Evan wrote:
I can’t recall the name but there was a thread that pointed out that as far back as the late 1890s there were people who were seriously ‘considering’ forms and functions of space travel and not in a Jules Verne sense either. (IIRC the W/I was if a certain South American scientist had done more practical and less theoretical work)
M79 wrote:
Evan wrote:
Ah and there’s the rub actually. Unlike the pre-Columbian visits to North America for fishing “Space” is hard to get to and arguably offers nothing significant as a ‘return’ on investment. That first step, (Earth’s surface-to-orbit) is a doozy in terms of energy and effort and it’s just not really ‘worth’ if past a very small initial scale until the late 40s. And arguably still a questionable 'value' beyond certain Earth oriented niches even then.
Falk wrote:
Oh I love me some Orion, yes I do
But…
Keep in mind Orion has never had any “technical” reason it couldn’t fly, only political ones. And not the ones most people think of either. You could get around the “Partial Test Ban Treaty” if you wanted to as the “pulse-units” are not “weapons” by design and their use falls under the “non-weapons experimentation” exception should the US, (and at the time USSR) agree. But while they were not ‘weapons’ there was no getting around the fact that their construction and design WERE based on weapons research and the ‘difference’ wasn’t all that clear in some cases. Specifically “Casba-Howitzer” was a highly modified “pulse-unit” that could generate a Directed-Energy-Weapon (DEW) event out to several million miles.
“Worse” in any case was in order to power the Orion you had to have a nuclear weapons industry that could produce THOUSANDS of ‘pulse-units’ per year! That the same capacity could not be turned at a moment’s notice to producing similar amounts of nuclear weapons was lost on no one at the time. Again you’d need a VERY good reason to throw away any future control or limitations ability on nuclear weapons, (a pulse unit is a very bad weapon but it IS a nuclear bomb none the less) and proliferation will be unstoppable due to the width and depth of the ‘industry’ involved.
Orion is quite possibly the ‘best’ drive out there if we ever need a way to save our bacon from an extra-Terrestrial “Extinction Level” event but it’s very much a Djinn with all the original tale implies.
Anaxagoras wrote:
GeographyDude wrote:
Legofan4 wrote:
OTL it was a BIT more complex than Legofan4 makes it out to be but in general Anaxagoras is correct and that’s how people thought of it right up until Sputnik went up. Even then had things been ‘closer’ the pace would have been slower if for no other reason than to allow infrastructure and economics to be built into the system whereas they were not OTL. Had the US not been panicked into starting the Moon Race by Soviet space spectacles the first Moon landing might not have been until the late 80s if even now. That the US could go from no manned space experience, (1960) to landing men on the Moon and bringing them back (1969) in less than 10 years showed as long as cost was no limit you could throw money at a problem till it was solved which arguably we knew from the Manhattan Project.
However, unlike the Manhattan Project which created from scratch not only a weapon but the research, design, and industrial support capability to build them on a regular basis the “Space Program” never considered or worked on building a sustainable or long-term system. The ‘goal’ was the one and only focus and anything not directly related to that single goal was shelved or forgotten. And on the other side the entire program was mainly an ‘off-shoot’ sidelight of the main military mission to build more capable ICBM’s. It rapidly became a low priority ‘prestige’ project once it was demonstrated that it had little or no military value.
Dathi THorfinnson wrote:
Oddly enough there were several pieces of fiction which had humans going to the Moon and then “stopping” but yes they mostly included some superior ‘alien’ force issuing a “cease and desist” order backed by world annihilating weapons
But keep in mind the way we DID it was by far considered the most unlikely method and with the least likely reason as well. And pretty much none of our hardware or organization that we used to go to the Moon in under a decade were affordable or sustainable once that single goal was reached. THAT might very well have been considered ASB but you could make an argument that once done then ‘we’ would go back and do it right. Which is what was supposed to happen with the Shuttle et-al.
To review, this is how it was SUPPOSED to happen:
First there would be primitive satellites launched into space/orbit. You need to have some sort of electronics for most satellite utility but frankly optical tracking of an object in orbit gives you a lot of science even with no on-board instruments. It doesn’t take much to realize that once you have an object in orbit with a known schedule of fly-overs that under the right conditions and with a powerful enough transmitter you can reflect radio waves, (and technically with a mirror you could reflect light signals too) over the horizon which has commercial and military uses. So arguably you could put up a ‘useful’ satellite in the 1920s if you’ve got the rockets. As electronics develop you can outfit the satellites with more sophisticated instruments and capability but getting it back down is going to remain a large challenge because your basic knowledge of the atmosphere, high speed aerodynamics and reentry dynamics is so very primitive.
