British and commonwealth rocket development
- Thread starter Ry01tank
- Start date
Some quick thoughts
1) Skylark is underrated
2) It is sometime said that british solid rocketry was not advanced enough to make ballistic missile at the time of Blue streak and its cancellation, this is wrong, British solid rocketry R&D was comparable to French one up until De Gaulle decided to spend Up to 6% of the state budget on the Force de frappe circa 1960, then the french took an advantage, but the British were still not far behind until the mid-60s. My point is that there absolutely was the skill and infrastructure base On the propulsive side (considering brits were more advanced than french in warhead, reentry and guidance) for Britain to make their own SLBM instead of getting Polaris
2) Stonechat is often forgotten but a nice solid motor that had a lot more planned applications From the 60s to 90s than just Falstaff, the 80s Stonechat-based orbital launchers (Orbital Skylark, Royal Ordnance’s “Small Orbiter" rocket, General Technology Systems LittLEO*) could have gotten a decent amount of interest and funding had they survived into the first newspace craze of the 90s, and given their headstart, possibly have gone to orbit
4) Reading about the period, The British, under the Wilson’s government, followed The literal and minimal interpretation of the ELDO treaties and accords, but the fact is, they did follow it and respect the pre agreed funding limits... My takeaway is that you can probably do some decent things with the British in ELDO in the second half of the 60/ as long as you can get some it etched in stone by international ELDO Accords before the 1964 election
*a company by Geoffrey Pardoe, former project manager of blue streak, so not nobody
1) Skylark is underrated
2) It is sometime said that british solid rocketry was not advanced enough to make ballistic missile at the time of Blue streak and its cancellation, this is wrong, British solid rocketry R&D was comparable to French one up until De Gaulle decided to spend Up to 6% of the state budget on the Force de frappe circa 1960, then the french took an advantage, but the British were still not far behind until the mid-60s. My point is that there absolutely was the skill and infrastructure base On the propulsive side (considering brits were more advanced than french in warhead, reentry and guidance) for Britain to make their own SLBM instead of getting Polaris
2) Stonechat is often forgotten but a nice solid motor that had a lot more planned applications From the 60s to 90s than just Falstaff, the 80s Stonechat-based orbital launchers (Orbital Skylark, Royal Ordnance’s “Small Orbiter" rocket, General Technology Systems LittLEO*) could have gotten a decent amount of interest and funding had they survived into the first newspace craze of the 90s, and given their headstart, possibly have gone to orbit
4) Reading about the period, The British, under the Wilson’s government, followed The literal and minimal interpretation of the ELDO treaties and accords, but the fact is, they did follow it and respect the pre agreed funding limits... My takeaway is that you can probably do some decent things with the British in ELDO in the second half of the 60/ as long as you can get some it etched in stone by international ELDO Accords before the 1964 election
*a company by Geoffrey Pardoe, former project manager of blue streak, so not nobody
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I still wonder if Guyana, as a British colony or Commonwealth member would have made a better launching site than Australia?
It's closer to the UK for a start, its in the Commonwealth, the govt there would not turn down the prestiage/cash, its right on the Equator, easy to ship too.
Yes, you probably need a shorter WW2 for Britain to have the post war cash for a viable space program, but maybe if they had teamed up with the French OTL instead of beliving American lies about technology sharing then something could have happened.
It's closer to the UK for a start, its in the Commonwealth, the govt there would not turn down the prestiage/cash, its right on the Equator, easy to ship too.
Yes, you probably need a shorter WW2 for Britain to have the post war cash for a viable space program, but maybe if they had teamed up with the French OTL instead of beliving American lies about technology sharing then something could have happened.
Canada is close, a Bermuda site would be an idea, Barbados was considered OTL but wasn't used
Britain would want a site in its own territory or a country that it knows will like Britain and not distance itself from the mother country. Guyana might still go its own way but it depends on socio-economic conditions that might not drastically shift, given that most higher paying jobs of a space launch site would be British, while the "laymen" jobs would be Guyanians
A British-French program would be the best case, but given each would want some form of it being "theirs"
Basically, a WW2 where the war ends by 43, an earlier start wouldn't change much, a War instead of Munich would basically be a shitshow for everybody, nobody was ready to fight a war in 38, even Britain in 39 was caught unprepared. France fell due to the strict rigid command structure and a last-minute change of command.
This new guy (forget his name) cancelled every warplan going on to replan what to do,
one of the plans was a counterattack on German forces moving through the Ardennes forest, basically, the attack was ready to go but the new guy canned it before putting a new plan to attack said forces, by that time the Germans had reinforced their flanks
This could potentially turn the war into a stalemate akin to WW1 overnight if the counterattack destroys that german army. it's 50/50 how the war goes afterward but i the Germans don't go for the Soviet Union it is likely to be a slugging match until America joins the war
This would lead to a far lower debt from lend lease, though the war effort would still leave Britain economically drained.
One of the biggest drains (besides debt) for the UK post-WW2 was the loss of the colonies, which had huge investments from British Companies. in this "Short WW2" maybe the British do better in the Pacific with its Colonies and its power allows Britain to retain her colonies in some centralized form
The other path is Hitler gets couped in 1938, basically WW2 starts after Munich fails and each country is caught lacking, if Germany falters the Whermact might coup hitler and end the war, this short conflict would leave Britain in the best place, not having much War debt and taking German scientists
The problem being that Woomera being in Australia is a feature and not a bug of Australia's participation in a space program. As Woomera -- withs its launch infrastructure and personnel -- is Australia's contribution to any space program of this era. While Woomera does suffer due to its lackluster ability to launch into equatorial orbits, having a different launch site means that you're going to struggle to keep Australia in your program, as happened with ELDO IOTL once it was resolved to move launch operations to somewhere that allowed for easier access to GEO than Woomera.
