A major reason the idea of horizontal assembly appeals to me is that I'm haunted by visions of the liabilities involved in NASA's 1960s Apollo vertical assembly procedures. Very specifically, the process of moving the assembled stack from the Assembly Building to the distant pad (necessarily so, given rockets sometimes blow up).
Weather is the problem. It takes a long time to move the vertical stack because you have to go slowly since it's an easily destabilized load. In that long interim, the weather forecast that said winds were going to be in acceptable ranges might turn out to be wrong. If the winds get too bad, the stack is going to topple over.
Obviously that never actually happened with the OTL Saturn range. Of course weather forecasting is getting better (thanks in big part to satellites, and of course massive improvements in computation power and endless refinement of weather modeling). But weather is the classic example of a chaotic system; forecasts are very good for half a day out, but for half a week out it isn't just the imperfect state of the art of our forecasting methods; we just can't know what's going to happen beyond a certain rather short timeframe. We can map probabilities but every transfer is a roll of the dice, and if you keep rolling you have to come up snake eyes eventually.
If it's moving horizontally, it's first of all capable of tolerating far worse wind conditions, being already toppled as it were!
And more to the point, it can move faster, so you are looking at a much shorter forecasting timeframe, the one in fact that rules on whether the launch is go or no go anyway. It stays safe in the assembly area, ready to be mothballed on long-term hold if the launch date itself goes sour, and you don't move it until you are much surer than you could possibly be with the slower transfer process that it will very likely be all right. And if this is the day snake-eyes come up, and you get an unexpected gale, worst case is the rocket itself is ruined, but the pieces aren't falling over, unless the storm rips the thing apart and scatters the pieces like so many mobile homes! More likely it can take a really nasty blow without damage (you'd probably still scrub the mission because you now have to check it out all over again) and can be brought back to the Assembly building much more quickly.
It would be nice to know that there's more behind NASA never having to scrub a launch mid-transport due to unexpected bad weather than just being lucky on a limited number of chances for things to go wrong. I am obviously under the impression that there was no way to design the stack and its support tower to safely withstand the worst winds the Florida coast has to offer (which of course go right up to worst known hurricanes ever, plus of course the possibility of tornadoes generally known as "waterspouts" when they form over the sea, which I know from personal experience are a thing to watch out for in Florida!) and I believe it is inherent in the chaotic nature of weather that there's no way to absolutely guarantee no chance of winds exceeding the best possible wind-reinforcement design. So every movement of a stack to a pad is a gamble.
Is this wrong? And is it only technically correct, with the realistic odds of an inevitable failure condition emerging from what appeared to be an acceptable forecast being so low we could have 1000 launches before one is likely to be ruined in this way? Or is it more like 100? Or 50? Or a million?
Against all this--well, vertical assembly and moving is the legacy, the hardware has been built, they've done it many times. Clearly the odds can't be as bad as one chance in 10, or we'd have had a storm-related disaster by now.
Challenger of course was weather-related, but it was also a case of violating clearly laid down guidelines, and the specific advice of a representative of the solid rocket vendor (not unfortunately the top level of the company speaking unambiguously, just some poor schmuck on the ground caught in the middle--but he's the guy who knew what he was talking about.) Not to mention ignoring evidence from the majority of earlier launches that the SRBs weren't meeting spec in practice in terms of integrity. I'm worrying about wind here, not cold, though insofar as the cold made the Challenger launch that much worse than prior shuttle launches, it too was a case of forecasts not matching reality. The insulation coming off the tank in the second disaster, ruining the reentry tiles, had I trust nothing to do with cumulative wind stress on the tank weakening it?
So OK, we haven't had a rocket toppled or even damaged by unexpected winds yet as far as I know. The actual launch schedule of manned Apollo missions in your timeline is I guess not more launches than we've managed with the Shuttle, so I suppose I'm probably worried over nothing?
