Wish I could find that excellent debunking article on the X-20. If I ever do I'll post it. Anyway, I'm certainly of the opinion that Dynasoar was (and will be ITTL) a colossal waste. It suffered massive delays not so much because it was low priority, but simply because the tech wasn't there; it takes Apollo-era tech to get a spacecraft that's little more capable than Mercury. Even so, there remained questions about whether the thermal shielding really would be good enough.
OK, OK! I already said if they want (American) Man In Space Sooner than I was born (1965) they're going to have to go over to a capsule, and since MISS is even more desultory than OTL, it's going to be later even than OTL--later than the Russians, even though
they're running a year or two behind.
(I never appreciated just how indispensable Sergei Korolev might actually have been.
)
There are those arguing that slower would have been better regarding human space travel. Maybe we'll see how right they are.
I'm enjoying nixonhead's narrative enough to take whatever ride he's offering.
As to advantages--skip reentries for plane changes don't end up working out, really; you lose as much orbital velocity as you save by not performing an orbital plane change, IIRC.
That depends on just what sort of lift to drag ratio you get--on a spaceplane that not only has to try for a fairly high one but also keep a human being or three alive and not roasted to death, or simply vaporized.
What I figure is--if at some point we experimented around with some actual spaceplanes, we'd know more about how to make the next one better. If we keep it on paper forever we'll never know. The '60s might be the best time to screw it up the first time around so the second try is OK.
Or anyway kill the spaceplane dream dead once and for all and get on with the cool capsules.
Anyway the higher the L/D the less costly the loss with each skip; if that is low enough then the sort of rocket with the sort of propellant supply one could have on board might make the loss up. The Sanger concept is that you do just the one boost and then skip on sheer momentum, each one less energetic than the last, but I've always been dubious about that. And more dubious about the point of the whole thing; you'd need speeds tantamount to orbital to get far with skipping so why not just boost all the way to orbit?
A spaceplane, in my view, is not for skipping like a rock across the atmosphere; it is for a more controlled reentry that can take the craft to a wide range of possible landing sites, including the desired one, and then land at it like an airplane, rather than needing a fleet of boats to fish it out of the water somewhere or leave some cosmonauts stranded in a freezing lake or surrounded by Siberian wolves for a couple nights while the Red Army is out looking for them.
Bahamut upthread mentioned cross-range in the same phrase with its costs as though it is itself a bad thing--it isn't, it's a good thing, the question is how much of a price do you have to pay for it and can you afford it? Related is the matter of a gentler, lower-G reentry profile--again a very good thing if you can afford it. Not a good thing if you trade crushing your astronauts for roasting them. We can do OK with capsules; that's clear. What isn't clear is how high a price must be paid to do better; we'd know that better if someone experimented.
If the only excuse for such a thing is the foolhardy excuses of military missions I've heard of, well then it's dumb. I just think knowing more about what can be done might be worth something, though not for purposes of bombing runs or stealing other people's satellites in acts of piracy. If the superpowers want to blow each other to hell they don't need manned skip-bombers to do it.
Let's hope they avoid doing that at least as long as OTL.
About the best that can be said for it is "it'd hopefully prevent STS," and while that's a very useful thing, there are much better ways to go about preventing STS than designing and flying a *different* bad system.
So that pretty much just leaves "it has wings!11one" as an advantage, which is more or less that to which I was flippantly referring, i.e. USAF gonna USAF.
I've tried to say better for it--an earlier "bad" system might be more forgivable, and lead to one that doesn't suck so much. Shouldn't that Air Force enthusiasm be useful for something?
But it's going to get preempted by something like Vostok. Hopefully a little better than Vostok. That's my guess.
As for launching...adding LRBs to Titan II would actually *increase* the cost vice Titan IIIC; the point of SRBs is they're cheaper (albeit lower performance) than LRBs. What you might do is try launching IIIC with a dummy guidance-only upper stage; that'll save the cost of the LR-91 at least. But really, what this is telling you is that Dynasoar is heavy, heavier than Gemini, which is saying something when you recall it's more like winged Mercury than winged Gemini.