All of that being said, if you can manage to make a Commonwealth space program stick, there will inevitably be a need for a site that does allow for better equatorial access than Woomera. And of the options available, Guyana is probably the best, but it'll never be able to realize all of the benefits of Kourou because of the politics of getting it built. As I strongly suspect you're not going to be able to get rid of Woomera due to Australian opposition and sunken institutional costs, which means you're building a second launch facility in Guyana for lower-inclination and GEO launches while Woomera keeps higher-inclination -- such as to a space station in a 50-ish degree inclination (like Mir and the ISS) -- and polar launches.
As the only option to keep the Australians happy and maintain a single launch complex would be something like the proposed Cape York launch site, the construction of which is going to be such a Herculean task and logistical nightmare that even the Treasury is likely to agree that it is preferable to just keep Woomera and build something in Guyana.
I would disagree with that, at least regarding Britain lacking the means for a viable space program. But I don't disagree with its spirit. While I'd argue it's not hard to get a sustainable British space program with what OTL gave us, it's never going to be something which gets the hearts of space cadets pumping. A satellite a year until the late-Seventies, the odd deep space mission, and maybe -- just maybe, with some luck and a lot of narrative intent -- a manned flight or two in license-built, Anglicized Mercury or Gemini isn't exactly exciting. Neat, especially the last bit? Perhaps. But not exciting, at least not in the way the different!WW2 British space wanks give us an honest-to-Heinlein von Braun Ferry Rocket with the Union Jack on its side.
A Victim of Circumstance: A Short(ish) TL Sketch
But if you want a British space program, you need to sort out Britain's ballistic missile program, as Britain ended up building two separate ballistic missiles -- Blue Streak and Black Arrow -- and bought a third in Polaris, while having at various steps in-between batted its eyes at ALCMs like Skybolt and the chimera that was Blue Steel II. And Britain also operated, but didn't own, a fourth IRBM in Thor. So let me try to do that, with a minimum of handwavium. But since this is Fifties Britain and aviation is involved, some amount of handwavium is going to be required. And then a brief discussion of the start of an actual space program, using almost exclusively OTL hardware and ideas.
For setting dressing, grant me two allohistorical discoveries/departures regarding H2O2. The first is that the British, in their experimenting with HTP in the late-Forties and early-Fifties, inadvertently discover the narrow range of temperatures where the 90%+ stuff is genuinely stable -- when in a clean enough storage vessel -- without risk of decomposition. (This was done in the Seventies IOTL, by which time HTP as a storable oxidizer was an after thought given the ready availability of IRFNA and N2O4.) The second is a likely consequence of the first -- as HTP that can be safely (for a given definition of "safely") stored is a world-beater before nitric acid inhibition and hydrazine that's worth its weight in gold -- and that's to make it the perfect rocket fuel, by finding a way to make it hypergolic with something that's equally storable and cheap. There've been papers on making hypergolic H2O2 fuels, and as they're based on simple experimental chemistry, there should be no secret sauce that would prevent the same from being done in 1950 if one had the incentive to look. So you get a mixed-alcohol fuel, that's primarily ethanolamine cut with copper (II) chloride and just enough other alcohols to give the fuel an acceptable freezing point, that is hypergolic with 90%+ HTP. Lets call that Alcohol Rocket Fuel #1 and leave it to your imaginations what sorts of dog-related puns rocketeers will come up with for something whose acronym is ARF-1.
Because of the obvious potential of ARF-1/HTP, the former is used by Saunders Roe instead of RP-1 in the Black Knight, and things work more or less as OTL. (While ARF-1 slightly underperforms RP-1 in RPA, the abstractions of RPA let me consider it a performance wash.) It seems destined to remain a solution looking for a problem, however, as an ARF-1/HTP IRBM is utterly impractical for the nuclear deterrent, given how absolutely massive it would need to be to deliver Orange Herald. Until the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty opened the door to American thermonuclear technology and much smaller bombs. Here is where the butterflies start to manifest, as someone realizes -- to mash together concepts together anachronistically as a shorthand -- that you can, with ARF-1/HTP, build something Black Arrow-shaped with a WE177-sized warhead and hit Moscow with it from Britain. The boom isn't going to be as big as Orange Herald or a W49, obviously, but you've got a missile that is actually handleable and doesn't require cryogenic propellants or getting it to light in the first place. It's a missile small enough to actually be road-mobile, which also neatly sidesteps all of the issues with the missile deterrent's vulnerability to a first-strike and the massive costs associated with dotting the British countryside with silos big enough to handle Blue Streak. The Treasury likes all of that very much: Making use of existing, demonstrated flight components? Great! No pesky silos of the sort that ended up equaling three-quarters of Atlas's total lifetime costs? Even better! Building a new bomb family will not go over well -- Orange Herald was tremendously expensive, even if a dead end -- but, if the RAF pitches it as a family to ensure they don't ask for more money to replace other bombs, it will go down about as good as hoped for. MacMillan and the political leadership are sold on not having to wrestle with the first-strike survivability question and its implicit need to paint targets on their silo-containing constituencies, with Blue Streak being terminated at the end of 1958 in favor of this allohistorical ARF-1/HTP ballistic missile that probably most looks like the 1964 Saunders Roe's sketches for a multi-Stentor-powered IRBM. This development program will have absolutely no hitches and not be something that needs the Benny Hill theme set to it, because this is the late-Fifties British aviation industry working on something that the Treasury has been promised will be cheap and easy. What could possibly go wrong?