I take it that even if it's easier to put it all together lying on its side (a point also denied, at least now that we've got the VAB and its gear), it's then a nightmare to shift it up 90 degrees. The stresses all rotate through intermediate angles and I guess it's impossible to just brace it good and tight against a cradle, you still have to check it out again once its brought up, leaving it standing in the breeze while you do that.
I admit to another motive--if switching over to horizontal could work well enough, it would be considerably easier to develop additional Saturn Multibody launch sites besides the one at Canaveral. The legacy VAB is being used to good effect there, recouping more of the considerable investment in the thing. But to enable Multibody at other sites--DoD for instance, presumably at Vandenburg and who knows where else (very possibly nowhere else, considering the non-negotiable infrastructure cost) or European or a separate commercial site--in this model there has to be another VAB at each one. Maybe not quite as fancy as the Canaveral one built for the Saturn V, but still that's a good reason to doubt any other site would in fact be designated ever. Even doing it at Vandenburg seems dubious unless already existing facilities for big Titan launches are adequate at least for an unmanned payload, which I suppose is all the Air Force is authorized to do anyway. OTL I believe the DoD sprung for a Shuttle-capable VAB at Vandenburg that in the end was never used for an STS, though I trust it was eventually used for something. So maybe one more site.
No Kourou, no site X--and I guess that's probably OK, if every notion I have the cost is ever coming down significantly (I don't mean the way you've patronized me, I do mean maybe 25 percent, maybe a third) is fatuous, then there really won't be all that many Multibody launches. Not unless Reagan and Teller propose to prepare for World War III for real with a factor of ten increase in launch expenditures for SDI, or the Footfall aliens show up and we decide to assemble Orion Ship Michael in orbit to greet them, or something like that.
So that's my wicked, fanboish hidden agenda--I'd like to see the rate of launches ramp up gradually. Not overnight, not to the point a trip to orbit costs like a plane ticket from New York to Sydney. I suppose even eight launches a year adds up to a lot of missions over a decade. Not that we're there yet. But it doesn't exactly eclipse the successes of the STS either.
Economies--yes, of course I expect they have to come from using people more efficiently. Incremental knowledge, incremental improvements.
Taking the Saturn launches of the 1960s as a guideline, though, it seems only reasonable to hope, that if not by 1983 than by 1993 there should be an accumulation of incremental streamlines that add up to a very significant cut in cost. Apollo was a national crash program--one that killed three astronauts in an actual Apollo craft (and others died flying airplanes in preparation, but it isn't clear we can count them) and darn near claimed three more with Apollo XIII. Cost was--not quite no object, but doing things rather expensively to be safe and quick was quite justified; it shouldn't be surprising there was some overkill and rather sobering even so it didn't always work out so well.
But now, NASA has launched all the Saturn IBs of OTL and if I haven't lost track another one. Now they've launched quite a number of 1Cs including Aardvark launches. The Multibody is a straightforward increment of the 1C--well actually the most untested characteristic of it is the question of just how well those side strips that are going to be used for anchoring SRBs or parallel core stages are going to work. Presumably in our earlier gung-ho weight-cutting of the Multibody's speculative masses we should have borne in mind, those things are integral to all Multibody first stages, whether launched with parallel stages or not--and I have been rather counting on those reinforcements in my various proposals--to air freight them on a flatbed airplane for instance, figuring you can tie them down good and proper with brackets that link in to two of the staging reinforcement structures running down the sides. Or my being sanguine about horizontal movement of the stack has something to do with again believing those strips are dandy for securing the lower stages to the truck. So I count on them being solid and straightforward design, and presume they are straight off lots of experience with parallel stages with Titan III and the like. But that's the really new thing.
Anyway aside from that a Multibody M02 is a moderate increment of a 1C which is a moderate increment of a 1B. But the latter's standard assembly and launch procedures were thrown together in a rush where on the whole safety wasn't compromised too much, nor too much time taken--implies it was done rather expensively.