And your control and guidance systems for the rocket itself are not there till late in the 1940s (WWII) without which you can’t guide your payload into a predictable orbit in the first place. Quite obviously there’s a known ‘computer/autopilot’ system available though: Humans!
But the capacity to launch a human vastly increases the size of the rocket needed and it wasn’t known until we did it how a human would react to and in space. Still you’d want to have figured out how to get a small satellite back intact before you throw a human into space. And initially you’d put a human into space in a very limited manner relying more on physics than human control because as noted you don’t know how he will react. (Essential Vostok and Mercury were this step OTL, with limited or no human control over the flight) Once you do know you can start designing a more capable spacecraft but this is going to require a more capable and larger launch vehicle and you soon run into cost issues.
So the next step is to reduce the cost of putting men and satellites into space. Ultra-cheap mass launchers, reusable spacecraft, dirt-cheap expendable rockets, the “how” matters less than the end cost per pound on orbit. It is going to be important down the road as future plans depend on what kind of payload it is and how it’s used but first and foremost you need reliable, cost-effective access to orbit above all other considerations. Why? Because no one expected or assumed that some ‘government’ was going to throw piles of money at some short-sighted, near-term “program” with no planned follow on or long-term plan. The “government” was interested in “space” for specific reasons most of which initially had little applicability outside those government interests. Once commercialization began those parameters expanded somewhat but very quickly it became clear that the ONE aspect that neither possible ‘investor’ needed or planned was manned operations.
People are useful when electronics are primitive or don’t exits but very rapidly they become a cost driver that tends to price themselves out of the market. But still, if you have economic access to orbit and it’s built around or uses a manned system then you are at least halfway to the goal. (Personally I’d give extra points to a system that can either be manned or unmanned if for no other reason than operationally “payload” that would normally go to crew and support systems can then be allocated to extra capacity)
Access would be followed originally by the building of a manned space station in orbit. As initially proposed, back when electronics were rare and/or of low lifetimes, this would be manned so as to support a staff to maintain and operate all the various intended roles the station would fulfill. As time has gone on the majority of these roles currently can be filled by automation vastly cheaper and easier than doing so with people. Still one of the roles the space station can and would still be able to perform is a way-station in orbit from which further distant flights could depart from and return to.
Now as a slight digression I’ll note that while all this is being built up it was not inconceivable or unexpected that man might make some ‘side-trips’ such as around or perhaps a small landing on the Moon with the inherent capability in hand. For rather obvious reasons, (which OTL turned out to be not so obvious of course) these were given a low probability simply because what such expeditions could do when compared to more fully planned and outfitted adventures could do would be minuscule. A half dozen visits to several isolated spots with about as many people, a few pounds of samples, a few experiments left behind, all at great expense wasn’t seen as a viable option. Unless you had no choice
No one imagined a desperate cause given national priority with almost unlimited funding aimed at a single goal with no thought of what came next or the future. It was all about building up capability to go anywhere, at any time so that all roads lay open before mankind.
A moments glory or endless opportunity, choose wisely…
Once you have economic access to orbit and some infrastructure on-orbit to support further operations you can build up spacecraft, satellites and other useful items on-orbit which greatly enhances your capability as you don’t need to use expensive and limited “large” launch vehicles. Putting people on the Moon, Mars, around Venus or into the asteroids becomes cheaper by an order of magnitude, especially if you can find a way to profit from the adventure. The hardest part about reconciling what was ‘supposed’ to happen with what has in fact happened OTL is the simple fact that OTL space operations have been accomplished in a VERY different manner than was planned and at this point ‘habit’ is ingrained enough that stepping “backwards” to find a more sustainable level is almost impossible. Not physically or even operationally but mentally and emotionally.