The likely dumpster fire that is the developing of that IRBM is beyond the scope of this sketch, as are the many butterflies it creates. We're instead going to keep our eyes on Blue Streak. Because Harold MacMillan is still Harold MacMillan, he still wants to get something from the not-insubstantial amount of taxpayer money that's been thrown into Blue Streak. So he intends to shop the completion of the Blue Streak as a satellite launcher, initially a two-stage vehicle consisting of a Blue Streak booster and Black Knight upper stage. So far so OTL Black Prince. But timing, in these things, is everything. IOTL, in mid-1960 after Blue Streak's cancellation as a military project, there just wasn't the right combination of partners to make Black Prince fly: No one in the Commonwealth had the money or interest outside of Australia, while the French, West Germans, and Italians had the money, they also wanted work-share, and that work-share would necessarily be a laborious project to engineer and come at the expense of Black Knight (and the system being flight-ready relatively quickly.) In early 1959, however, there is a key difference, as there is a member of the Commonwealth who has the money, interest, and for whom work-share won't be a problem: Canada.
As in early 1959, John Diefenbaker had a problem. He was about to terminate the Avro Arrow's development: Whether or not you believe he retained it solely to preserve jobs in several swing districts in Ontario, as has been speculated, the interceptor's now on the chopping block lest it devour the whole of the Canadian defense budget. Ever the canny operator, even if he didn't retain the Arrow to preserve jobs, he recognizes the potential adverse electoral consequences of the Arrow's cancellation. And, while Avro had been given due notice of the impending (likely negative) review of the Arrow and been advised to find other work to retain its workforce, some insurance never hurt. Which is why when the MacMillan government approached Canada about participating in the development of a satellite launch vehicle, Diefenbaker arrived at a plan that only a politician could: He would trade the Arrow for Black Prince.
The idea was, in its own way, brilliant. As Diefenbaker was aware of plans, which he intended to support, to keep Canada on the bleeding-edge of aerospace through the development of an artificial satellite (Alouette 1). That satellite would need to be launched somehow, though the plan at the moment was to use an American launcher. A Commonwealth launcher, though, had its own merits. The most practical of which being that some of it could be built in Canada, which could conveniently absorb some of Avro's workforce that had been working on the Arrow. Better still, as Avro and Saunders Roe were still part of the same broad corporate family tree, and still frequently communicated. Which would nominally simplify the license-building of a Black Knight-derived upper-stage. It wouldn't be a one-for-one trade of dollars, of course, which was the beauty of it for him politically, as he got to shed the Arrow while mitigating the damage of the cancellation and keeping Canada diplomatically front-and-center in the emerging field of rocketry. In short order a tripartite agreement is brokered to fly Black Prince: Britain would provide the booster in Blue Streak, tracking stations, and project management; Canada would provide the payload and upper-stage, derived from a license-built Black Knight; and the Australians wound provide the launch site. The monetary arrangements of Black Prince made precisely no one happy, as the the MacMillan government had to fight tooth-and-claw to get the Treasury to pay to finish Blue Streak (and felt it was overpaying for the privilege) and the Canadian unhappiness with the cost overruns with Alouette grew all the worse when fabricating and integrating their own native upper-stage was added. But, usually, that no one's quite happy is a sign that an equitable partnership had been reached.
The project is paced by the development of Alouette and, thus, holds to a mid-1962 anticipated launch date. But somewhere from inception to a launchpad in South Australia, a three-nation partnership has become a truly Commonwealth-wide project. South Africa has become a formal partner, contributing Deep Space Station 51, the use in the Commonwealth's space activity specifically contracted for with NASA in its construction, and the magic of butterflies nudged the 1960 referendum to a different result to keep them in the Commonwealth. Singapore too has joined as well and made available its own tracking station, though a diplomatic nicety of the UK, as it is the RAF that operates that installation. And the first official act of the newly formed Indian National Committee on Space Research -- the forerunner of OTL's ISRO -- is to attend the launch of Alouette 1 in an official capacity. And, to cap things off, the first launch of the Black Prince doesn't catch a case of the explosions and actually works as intended, making the Commonwealth of Nations the third power to launch a satellite. And a second satellite -- Ariel 1, Britain's first -- would be launched from Woomera a few months later.
From this unlikely turn of events, the British (and the rest of their spiritual empire) find themselves with a space program. By 1962, it was obvious what the next step was: The launching of a geostationary communications satellite, as the telecommunication satellite had the potential to truly bind the Commonwealth together. And it was an idea that genuinely excited all of the partners, even if the costs would still fall squarely on the three founding members of the space program. This would require a significantly more powerful rocket, but the makings of that were already there, as Rolls-Royce had been actively working a hydrolox motor and de Havilland sketching a new, 10' upper-stage utilizing it. (While Avro, meanwhile, is eying the already existing 10'-diameter hydrolox stage because license-building upper-stages has unironically worked so well for them thus far.) While that ARF-1/HTP IRBM, having maybe finally hit maturity, offers a mass produceable strap-on thrust-augmenter for the Black Prince II. But, despite its cost, the Black Prince has become something which has captured the heart the Commonwealth in a way that hadn't been anticipated, much to the frustration of the Treasury. Killing it is so much harder when there's an actual diplomatic consequence to it.
Can this low-probability space program actually achieve greater things going forward? That will ultimately come down to narrative intent. As since it has launched -- to pardon the pun -- the combination of sunken costs and diplomatic consequences will make it hard for Britain, at the very least, to kill. But one should never, ever underestimate the ability of the Treasury to let its miserliness get the better of it. And there's real dramatic potential in the tragedy of Black Arrow on an even bigger scale.