After all these years, and in future years with Multibody launches coming up, yes I certainly think that opportunities for both speeding up the processes, from assembly of the stages to their transport to their assembly and moving them to the pad to the final launch preparations there, and cutting down on the number of people needed to manage these processes, will crop up. They'd take one time or cost saving step one year, another the next, and I'm trusting these will accumulate since the baseline cost we are backing down from was probably pretty high. Not too high for what was accomplished in the timeframe it was accomplished, but too high to simply baptize as the minimum reasonable cost of doing this sort of thing routinely.
So fine, never go over to horizontal and make it clear if someone wants to avoid a towering VAB they need to take their chances with a clean sheet and may well come up with something dangerously less reliable. I trust we can trust the safety of the vertical movement process since it seems acceptable to you, and we aren't rolling dice recklessly against the Florida winds the way I fear we might be. If it's safe enough I guess slow but steady can keep on winning the race.
I just wish if every opportunity I've been excited by for making this space program an order of magnitude more accomplished than the OTL Shuttle experience is going to be slapped down as irresponsible lunacy, y'all wouldn't spend so much time sneering at the STS. Right now, given all this discouragement of any significant improvements on any front, it looks like a wash to me.
It's a very enjoyable timeline; I have said and will say the numbers look solid, the hardware looks sexy enough, it seems square and above-board and it's exciting to see things going down another path like this. But it's not striking me as a radically better path, just an alternate one.
I hope that seems fair.
And I still dare hope, though I know you've got your fire hose of cold water waiting, that some kind of fundamental improvement over OTL emerges.
Just hoping the rabbit you do pull out of your hat isn't simply Reagan and Teller stampeding the country into weaponizing space; we could just as well (or ill!) have done that with OTL stuff and I'm sure if that kind of money had been spent on a Shuttle-based increment of our abilities we'd be plenty wowed by that too.
Or you know, mostly all dead and glowing.
Well, to be fair, a lot of people here wouldn't even have been born in the first place.
----
Brainbin, I'd certainly be excited to see Spain enter the field in a moving and visible way, so thanks for that suggestion.
Weather is the problem. It takes a long time to move the vertical stack because you have to go slowly since it's an easily destabilized load. In that long interim, the weather forecast that said winds were going to be in acceptable ranges might turn out to be wrong. If the winds get too bad, the stack is going to topple over.
Obviously that never actually happened with the OTL Saturn range. Of course weather forecasting is getting better (thanks in big part to satellites, and of course massive improvements in computation power and endless refinement of weather modeling). But weather is the classic example of a chaotic system; forecasts are very good for half a day out, but for half a week out it isn't just the imperfect state of the art of our forecasting methods; we just can't know what's going to happen beyond a certain rather short timeframe. We can map probabilities but every transfer is a roll of the dice, and if you keep rolling you have to come up snake eyes eventually.
If it's moving horizontally, it's first of all capable of tolerating far worse wind conditions, being already toppled as it were!
And more to the point, it can move faster, so you are looking at a much shorter forecasting timeframe, the one in fact that rules on whether the launch is go or no go anyway. It stays safe in the assembly area, ready to be mothballed on long-term hold if the launch date itself goes sour, and you don't move it until you are much surer than you could possibly be with the slower transfer process that it will very likely be all right. And if this is the day snake-eyes come up, and you get an unexpected gale, worst case is the rocket itself is ruined, but the pieces aren't falling over, unless the storm rips the thing apart and scatters the pieces like so many mobile homes! More likely it can take a really nasty blow without damage (you'd probably still scrub the mission because you now have to check it out all over again) and can be brought back to the Assembly building much more quickly.It would be nice to know that there's more behind NASA never having to scrub a launch mid-transport due to unexpected bad weather than just being lucky on a limited number of chances for things to go wrong. I am obviously under the impression that there was no way to design the stack and its support tower to safely withstand the worst winds the Florida coast has to offer (which of course go right up to worst known hurricanes ever, plus of course the possibility of tornadoes generally known as "waterspouts" when they form over the sea, which I know from personal experience are a thing to watch out for in Florida!) and I believe it is inherent in the chaotic nature of weather that there's no way to absolutely guarantee no chance of winds exceeding the best possible wind-reinforcement design. So every movement of a stack to a pad is a gamble.