What we’ve done to date is very often seen as THE way to do things and this tends to lead to the self-supporting or circular logical argument that it is therefore the RIGHT way to do things. Going to the Moon requires a large program with very expensive and multiple levels of involvement and support. Satellites are expensive and can neither be serviced nor upgraded since the cost of doing so is larger than simply sending up another. And so on but in truth the vast amount of options that are opened up with economic access and orbital infrastructure are always going to be the better option. The problem is that building up either takes time and effort which when compared to the more ‘near-term’ realized “quick-and-dirty” methods such as huge launchers and massive payloads are always going to be less appealing. Even more so when you have clear evidence with the latter being a historical example while the former has been ‘disproven’ to be viable with a less than credible example. (Shuttle)
Earth orbit is not just “half way to anywhere” though it is that certainly, it represents overcoming about 90% of the inherent energy burden of getting things off Earth and a place where skills, techniques and operations can be learned and practiced that are applicable anywhere beyond that point. The key to an earlier or even modern version of interplanetary flight is there and always has been but to apply it requires certain technologies and capability. It also takes a certain “vision” and support that was lacking OTL and sadly in many who we consider ‘key’ people in development.
Take Goddard for example. He was offered a large sum of private money to continue and expand his experiments. He refused because it would have opened his work to others, (arguably many of whom could have vastly improved his work and had knowledge and experience themselves that would have been of great value) both for sharing and possibly stealing of his patents. He’d been publicly ridiculed for some of his more outspoken ideas but beyond some general experimentation he felt almost all his work was actually theoretical rather than practical. (He also had an aversion to ‘government’ money due to bad experiences during WWI but did not hesitate when the government called him back in WWII)
THE problem is that the interest in general was NOT there for the obvious reasons that no one saw ‘space’ as the solution to any suspected ‘problem’ which changed after WWII. Keep in mind the “billions” (current money) spent on the V2 and other rocket research in Germany pre-WWII was aimed at finding a way around the Versailles Treaty on artillery and one could argue the majority of the money was in fact wasted with little to show for it. (The majority of actual 'practical' rocket projects with actual military utility were pretty much 'side-bars' to Von Braun's work but which do we remember?)
Randy
With a PoD after 1900, how early could we get large-scale interplanetary spaceflight? Supposing people generally supported it, what sort of scientific discoveries and technological development are necessary for it to be technologically and economically doable? And how can we get that public support?
The idea of rocket-powered spaceflight has been around since at least the mid-1800's, and Goddard did his experiments in the 1920's. With that, it's possible to just design the metals better and stack them taller, as America and Russia both did. If you do enough, that could get us to Mars... but not on an economically sustainable basis, so it'd probably be a prestige project like the OTL moonflights.
With a PoD after 1900, is there some way to break beyond that?
I can’t recall the name but there was a thread that pointed out that as far back as the late 1890s there were people who were seriously ‘considering’ forms and functions of space travel and not in a Jules Verne sense either. (IIRC the W/I was if a certain South American scientist had done more practical and less theoretical work)
M79 wrote:
Please define, 'large-scale interplanetary transport'? Tourists at $1000/lb? Functional if not self-sufficient bases/colonies on another planet with routine service between them...?
Evan wrote:
This, or at least routine expeditions (like the annual fishing trips to Newfoundland even when there wasn't permanent European settlement.)
Ah and there’s the rub actually. Unlike the pre-Columbian visits to North America for fishing “Space” is hard to get to and arguably offers nothing significant as a ‘return’ on investment. That first step, (Earth’s surface-to-orbit) is a doozy in terms of energy and effort and it’s just not really ‘worth’ if past a very small initial scale until the late 40s. And arguably still a questionable 'value' beyond certain Earth oriented niches even then.
Falk wrote:
Go full Orion
Oh I love me some Orion, yes I do
But…
Keep in mind Orion has never had any “technical” reason it couldn’t fly, only political ones. And not the ones most people think of either. You could get around the “Partial Test Ban Treaty” if you wanted to as the “pulse-units” are not “weapons” by design and their use falls under the “non-weapons experimentation” exception should the US, (and at the time USSR) agree. But while they were not ‘weapons’ there was no getting around the fact that their construction and design WERE based on weapons research and the ‘difference’ wasn’t all that clear in some cases. Specifically “Casba-Howitzer” was a highly modified “pulse-unit” that could generate a Directed-Energy-Weapon (DEW) event out to several million miles.
“Worse” in any case was in order to power the Orion you had to have a nuclear weapons industry that could produce THOUSANDS of ‘pulse-units’ per year! That the same capacity could not be turned at a moment’s notice to producing similar amounts of nuclear weapons was lost on no one at the time. Again you’d need a VERY good reason to throw away any future control or limitations ability on nuclear weapons, (a pulse unit is a very bad weapon but it IS a nuclear bomb none the less) and proliferation will be unstoppable due to the width and depth of the ‘industry’ involved.