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The main problem with using Woomera is that the range extends to the north-west, not the north-east. It runs counter to the physics of a useable launch range which if it is to use the Earth's rotation to enable orbit to be reached. It was designed that way because it was easier for weapon's testing and it had a low population density. As an Australian, I can point out that most of the Australian population is on the east coast of the continent. Nuclear testing at Maralinga also has a similar problem with prevailing winds from the west, taking any fallout over the east coast, which was more than likely why nuclear tests moved to Christmas Island in the Pacific. Gayana is better bet for a launch facility.
My idea is basically a kaiserreich inspired one
Canada intervenes in the Second American Civil War, taking Michigan and New York state to Maine (All of New England) as a vassal state, the US is split between the Pacific states and USA
The Union of Britain gets liberated and the Monarchy restored, France is defeated by Germany.
In this situation Canada basically stands as a superpower, the industry and economic power resulting from the British Exiles and the wars (along with Economic gains in America) lead to Canada co-leading the Inter-Commonwealth Treaty Organization with the UK
Yes a Canada with 14 million people being a superpower is far-fetched, but in this timeline basically everybody besides Germany is kinda screwed up
Canada and the Commonwealth countries would be in a Cold War with Germany and Japan, a space race would ensue with Germany putting the first satellite and man in space
The Inter-Commonwealth Space Agency is founded, and mostly Canada and UK are involved. the launch site is in Canada or New England
Commonwealth puts first Astronauts on the moon in 67, one Canadian one British. Space Race continues after
A site near Darwin was proposed as an alternative to Kourou when ELDO was looking for a launch site that could reach GEO. There is (or was) a map online showing a pretty wide range of launch azimuths, over a range comfortably exceeding 90 degrees , including due north and due east. AFAIK it would have been capable of launching directly into a useful GTO and into a sun-synchronous orbit, something not many launch sites can manage. It was apparently the second-ranked choice, with Kourou preferred partly for 'political reasons', which may translate to not being adequatly French. ITTL, politics may be in its favour. There is the small issue that Cyclone Tracy would probably make a right mess of the place in 1974. Weather is certainly a strong argument against it.
I see Canadian industrial and scientific involvement in such a programme as highly probable, but I wouldn't expect Canada to be a strong contender for a launch site. Certain British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean have advantages, potentially allowing shared use of the USAF's Eastern Test Range.
FWIW, my best-case scenario for a UK-led space program has the first crewed flight taking place in 1969, likely using one of the large-diameter Blue Streak derivatives that were studied for spaceflight purposes. The version that seems to have been studied most was 14 feet in diameter, with four uprated RZ.2 derivatives (or possibly two RZ.14 with two RZ.2-type combustion chambers, resembling the RD-180) on the first stage and a hydrogen/oxygen upper stage. Expected payload was 35,000 pounds to a 300 nautical mile orbit, which is comparable to Titan IIIE/IIIM, and about 70% of Proton, so would allow a reasonable size crewed capsule, space station module, or reconnaissance satellite.
Woomera is oriented for launching NW, but that is not an immutable quality of the site. If you'll pardon the jape, there's nothing but empty space filled with indigenous (and invasive!) fauna that want to kill to you for hundreds of kilometers north and east of the site for spent stages to fall on. So you can easily overfly the vastness of the Australian interior north and east of the site. A graphic from Kistler showing their intended launch inclinations for their K-1 illustrates this point:
Is there a joke to be made about people being an invasive species and potentially dropping spent stages on Cairns? Probably. But in all seriousness, given all of the physical space to work with, it's not a big deal to ensure there's no actual overflight of it. Woomera's not ideal for exactly the reason you said -- that the heartland of Australia's population tends to be due east of Woomera and thus equatorial launches can't be made -- but it can work well enough as it allows for sun-synchronous orbits, polar orbits, and orbits with inclinations greater than 45-degrees. Which are the really important orbits, as 50- or 55-degrees was the historical benchmark reference by NASA for an American space station while OTL's International Space Station is inclined at 51.6-degrees.
So yes, Guyana is certainly a better choice. (On paper: I don't think there's ever been a serious attempt to identify a launch site in British Guiana. Our minds just kind of go there reflexively because Kourou exists.) But Woomera's good enough for the early stages of a space program and, even then, perfectly adequate for a fair number of mission profiles. Which leads to narratively interesting questions about its fate once a launch site capable of equatorial operations becomes a necessity.
Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it runs into the common problem all Different WW2 TLs do, at least when it comes to TLs focused on space programs. Especially the Really Different WW2s, of which Kaiserreich is one of them. And that problem is that space programs are very limited aspects of settings. It's very, very hard to strike a good balance between providing enough detail on the changes in the setting which are the foundation of your radically different space program so that the reader can suspend his disbelief, without those details crowding out everything else. If you don't know anything about Kaiserreich, your description of things makes no sense, and even then -- knowing what I do of the setting -- Canada retaining any part of the United States after the 2ACW is very, how shall we say...optimistic. Unless it's Kaiserredux.
Honestly, forget Kaiserreich. I want Kaiserredux space programs. Bring on Czar Alexander I Kartvelli, His Imperial Georgian Majesty and Most Supreme Aero-Autocrat.
Darwin's problems, as far as ELDO was concerned, were a lack of infrastructure to support a space program -- the lack of a deep water harbor and the size of the airport were both concerns -- and, as you mentioned, the frequent cyclones. Darwin's just really remote, in the grand scheme of things. Woomera and Kourou are remote, too, but not so much in the grand scheme of things: The former is relatively close to Australia's economic and industrial heart, at least, while the latter can draw on the whole of the North American economic zone just on the other side of the Caribbean for whatever cannot be brought in from Europe. Darwin scores better than some other places CNES looked at -- Atomic Rockets has a brief discussion of all 15 -- but I don't think it was second on their list. Maybe when ELDO was dealing with the British and Australians, but by the time they were gone, there was no need to pay any heed to Anglophonic sympathies.