Is this wrong? And is it only technically correct, with the realistic odds of an inevitable failure condition emerging from what appeared to be an acceptable forecast being so low we could have 1000 launches before one is likely to be ruined in this way? Or is it more like 100? Or 50? Or a million?
Against all this--well, vertical assembly and moving is the legacy, the hardware has been built, they've done it many times. Clearly the odds can't be as bad as one chance in 10, or we'd have had a storm-related disaster by now.
Challenger of course was weather-related, but it was also a case of violating clearly laid down guidelines, and the specific advice of a representative of the solid rocket vendor (not unfortunately the top level of the company speaking unambiguously, just some poor schmuck on the ground caught in the middle--but he's the guy who knew what he was talking about.) Not to mention ignoring evidence from the majority of earlier launches that the SRBs weren't meeting spec in practice in terms of integrity. I'm worrying about wind here, not cold, though insofar as the cold made the Challenger launch that much worse than prior shuttle launches, it too was a case of forecasts not matching reality. The insulation coming off the tank in the second disaster, ruining the reentry tiles, had I trust nothing to do with cumulative wind stress on the tank weakening it?
So OK, we haven't had a rocket toppled or even damaged by unexpected winds yet as far as I know. The actual launch schedule of manned Apollo missions in your timeline is I guess not more launches than we've managed with the Shuttle, so I suppose I'm probably worried over nothing?
I take it that even if it's easier to put it all together lying on its side (a point also denied, at least now that we've got the VAB and its gear), it's then a nightmare to shift it up 90 degrees. The stresses all rotate through intermediate angles and I guess it's impossible to just brace it good and tight against a cradle, you still have to check it out again once its brought up, leaving it standing in the breeze while you do that.
I admit to another motive--if switching over to horizontal could work well enough, it would be considerably easier to develop additional Saturn Multibody launch sites besides the one at Canaveral. The legacy VAB is being used to good effect there, recouping more of the considerable investment in the thing. But to enable Multibody at other sites--DoD for instance, presumably at Vandenburg and who knows where else (very possibly nowhere else, considering the non-negotiable infrastructure cost) or European or a separate commercial site--in this model there has to be another VAB at each one. Maybe not quite as fancy as the Canaveral one built for the Saturn V, but still that's a good reason to doubt any other site would in fact be designated ever. Even doing it at Vandenburg seems dubious unless already existing facilities for big Titan launches are adequate at least for an unmanned payload, which I suppose is all the Air Force is authorized to do anyway. OTL I believe the DoD sprung for a Shuttle-capable VAB at Vandenburg that in the end was never used for an STS, though I trust it was eventually used for something. So maybe one more site.
No Kourou, no site X--and I guess that's probably OK, if every notion I have the cost is ever coming down significantly (I don't mean the way you've patronized me, I do mean maybe 25 percent, maybe a third) is fatuous, then there really won't be all that many Multibody launches. Not unless Reagan and Teller propose to prepare for World War III for real with a factor of ten increase in launch expenditures for SDI, or the Footfall aliens show up and we decide to assemble Orion Ship Michael in orbit to greet them, or something like that.
So that's my wicked, fanboish hidden agenda--I'd like to see the rate of launches ramp up gradually. Not overnight, not to the point a trip to orbit costs like a plane ticket from New York to Sydney. I suppose even eight launches a year adds up to a lot of missions over a decade. Not that we're there yet. But it doesn't exactly eclipse the successes of the STS either.
Economies--yes, of course I expect they have to come from using people more efficiently. Incremental knowledge, incremental improvements.