Orion is quite possibly the ‘best’ drive out there if we ever need a way to save our bacon from an extra-Terrestrial “Extinction Level” event but it’s very much a Djinn with all the original tale implies.
Anaxagoras wrote:
It's frankly almost beyond belief that men landed on the Moon a mere sixty-six years after the first airplane flight.
GeographyDude wrote:
to me that shows power of healthy feedback between theory and practice
Legofan4 wrote:
And being in a giant dick waving contest between the two largest powers on the planet. Which is honestly the only reason we rushed to get to the Moon.
OTL it was a BIT more complex than Legofan4 makes it out to be but in general Anaxagoras is correct and that’s how people thought of it right up until Sputnik went up. Even then had things been ‘closer’ the pace would have been slower if for no other reason than to allow infrastructure and economics to be built into the system whereas they were not OTL. Had the US not been panicked into starting the Moon Race by Soviet space spectacles the first Moon landing might not have been until the late 80s if even now. That the US could go from no manned space experience, (1960) to landing men on the Moon and bringing them back (1969) in less than 10 years showed as long as cost was no limit you could throw money at a problem till it was solved which arguably we knew from the Manhattan Project.
However, unlike the Manhattan Project which created from scratch not only a weapon but the research, design, and industrial support capability to build them on a regular basis the “Space Program” never considered or worked on building a sustainable or long-term system. The ‘goal’ was the one and only focus and anything not directly related to that single goal was shelved or forgotten. And on the other side the entire program was mainly an ‘off-shoot’ sidelight of the main military mission to build more capable ICBM’s. It rapidly became a low priority ‘prestige’ project once it was demonstrated that it had little or no military value.
Dathi THorfinnson wrote:
And then a gap about that long with no one landing on the moon. If someone had written that in the 50s, say, it would have been considered totally ASB!
Oddly enough there were several pieces of fiction which had humans going to the Moon and then “stopping” but yes they mostly included some superior ‘alien’ force issuing a “cease and desist” order backed by world annihilating weapons
But keep in mind the way we DID it was by far considered the most unlikely method and with the least likely reason as well. And pretty much none of our hardware or organization that we used to go to the Moon in under a decade were affordable or sustainable once that single goal was reached. THAT might very well have been considered ASB but you could make an argument that once done then ‘we’ would go back and do it right. Which is what was supposed to happen with the Shuttle et-al.
To review, this is how it was SUPPOSED to happen:
First there would be primitive satellites launched into space/orbit. You need to have some sort of electronics for most satellite utility but frankly optical tracking of an object in orbit gives you a lot of science even with no on-board instruments. It doesn’t take much to realize that once you have an object in orbit with a known schedule of fly-overs that under the right conditions and with a powerful enough transmitter you can reflect radio waves, (and technically with a mirror you could reflect light signals too) over the horizon which has commercial and military uses. So arguably you could put up a ‘useful’ satellite in the 1920s if you’ve got the rockets. As electronics develop you can outfit the satellites with more sophisticated instruments and capability but getting it back down is going to remain a large challenge because your basic knowledge of the atmosphere, high speed aerodynamics and reentry dynamics is so very primitive.
And your control and guidance systems for the rocket itself are not there till late in the 1940s (WWII) without which you can’t guide your payload into a predictable orbit in the first place. Quite obviously there’s a known ‘computer/autopilot’ system available though: Humans!
But the capacity to launch a human vastly increases the size of the rocket needed and it wasn’t known until we did it how a human would react to and in space. Still you’d want to have figured out how to get a small satellite back intact before you throw a human into space. And initially you’d put a human into space in a very limited manner relying more on physics than human control because as noted you don’t know how he will react. (Essential Vostok and Mercury were this step OTL, with limited or no human control over the flight) Once you do know you can start designing a more capable spacecraft but this is going to require a more capable and larger launch vehicle and you soon run into cost issues.
So the next step is to reduce the cost of putting men and satellites into space. Ultra-cheap mass launchers, reusable spacecraft, dirt-cheap expendable rockets, the “how” matters less than the end cost per pound on orbit. It is going to be important down the road as future plans depend on what kind of payload it is and how it’s used but first and foremost you need reliable, cost-effective access to orbit above all other considerations. Why? Because no one expected or assumed that some ‘government’ was going to throw piles of money at some short-sighted, near-term “program” with no planned follow on or long-term plan. The “government” was interested in “space” for specific reasons most of which initially had little applicability outside those government interests. Once commercialization began those parameters expanded somewhat but very quickly it became clear that the ONE aspect that neither possible ‘investor’ needed or planned was manned operations.