The elephant in the room, of course, being just paying for space at the Cape and using the Atlantic Range. Given the nature of Anglo-American civil and military cooperation, had a Commonwealth space program wanted to do that for equatorial launches, it seems unlikely that an accommodation couldn't be reached that allowed for the launching of Commonwealth rockets from the Cape while allowing them to remain under Commonwealth control. There are virtues to having your own launch site on territory you control, however, and given Uncle Sam's occasionally being a...somewhat less than charitable ally at times, especially when it came to space-related things, the extra cost is probably worth it for the insurance it provides.
Going back to that CNES list, Trinidad makes for an interesting option, as it's a Commonwealth member, can take advantage of the Atlantic Range's tracking infrastructure, and provides a nice inclination at 10.5-degrees. It's also only really usable for equatorial launches, which makes it non-threatening to the Australians, if we assume that fighting to keep an Australian launch site is going to be a hill Canberra dies on. There's also a thematic elegance to a Commonwealth space program that launches from the Caribbean and Australia, as the Sun never sets on the British (Star) Empire. You can also use it for allohistorical silliness, like a West Indies Federation that manages to stick but is economically the service industry equivalent of a petro-state between tourism and launch site revenue.
I concur that something like what de Havilland was daydreaming about and scribbling in the margins of reports -- 14'- or 16'-diameter with 4x RZ.2s with a hydrolox upper-stage -- is where things ideally end up. But I think that's incredibly overambitious to think it'd be available and man-rated by 1969, at least with a Blue Streak program we recognize as Blue Streak. Because Large Diameter Blue Streak, for lack of a better term, is an entirely new rocket. That tended to get downplayed by de Havilland, who'd talk about making the core bigger as if it were a simple thing. Which, in engineering terms, is not that hard. The problem is that it's going to need all new production tooling, which is going to be expensive, and expense of any sort was always Blue Streak's enemy. No small part of why Blue Streak was 10' in diameter was as a cost-saving measure, as Convair's balloon tank manufacturing techniques were licensed. Such a shortcut -- and dozens of others -- that were available for Blue Streak wouldn't be available for LDC Blue Streak, meaning it'll be both expensive and take a while, even before Treasury stinginess gets involved. I'd think you'd be looking at the actual will for something like LDC Blue Streak finalizing in the late-Sixties and then it actually making it to the launchpad 8-9 years later. So call it 1968 for formal project initiation and completion in the 1976-77 range.
In the interim, Blue Streak-Centaur is more than sufficient for anything which a Commonwealth space program might require. Including launching a Gemini-sized manned payload. From Woomera. If thrust augmentation is applied, it's not hard to get a throw weight large enough to at consider something like McDonnell-Douglas's modular Gemini space station concepts. But that assumes there's money available for any kind of manned spaceflight at all, which is by means guaranteed. Or, even if there is, that the effort doesn't end up like every ESA attempt at a manned vehicle so far. I think we tend to give a pass to the plausibility of building a Commonwealth manned vehicle due to the implicit assumption Jim Chamberlin will be prominently involved. For the same reason I, at least, gravitate toward the "just license Gemini" solution: It's practically got dual-citizenship as it is. (And there're so, so many sketchy Gemini concepts you can use that are just pitch-perfect for the fiscally strapped mess that would be a Commonwealth space program in a timeline we recognize.)
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IIRC someone here....or possibly the Secret Projects Board.....suggested that this could come out of ways of getting the B.12/36 and P.13/36 aircraft off the ground.
It's interesting. It would be nice if the UK did not sink its work on solid fuel engines. Let's assume that Blue Streak Centaur appears in the mid-1960s. The first manned flight is maybe 1972-1973.Woomera is oriented for launching NW, but that is not an immutable quality of the site. If you'll pardon the jape, there's nothing but empty space filled with indigenous (and invasive!) fauna that want to kill to you for hundreds of kilometers north and east of the site for spent stages to fall on. So you can easily overfly the vastness of the Australian interior north and east of the site. A graphic from Kistler showing their intended launch inclinations for their K-1 illustrates this point:
Is there a joke to be made about people being an invasive species and potentially dropping spent stages on Cairns? Probably. But in all seriousness, given all of the physical space to work with, it's not a big deal to ensure there's no actual overflight of it. Woomera's not ideal for exactly the reason you said -- that the heartland of Australia's population tends to be due east of Woomera and thus equatorial launches can't be made -- but it can work well enough as it allows for sun-synchronous orbits, polar orbits, and orbits with inclinations greater than 45-degrees. Which are the really important orbits, as 50- or 55-degrees was the historical benchmark reference by NASA for an American space station while OTL's International Space Station is inclined at 51.6-degrees.
So yes, Guyana is certainly a better choice. (On paper: I don't think there's ever been a serious attempt to identify a launch site in British Guiana. Our minds just kind of go there reflexively because Kourou exists.) But Woomera's good enough for the early stages of a space program and, even then, perfectly adequate for a fair number of mission profiles. Which leads to narratively interesting questions about its fate once a launch site capable of equatorial operations becomes a necessity.
Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it runs into the common problem all Different WW2 TLs do, at least when it comes to TLs focused on space programs. Especially the Really Different WW2s, of which Kaiserreich is one of them. And that problem is that space programs are very limited aspects of settings. It's very, very hard to strike a good balance between providing enough detail on the changes in the setting which are the foundation of your radically different space program so that the reader can suspend his disbelief, without those details crowding out everything else. If you don't know anything about Kaiserreich, your description of things makes no sense, and even then -- knowing what I do of the setting -- Canada retaining any part of the United States after the 2ACW is very, how shall we say...optimistic. Unless it's Kaiserredux.
