It's a Small World From Above


Sirius: 20 Years of Spaceflight
Penguin, New York, 1976


The first flight of HD-2 Sirius was on April 8, 1957, with a dummy upper stage
and payload. This was followed in May by the launch of a full three-stage
rocket with a reentry test vehicle for the Skylark spacecraft. The test vehicle
successfully made it to orbit, and reentered over the Pacific to land in the
water off the California coast. This nearly resulted in legal action from the
FAA, but the case was quietly dropped under circumstances still not clear
today. Since 1960, the Skylark TV-1, the first spacecraft ever recovered, can
be seen hanging from the ceiling of the Science Museum in London.

Two more test vehicles were flow that year, of increasing complexity, though
both splashed down near Kiritimati. The Mickey-1 and Mickey-2 geostationary
television satellites were also launched, marking the real start of the
now-ubiquitous DSN. Finally, on September 2, the first full-up vehicle,
Skylark-0, was launched. After three orbits, the vehicle's inertial guidance
brought it close enough to Kiritimati that radio control took over and remotely
piloted the vehicle to a landing on the fresh tarmac of the island's airstrip.
The Skylark-0 was remarkably good shape, and could have be reflown with a fresh
aeroshell. It was, instead, quickly disassembled and every last component
checked for problems that could imped the first manned flight.


MEN IN SPACE!
LA Times, November 14, 1957


Kiritimati, Pacific Ter., Canada - The Hugues-Disney Spaceflight Company (HDSC)
and the Anglo-Canadian Spaceplanes Ltd. announced today that they have launched
a "Skylark" space vehicle carrying three "astronauts" into orbit around the
Earth. The pilot was RCAF Cap. John Kinsey, a Canadian; the co-pilot was
American Howard Hugues, co-owner of HDSC; and the flight engineer was RAF Cap.
Ian DeLaney of the United Kingdom. After three circumnavigations of the globe,
the tri-national crew guided their craft to land here at Kiritimati, just 300
feet from the launch pad where they departed. An official from the FAI was on
hand to certify the Skylark-1 as the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever.
 
I'm hoping you have a sketch of Skylark:).

I'd have thought Disney would have wanted more Americans to go up; oh well, the one who did was Hughes!

I have to say, for the first manned orbit ever to carry three men, and for the Skylark to be capable of a controlled horizontal landing (I presume that's what that was--a ballistic capsule would be very hard to pilot to a precision landing at a designated point, and to land on land means some kind of rocket or even more ambitious jet-engine or helicopter type landing system) is a pretty big first step.

What is Skylark's "aeroshell" system--a hot nickel-alloy shingle type thing, or an ablative shell, or what? If the latter, how do they guarantee the craft is aerodynamically maneuverable once it's come through the hypersonic part of reentry? Does it have a supplementary jet (or conceivably, propeller) engine for final positioning and thrust margin for landing, or did they glide it in with that kind of precision?

What was the all-up mass of the thing upon landing? The mass of the whole HD-2 launch system upon launch?

Anyway good on you to have the first orbit be international (if corporate and Anglo-sphere!)
 
Anglo-US relations?

Are Anglo-US relations any less strained in this TL? I can't really imagine the Suez crisis being butterflied away. Or possibly (as in the Tail-Gunner in the Pilot Seat TL) does the US support UK & France?
 
Are Anglo-US relations any less strained in this TL? I can't really imagine the Suez crisis being butterflied away. Or possibly (as in the Tail-Gunner in the Pilot Seat TL) does the US support UK & France?

As exasperating as Eisenhower's resolution of Suez was to Britain and France, it hardly threatened the basic NATO alliance. I suppose the rankling insult those powers felt might have had something to do with DeGaulle's (much later!) decision to expel American forces from France and the general popularity of that move there, but even so France did remain in NATO and Britain of course never asked us to leave.

Meanwhile HD was a private civilian multinational venture. I rather think Eisenhower would be very grateful that even while clashing with the respective European governments, this project went forward.

I've already wondered at how willing Disney would be to distance his venture from the USA; I didn't remark on Hughes's attitude because I have the impression that ITTL he has become a bit exasperated with the US military-industrial complex and is quite pleased to do it on his own.

However, another reason Ike might have been grateful to Disney and Hughes aside from helping patch up Anglo-American relations, is that he also wanted to establish the precedent of orbital space as legally international territory that could be navigated without any nation being able to veto it. OTL this was why he was so keen on the Vanguard project and put von Braun's efforts at Redstone on ice. What he really wanted was to be able to launch spy satellites over the Soviet Union and the secret CIA Corona program was in hand for that--but had those questionable-purposed surveillance missions been the first, the Russians might well have thrown themselves behind a stringent theory of airspace extending into orbit, or so he feared anyway. OTL Sputnik brought with it the silver lining of closing that door and opening up space for his plans; ITTL HD accomplishes a similar purpose, and pre-empts any Soviet firsts and does it at no cost to the taxpayer too. I imagine Eisenhower is ready to give these guys medals.