People are useful when electronics are primitive or don’t exits but very rapidly they become a cost driver that tends to price themselves out of the market. But still, if you have economic access to orbit and it’s built around or uses a manned system then you are at least halfway to the goal. (Personally I’d give extra points to a system that can either be manned or unmanned if for no other reason than operationally “payload” that would normally go to crew and support systems can then be allocated to extra capacity)
Access would be followed originally by the building of a manned space station in orbit. As initially proposed, back when electronics were rare and/or of low lifetimes, this would be manned so as to support a staff to maintain and operate all the various intended roles the station would fulfill. As time has gone on the majority of these roles currently can be filled by automation vastly cheaper and easier than doing so with people. Still one of the roles the space station can and would still be able to perform is a way-station in orbit from which further distant flights could depart from and return to.
Now as a slight digression I’ll note that while all this is being built up it was not inconceivable or unexpected that man might make some ‘side-trips’ such as around or perhaps a small landing on the Moon with the inherent capability in hand. For rather obvious reasons, (which OTL turned out to be not so obvious of course) these were given a low probability simply because what such expeditions could do when compared to more fully planned and outfitted adventures could do would be minuscule. A half dozen visits to several isolated spots with about as many people, a few pounds of samples, a few experiments left behind, all at great expense wasn’t seen as a viable option. Unless you had no choice
A moments glory or endless opportunity, choose wisely…
Once you have economic access to orbit and some infrastructure on-orbit to support further operations you can build up spacecraft, satellites and other useful items on-orbit which greatly enhances your capability as you don’t need to use expensive and limited “large” launch vehicles. Putting people on the Moon, Mars, around Venus or into the asteroids becomes cheaper by an order of magnitude, especially if you can find a way to profit from the adventure. The hardest part about reconciling what was ‘supposed’ to happen with what has in fact happened OTL is the simple fact that OTL space operations have been accomplished in a VERY different manner than was planned and at this point ‘habit’ is ingrained enough that stepping “backwards” to find a more sustainable level is almost impossible. Not physically or even operationally but mentally and emotionally.
What we’ve done to date is very often seen as THE way to do things and this tends to lead to the self-supporting or circular logical argument that it is therefore the RIGHT way to do things. Going to the Moon requires a large program with very expensive and multiple levels of involvement and support. Satellites are expensive and can neither be serviced nor upgraded since the cost of doing so is larger than simply sending up another. And so on but in truth the vast amount of options that are opened up with economic access and orbital infrastructure are always going to be the better option. The problem is that building up either takes time and effort which when compared to the more ‘near-term’ realized “quick-and-dirty” methods such as huge launchers and massive payloads are always going to be less appealing. Even more so when you have clear evidence with the latter being a historical example while the former has been ‘disproven’ to be viable with a less than credible example. (Shuttle)
Earth orbit is not just “half way to anywhere” though it is that certainly, it represents overcoming about 90% of the inherent energy burden of getting things off Earth and a place where skills, techniques and operations can be learned and practiced that are applicable anywhere beyond that point. The key to an earlier or even modern version of interplanetary flight is there and always has been but to apply it requires certain technologies and capability. It also takes a certain “vision” and support that was lacking OTL and sadly in many who we consider ‘key’ people in development.
Take Goddard for example. He was offered a large sum of private money to continue and expand his experiments. He refused because it would have opened his work to others, (arguably many of whom could have vastly improved his work and had knowledge and experience themselves that would have been of great value) both for sharing and possibly stealing of his patents. He’d been publicly ridiculed for some of his more outspoken ideas but beyond some general experimentation he felt almost all his work was actually theoretical rather than practical. (He also had an aversion to ‘government’ money due to bad experiences during WWI but did not hesitate when the government called him back in WWII)
THE problem is that the interest in general was NOT there for the obvious reasons that no one saw ‘space’ as the solution to any suspected ‘problem’ which changed after WWII. Keep in mind the “billions” (current money) spent on the V2 and other rocket research in Germany pre-WWII was aimed at finding a way around the Versailles Treaty on artillery and one could argue the majority of the money was in fact wasted with little to show for it. (The majority of actual 'practical' rocket projects with actual military utility were pretty much 'side-bars' to Von Braun's work but which do we remember?)
Randy