Honestly, forget Kaiserreich. I want Kaiserredux space programs. Bring on Czar Alexander I Kartvelli, His Imperial Georgian Majesty and Most Supreme Aero-Autocrat.
Darwin's problems, as far as ELDO was concerned, were a lack of infrastructure to support a space program -- the lack of a deep water harbor and the size of the airport were both concerns -- and, as you mentioned, the frequent cyclones. Darwin's just really remote, in the grand scheme of things. Woomera and Kourou are remote, too, but not so much in the grand scheme of things: The former is relatively close to Australia's economic and industrial heart, at least, while the latter can draw on the whole of the North American economic zone just on the other side of the Caribbean for whatever cannot be brought in from Europe. Darwin scores better than some other places CNES looked at -- Atomic Rockets has a brief discussion of all 15 -- but I don't think it was second on their list. Maybe when ELDO was dealing with the British and Australians, but by the time they were gone, there was no need to pay any heed to Anglophonic sympathies.
The elephant in the room, of course, being just paying for space at the Cape and using the Atlantic Range. Given the nature of Anglo-American civil and military cooperation, had a Commonwealth space program wanted to do that for equatorial launches, it seems unlikely that an accommodation couldn't be reached that allowed for the launching of Commonwealth rockets from the Cape while allowing them to remain under Commonwealth control. There are virtues to having your own launch site on territory you control, however, and given Uncle Sam's occasionally being a...somewhat less than charitable ally at times, especially when it came to space-related things, the extra cost is probably worth it for the insurance it provides.
Going back to that CNES list, Trinidad makes for an interesting option, as it's a Commonwealth member, can take advantage of the Atlantic Range's tracking infrastructure, and provides a nice inclination at 10.5-degrees. It's also only really usable for equatorial launches, which makes it non-threatening to the Australians, if we assume that fighting to keep an Australian launch site is going to be a hill Canberra dies on. There's also a thematic elegance to a Commonwealth space program that launches from the Caribbean and Australia, as the Sun never sets on the British (Star) Empire. You can also use it for allohistorical silliness, like a West Indies Federation that manages to stick but is economically the service industry equivalent of a petro-state between tourism and launch site revenue.
I concur that something like what de Havilland was daydreaming about and scribbling in the margins of reports -- 14'- or 16'-diameter with 4x RZ.2s with a hydrolox upper-stage -- is where things ideally end up. But I think that's incredibly overambitious to think it'd be available and man-rated by 1969, at least with a Blue Streak program we recognize as Blue Streak. Because Large Diameter Blue Streak, for lack of a better term, is an entirely new rocket. That tended to get downplayed by de Havilland, who'd talk about making the core bigger as if it were a simple thing. Which, in engineering terms, is not that hard. The problem is that it's going to need all new production tooling, which is going to be expensive, and expense of any sort was always Blue Streak's enemy. No small part of why Blue Streak was 10' in diameter was as a cost-saving measure, as Convair's balloon tank manufacturing techniques were licensed. Such a shortcut -- and dozens of others -- that were available for Blue Streak wouldn't be available for LDC Blue Streak, meaning it'll be both expensive and take a while, even before Treasury stinginess gets involved. I'd think you'd be looking at the actual will for something like LDC Blue Streak finalizing in the late-Sixties and then it actually making it to the launchpad 8-9 years later. So call it 1968 for formal project initiation and completion in the 1976-77 range.
In the interim, Blue Streak-Centaur is more than sufficient for anything which a Commonwealth space program might require. Including launching a Gemini-sized manned payload. From Woomera. If thrust augmentation is applied, it's not hard to get a throw weight large enough to at consider something like McDonnell-Douglas's modular Gemini space station concepts. But that assumes there's money available for any kind of manned spaceflight at all, which is by means guaranteed. Or, even if there is, that the effort doesn't end up like every ESA attempt at a manned vehicle so far. I think we tend to give a pass to the plausibility of building a Commonwealth manned vehicle due to the implicit assumption Jim Chamberlin will be prominently involved. For the same reason I, at least, gravitate toward the "just license Gemini" solution: It's practically got dual-citizenship as it is. (And there're so, so many sketchy Gemini concepts you can use that are just pitch-perfect for the fiscally strapped mess that would be a Commonwealth space program in a timeline we recognize.)
France and Germany are constantly developing Arianne, which will have a schedule similar to OTL. Meanwhile, the UK, together with Canada and with McDonnel's silent support, is building an equivalent of the Big G to LDCBS (my proposed name is Blue Storm).
When ESA resources are consolidated, you will be able to see interesting butterflies for the 1980s.
I want to say it was this thread, in which @Shevek23 does the yeoman's work of RPA'ing HTP engines and musing about staged combustion peroxide engines in the Fifties that anyone that wants a higher-delta TL would be encouraged to read.
That timeline still strikes me as optimistic, but that's me nitpicking based only upon my sensibilities. Though it's probably going to take at least 3 years to go from the decision to license Centaur to get it onto the launchpad. Is Centaur a sure-fire enough bet in 1963 to make licensing it the logical choice, against developing a new Commonwealth stage using Rolls-Royce's RZ.20 engines? That seems...unlikely, as by the end of 1963, it's had all of two flights and one of them was its rather infamous maiden outing. And the pressure to build something new will be strong, at least from Britain. As where else are those new RZ.20s going to be built? We like Blue Streak-Centaur because it's clean and logical, but getting there is not going to be a straight line and even then "just license-build Centaur" needs Centaur to have established it is, well, Centaur.