Taking the Saturn launches of the 1960s as a guideline, though, it seems only reasonable to hope, that if not by 1983 than by 1993 there should be an accumulation of incremental streamlines that add up to a very significant cut in cost. Apollo was a national crash program--one that killed three astronauts in an actual Apollo craft (and others died flying airplanes in preparation, but it isn't clear we can count them) and darn near claimed three more with Apollo XIII. Cost was--not quite no object, but doing things rather expensively to be safe and quick was quite justified; it shouldn't be surprising there was some overkill and rather sobering even so it didn't always work out so well.
But now, NASA has launched all the Saturn IBs of OTL and if I haven't lost track another one. Now they've launched quite a number of 1Cs including Aardvark launches. The Multibody is a straightforward increment of the 1C--well actually the most untested characteristic of it is the question of just how well those side strips that are going to be used for anchoring SRBs or parallel core stages are going to work. Presumably in our earlier gung-ho weight-cutting of the Multibody's speculative masses we should have borne in mind, those things are integral to all Multibody first stages, whether launched with parallel stages or not--and I have been rather counting on those reinforcements in my various proposals--to air freight them on a flatbed airplane for instance, figuring you can tie them down good and proper with brackets that link in to two of the staging reinforcement structures running down the sides. Or my being sanguine about horizontal movement of the stack has something to do with again believing those strips are dandy for securing the lower stages to the truck. So I count on them being solid and straightforward design, and presume they are straight off lots of experience with parallel stages with Titan III and the like. But that's the really new thing.
Anyway aside from that a Multibody M02 is a moderate increment of a 1C which is a moderate increment of a 1B. But the latter's standard assembly and launch procedures were thrown together in a rush where on the whole safety wasn't compromised too much, nor too much time taken--implies it was done rather expensively.
After all these years, and in future years with Multibody launches coming up, yes I certainly think that opportunities for both speeding up the processes, from assembly of the stages to their transport to their assembly and moving them to the pad to the final launch preparations there, and cutting down on the number of people needed to manage these processes, will crop up. They'd take one time or cost saving step one year, another the next, and I'm trusting these will accumulate since the baseline cost we are backing down from was probably pretty high. Not too high for what was accomplished in the timeframe it was accomplished, but too high to simply baptize as the minimum reasonable cost of doing this sort of thing routinely.
So fine, never go over to horizontal and make it clear if someone wants to avoid a towering VAB they need to take their chances with a clean sheet and may well come up with something dangerously less reliable. I trust we can trust the safety of the vertical movement process since it seems acceptable to you, and we aren't rolling dice recklessly against the Florida winds the way I fear we might be. If it's safe enough I guess slow but steady can keep on winning the race.
I just wish if every opportunity I've been excited by for making this space program an order of magnitude more accomplished than the OTL Shuttle experience is going to be slapped down as irresponsible lunacy, y'all wouldn't spend so much time sneering at the STS. Right now, given all this discouragement of any significant improvements on any front, it looks like a wash to me.
It's a very enjoyable timeline; I have said and will say the numbers look solid, the hardware looks sexy enough, it seems square and above-board and it's exciting to see things going down another path like this. But it's not striking me as a radically better path, just an alternate one.
I hope that seems fair.
And I still dare hope, though I know you've got your fire hose of cold water waiting, that some kind of fundamental improvement over OTL emerges.
Just hoping the rabbit you do pull out of your hat isn't simply Reagan and Teller stampeding the country into weaponizing space; we could just as well (or ill!) have done that with OTL stuff and I'm sure if that kind of money had been spent on a Shuttle-based increment of our abilities we'd be plenty wowed by that too.
Or you know, mostly all dead and glowing.
Well, to be fair, a lot of people here wouldn't even have been born in the first place.
----
Brainbin, I'd certainly be excited to see Spain enter the field in a moving and visible way, so thanks for that suggestion.
