM would have been rather expensive to develop - $250 million in 1971, which is a good deal more than what it would cost to restart Saturn production and develop any of the Saturn INT vehicles. And certainly more expensive to re-start Saturn 1B production.

I think that is the real reason why NASA was so interested in the INT-20 variants (the S-IC with fewer engines and only a S-IVB on top) while the INT-21 was of interest because it was the most economical option for getting space stations to orbit. Downsizing the Saturn V hardware was cheaper than uprating the Saturn 1B to do interesting things

And I suspect that the attractions of the S-IVB combined with a solid rocket cluster as a first stage was a big reason why the Saturn INT vehicles didn't go further.

Based on the IEOP study and these Bellcomm memos (19701127 S-IVB + UA-1207s--Bellcomm.pdf and 19690318 Low-Cost S-IVB--Bellcomm.pdf), it looks like the cluster of UA1205s or UA1207s would have been put medium sized payloads in orbit for much less than anything based on the S-IB or S-IC.

As I noted above even if NASA had wanted to develop the LRBs the political "will" wasn't there and the nature of most of the 'other' upgrades had similar issues. (The Aft-Cargo Carrier, for example wasn't needed because there was no known need for that additional cargo, and so on) And if one is going to make major changes to the "Space Transportation SYSTEM" so the idea was then you might as well go to the 'next' step as a launch system. (Hence NLS, ALS, etc, in fact it was my understanding that NASA didn't push the Shuttle-C because it WAS based on the Shuttle as a system in addition to being a direct 'competitor' to the Shuttle... How? It was an UNMANNED Shuttle :) )

True. Though to be fair to NASA and Congress, the Shuttle as a launch system was very much oversized for America's needs. It was designed to be economical in to meet a demand of 60+ launches a year and for most of its time the US was launching maybe 20 things a year... Investing further in an oversized system is hard to sell.

Maybe the only way I can imagine the LRBs seeing the light of day is if NLS or ALS had gotten some traction and the first stage of NLS/ALS had been something that could have been used to boost the Shuttle.

Also, given that the Shuttle was so oversized for America's needs, I think NASA was right that any other big cargo LV would be a threat to the Shuttle.

fasquardon
 
Maybe the only way I can imagine the LRBs seeing the light of day is if NLS or ALS had gotten some traction and the first stage of NLS/ALS had been something that could have been used to boost the Shuttle.
I saw a LRB proposal for SLS that included a "single stick" design, where it was just the LRB.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/11/dynetics-pwr-liquidize-sls-booster-competition-f-1-power/
Basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-3 this, but as an LRB.
And whadda know, it showed up in ALS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis_(rocket)
 
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