At the risk of invoking butterflies, if you've got a Commonwealth space program, you won't have a Gemini we recognize and, by extension, even less of a Big G we'd recognized. As the odds of Jim Chamberlin remaining in NASA's service -- if he ever enters it at all -- are very low if he can put his talents to work back in the Great White North. And without Chamberlin, you don't get Gemini. You do probably get a Super Mercury from McDonnell, that will resemble Gemini in a lot of ways, but it won't be Gemini without Chamberlin. Which is why Super Mercury is killed for an accelerated proto-Apollo and the Commonwealth proceeds with the half-developed Super Mercury on an economy manned program, with Avro and Chamberlin building it. (Because "Jim Chamberlin builds Gemini" is a hobby-horse of mine that I try to figure out how to do in every Commonwealth space program idea I have.)
I thought that manned flights would come much later. It would not be a pre-planned element, but rather a form of pressure from the scientific community to respond to American and Soviet successes. Which pushes the possible date of manned flight to the 1970s. Jim could return to the service of the crown after the closure of MOL.
And of course since it's still in the "color" era it's name will be "Red Rover" no doubt
Randy
Big G would need to have an abort tower, Studies post Gemini found the Ejection seats would burn the astronauts to death due to the 100% oxygen
IIRC Churchill told warplanners to use proper names for D-Day beaches, as he didn't want to have to report casualties on "Rabbit" beachAnd of course since it's still in the "color" era it's name will be "Red Rover" no doubt
Randy
Avro-Canada making a manned capsule would be very unlikely, same with Arrow being replaced with a rocket upper stage, Avro basically melded with the Arrow development (putting everything into it), canceling it would still lead to a loss in talent and workers as Avro would need to recoop sunken costs.
Not to mention Diefenbaker was all about cutting costs, replacing an expensive plane program with a startup space program would have its own issues and costs
Also too Apollo would be butterflied as well to an extent, A LOT of Canadians were involved in Apollo, 32 Engineers were lead to the Space Task Group, which planned Mercury to Apollo
Notable members
Jim Chamberlin, Gemini head designer
John Hodge, Flight Director
Owen Maynard, Chief of the Lunar Module development team, A MAJOR contribution and is credited as being most responsible for its design (Grumman did the details)
He also set up the Apollo flight development system, which outlined goals for missions (he did A to G missions, G being the first landing)
Tecwyn Roberts, helped develop the worldwide communication network for Gemini and Apollo
With these guys staying in Canada the entire Mercury to lunar landing details would be different (Mercury to a lesser extent)
Maybe Lunar Orbit Rendevous doesn't happen
Is it improbable that there is a Commonwealth manned space program? Yes. In that context, is it improbable that Avro would build the manned vehicle itself? I find that rather more open to debate. As Canada's got a large and mature enough aerospace industry that it's going to require some work-share and that work-share is going to need to be both substantive and important. And within Canada's aerospace industry, Avro (if they're still a going concern) is the one with the most expertise dealing with cutting-edge aircraft, which is why it's only logical they'd end up with some hand in whatever that work-share is. Especially in an early Commonwealth space program scenario -- like the Victim Of Circumstance sketch I offered, where the initial participants are just Britain, Canada, and Australia -- do the odds up appreciably of Canada getting a big chunk of the work and that, in turn, feeding it back to Avro.
Yes, it is improbable, but any Commonwealth space program is going to have a certain level of improbability and contrivance to it, at least if we're not rewriting considerable portions of the Interwar Period and WW2. OTL was also highly contingent and, frankly, improbable as hell. As Britain developed an indigenous IRBM, scrapped it and got it turned into a launcher with ELDO, pulled out of ELDO due to failures with Europa that had nothing to do with the British portion of it, and then developed a second, entirely new launcher, which it used just long enough to put a satellite into orbit and then say it'd had its fill of orbital vehicles. If someone actually wrote a TL where that happened, it'd get derived for being implausible and ridiculous, and for good reason! But that doesn't change the fact it's what OTL gave us.
Alternative history, by its nature, requires a certain willingness to suspend one's disbelief. Authors, of course, need to do their part to make sure that whatever they are proposing is plausible and makes some sense in context, but part of the fun of the exercise is the reader's meeting the author halfway to imagine what might have been. Especially space-related allohistory, given the miniscule number of countries and firms involved in doing space things, so being a fan of the genre usually means being even more willing to suspend one's disbelief.
A Commonwealth space program cannot save Avro from massive dislocation as a result of the Arrow's cancellation. It might, if narratively pursued, provide enough work to keep the company afloat and allow it to retain its core engineering and manufacturing talent. The practical difference between having to lay-off three-quarters of your workforce and all of it is that you can at least try to retain enough to rebuild with in the future. And, while Avro doesn't know it yet, there's a massive geyser of money south of the border about to turn a fiscal fire hose on anyone in the free world with any idea about how to beat the dastardly Russians to the Moon. At least if you're keeping things mostly OTL with Apollo.
Now, the role of a Commonwealth space program within Apollo-as-we-know-it is a butterfly-laden question. As "Apollo-as-we-know-it" is going to have fairly significant butterflies due to the Avro Group never going south to begin with. But it's fair to say that the Commonwealth space program will probably want to be involved with Apollo, that NASA always welcomed international partners, and there's enough work going around that some of it will invariably trickle back to Avro -- even if it's just subcontracting -- because the whole of the North American aerospace-industrial complex was involved in Apollo one way or other while it was occurring. And that's without getting to the possibilities of actual, formal cooperation between the American and Commonwealth space programs in trying to win the race to the Moon. You're not going to get a manned Commonwealth lunar mission any time soon -- if ever -- but there's enough secondary stuff, like lunar probes and mapping, where an independent Commonwealth space program could meaningfully contribute and be included programmatically into Apollo's planning. If there's enough governmental will to pay for it: Ability and willingness to pay were generally what sidelined international involvement IOTL in Apollo. But by the same token, nobody else IOTL in the West had their own orbital launcher at the time, either, and the diplomatic and PR benefits from an international dimension to Apollo might provide a basis for a very different approach to how NASA approached the subject. (As IOTL, NASA was more than willing to take on anyone who wanted to participate in Apollo, but you had to pay your own way and move at NASA's speed. Which precisely no one else could do because of the sheer amount of money being thrown around during Peak Apollo.)