And maybe a secret government contract to launch Corona too--presumably not from Kiritimati, I guess the deal would be for HD to manufacture the launcher and deliver it to some US government branch (NASA not yet existing, the CIA wanting to hide its involvement, I guess either to the Air Force or some other military branch, or some dummy agency the CIA cooks up) and the government launches it from somewhere, maybe in the Nevada desert.

Even if Hughes is miffed, I don't suppose he'd say no to a quiet government contract to provide an off-the-shelf launcher system, no questions asked, for a decent amount of cash. I doubt Disney would object either, nor would his international partners.
 
Overtly, the US government hasn't contributed one thin dime to Skylark-Sirius. No Sputnik yet (the Russian don't rush R-7, and aren't going to announce it until it's ready), and so no big government push to create NASA in response. IOTL, Ike really wanted a civilian satellite first, to established overflight rights for reconnaissance purposes. HD-1/Pioneer 1 established that, and a certain three-letter-agency has been quietly working on the TTL versions of Thor-Agena and Atlas-Agena ever since. More in the next update.

The Canadian Government contribution is basically the tax haven they created for HDSC, and the UK government has a similar deal for Spaceplanes. They also contributed to the training program(me) and provided test pilots for the first few flights. Really, though, this is a commercial space program. Sirius was designed to make money by usurping network television with the Disney Satellite Network, as well as telephony communications satellites.

Skylark is, basically, a slightly-larger, UK-designed version of DynaSoar. The outer skin is an ablative heat shield that is not reused, while the inner structure and pressure vessel is reused (Apollo and Gemini could have gone this, and they actually did it with the Gemini used on the MOL test launch). The shear size of Sirius means they could get away with a pretty large Skylark, so why not but three aboard? And the landing isn't that complicated; after reentry, the pilot just locks on the VOR beacon and glides down to landing. No more complicated than Shuttle, and much more room for error due to the much lower inclinations.

At the moment, noone in the West besides von Braun is really pushing for the Moon, and he's far to busy to campaign for it.
 
One thing I think will be interesting is the effects of a much earlier Disney Channel, with nationwide reach. Will it be much less a kids's channel, as it is today, and evolve into something more akin to ABC/NBC/CBS? A far earlier haven for quality long-form TV like we have now?

EDIT: I wonder, Hughes did own RKO at this point, and was looking to offload it...
 
I've been looking back at the earlier posts--so the Mickey satellite could mass as much as 7.5 tons in geosynch orbit?

That's huge by the standards of OTL early comsats; Telstar massed just 77 kg, or about 1/100 of Mickey!

And Telstar was not launched into geosynch, but a 2-hour orbit.

Even decades later, when direct broadcast satellites were launched to reach satellite dishes from geosynch, these still massed well under 8 tonnes, closer to two.

Mind, if Disney is going to reach TVs with ordinary antennae from 40000 km it had better be powerful!

Solar panels were in a pretty poorly developed state back then (and what improvements they enjoyed through the '60s were due to government-subsidized research for NASA and other space agencies (that is, the military). What's Mickey's power source? A mirror powered solar steam engine?

I'm guessing pretty soon, someone is going all the way up there, with a toolkit or fuel or fresh batteries or something.

Or the next Mickey to be launched can nudge this one out of its current position and pick up where it left off.
 
Well, it's 7.5 tonnes to GTO, which means ~5 tonnes once it captures to GEO. Still, it's a large vehicle, able the handle the heavy electronics of the time, with plenty of redundancy to last it a while.

And yes, solar thermal makes the most sense for power. It does require full three-axis stabilization (rather than the spin-stabilized design used by most early comm sats). But again, there should be mass margin for it.

The content of DSN is initially five channels of various content; remember that OTL Disney owns ABC and ESPN. That's four more than any other network, and worth it to lease the DSN receiver...
 
So, the business plan is that customers lease the special receivers.

I was wondering if 1950s electronics is up to encrypting the signal and having receivers in every home without the risk of someone pirating the key. But if very special hardware is needed just to pick it up, I guess that might be as good as encryption.

I guess that means there is no need for advertisements?

Then again, Americans are used to the ads and it's another revenue stream. Maybe some channels have them and others don't?
 
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