You could even shoehorn in a manned component, if you really put your thinking cap on. Fly TTL's equivalent of the Gemini 6A/Gemini 7 rendezvous, but outright give your Gemini 7 analogue to the Commonwealth and launch it from your choice of launch site. (Which, in 1965, is still probably going to be Woomera.) All you need are Commonwealth astronauts, and given the usual cooperation between the English-speaking nations, there've probably been a few in training with an eye exactly to this sort of stunt. Not only do you get the propaganda victory of the first spacecraft rendezvous, but also the first rendezvous between the spacecraft of different nations as well. It also conveniently sets precedents for the Commonwealth acquiring a spacecraft without the full expense of developing an indigenous one and provides a narrative basis for why an attachment might be formed to an outmoded American piece of hardware that is steadily anglicized as time goes on through licensed production. If you're into that sort of thing, at any rate.
Diefenbaker was specifically about cutting costs in the context of the Canadian defense budget. As his government's decision to pursue BOMARC and SAGE were just devouring defense dollars: Something like a quarter of all Canadian defense spending was anticipated to be needed by them. Canada could afford BOMARC/SAGE or it could afford the Arrow. The consensus was that it could not afford both. And thus the Arrow was tossed overboard. That doesn't mean, however, Diefenbaker was inherently opposed to spending money on aerospace projects the way that some politicians -- usually British -- were. And Diefenbaker was very clearly of the same mind as men like Sandys Duncan, in that the age of the interceptor was over and that of the missile had begun. Which means that working on space rockets won't get a knock, conceptually, from him and his government.
Just how much is the upper-stage of the Black Prince, as posited in Victim Of Circumstance, going to cost? That's a great question. And the answer is: I have no earthly idea. But I can make some inferences. Black Knight, the vehicle it's based off of, was cheap enough that even the Treasury could find the pennies to fire it off two dozen times. An OTL comparable is also the second-stage of Black Arrow, which went to orbit and was also developed on a notoriously shoestring budget. And there should be no real development work which needs doing, either, beyond slapping vacuum nozzles onto your Gamma engine. For Victim Of Circumstance, I'd assumed C$6MM -- which in comparison to Alouette's C$3MM effectively tripled the price of it -- for the upper stage, which provides ample room for mental mathing. Though there are some interesting things you might do if you wanted a more adventurous launch vehicle. (An ARF-1-fueled XLR40 with a vacuum nozzle would do interesting things to its performance and better optimize it as a second stage, for example.) The point being that that is pennies compared to the quarter-billion dollar commitment that was being cut loose with the cancellation of the Arrow.
Is the Canadian contribution to the Commonwealth space program sustainable? That too is a great question, which really depends upon narrative sensibilities. As in Victim Of Circumstance, it is purposefully engineered to be fairly cheap and easy to get started with the Commonwealth space program. The cost graph goes vertical if they actually start playing around with a licensed Centaur, where just a pair of RL10s are going to cost something in the neighborhood of a third of the entire development cost of Maple Knight (as I've taken to calling that particular upper stage; just calling it [Color] Arrow also has its charms, allohistorical rhyming-wise and in-context).
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A manned Commonwealth Program would likely happen in the 70's, Britain is still struggling in the 60s
Even for a Canadian who describes himself as a "Canadian Patriot with Social Conservative leanings (not a nutjob)"
A manned Program is a step too far
Avro Canada WILL have huge sunken costs with the loss of the Arrow Program, there is a reason why the Company folded shortly after
Though I do like the idea of the Commonwealth Capsule being Canadian-made
Europa didn't perform well, which was why it was canceled and Black Arrow didn't use Blue Streak
A rocket derived from Blue Streak would eventually need to be replaced or uprated for a manned capsule, it would kinda look like Ariane with strap-on boosters and stretched tanks
Avro would likely still lose some of the manufacturing talent, American Aerospace companies had representatives hiring while Arrow's were literally being scrapped. The big thing would be keeping Chamberlin and Maynard along with some others
Having people in space in the 60s would be pushing it, likely a manned capsule in the 70s would be likely as it would require a modified Blue Streak design with all the changes for manned missions
BOMARC and SAGE came around because the rules of the Cold War changed overnight, Arrow was designed when the main threat was Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole, After Spudnik (launched same day as Arrows rollout) the threat was Missiles coming over the North Pole
I am more concerned with Avro becoming the modern-day Bombardier, a shell of a company with little business kept alive for political reasons
Given that OTL Avro was losing business before the Arrow was canceled it is likely that this "Black Prince" would be one of the few things that sell, especially with the inevitable downsizing of Avro's business.
Sustainability really depends on how Avro does, does it regain its former business (military planes) or does it remain a shell of its former Company.
I could see Avro ending up developing its own rocket for launch from Canada (not shipping across the planet)
Also too, this rocket program would require investment per year by the Canadian taxpayer, depending on how bad a liberal governments spending is the next conservative government could cut it
Eh, BOMARC and SAGE were still all about countering Soviet over-the-pole bombers and not missiles.
Randy