Yeah, if the people who designed Titan III woke up with some strange compulsion to ditch the solids for liquid boosters, they'd probably just make them hypergolic boosters anyway.
My little hydrogen peroxide bee in my bonnet I've been living with this past half year or so has flown on past this timeline too, unless someone thinks of Thrust Augmented Nozzles a bit earlier than they did OTL. The time for high-test peroxide to get its foot in the door of the booster biz was the earlier 1950s, it has passed already.
Anyway I still like the notion of making the Titan III more flexible by attaching any of a range of solids to it, up to the maximum of the OTL design. I suppose if we can just monkey with the second stage instead, that's essentially what I said--just load in variable amounts of propellant to the second stage and perhaps make different sizes of it where that's cost-effective. Down to zero.
But that's just to enable the dubious dream of suborbital skip-gliding Dyna-Soars; I want the fully orbital version myself.
I thought I recalled Chrysler sending a submission for Project 7969 (turned into MISS), but that seems not to be the case. However, it appears that in 1950 a Chrsyler man was appointed by Truman to be Missile Czar to get US missile projects off the ground; turns out they were in the missile game even earlier than I thought!
(source: p26
here).
nixonshead: I know you said ITTL there is no Saturn program proper, but did the ABMA team already start (notional) work on Saturn? OTL they started in 1956/early 1957, based on a DoD space launch requirement circulated in late 56 for a HLLV. They justified it since it wasn't a missile, it was a pure LV, and therefore was not prohibited as an over-1500km-range weapon.
I downloaded that book and started skimming the opening: it deserves a close read. However I wonder if the PDF is formatted the same as the version you read because I don't see anything about a missile czar from Chrysler on p. 26, or anywhere within 5 pages of it either way. But I believe you.
The fun question is, was there more before? Why did Truman pick a Chrysler man, and was it perhaps because despite being mainly in the motor vehicle business, there were people at Chrysler, in high management or on the board, who had an interest in rocketry or space from way back?
That would be nice to know about.
What I assumed this morning driving to work was that the main line here is probably that Chrysler was after all a contractor the
Army was accustomed to dealing with, and the Navy and Air Force had already jumped on the aeronautical big shots. Convair, Boeing, Grumman, North American--these are names one is accustomed to seeing hanging out making drawings on napkins of things that fly, especially with guns and bomb bays on them. How, I had to wonder, did a car company get into their crowd? (And why didn't other aeronautical hotshots like say Lockheed succeed in getting contracts for actual rockets where Chrysler could?
)
So I figured--for one thing, von Braun was on the Army's ride, and had to choose from Army contractors. Actually until I got home and finally got a chance to look at some Chrysler background on the Internet I had naively assumed that until the Saturn I anyway, von Braun's group at Huntsville pretty much designed and constructed the rockets with people, workmen and mechanics, directly on the Army's civil payroll, a direct Redstone Arsenal production, money going straight from the taxpayer to hardware with no private contractors involved.
Well, wrong. Apparently Chrysler's contractor business at Redstone went back to the early 50s and they were involved in the Redstone rocket and Jupiter both.
Other than an Army project to develop a
flying Jeep in the late 50s, the car company never did attempt to make anything that flies--except in partnership with von Braun in Huntsville, where they had established an entire division of the company to solidify von Braun's visions in metal. I believe it was the case that he and his Army-paid team did indeed do all the design work and made the prototypes themselves by hand, just as I had assumed, but then when it was time to productionize the things he handed them over to Chrysler--their job was to find ways to replicate his work in an economical yet reliable fashion, and they were happy to do it. And von Braun, I imagine, was happier to be the brains for a company that had no aeronautical team of its own than he would be with his prima donnaishness clashing with the likes of Kelly Johnson or the other teams the big aero firms had built up on their own. But I also imagine that over a better part of a decade Chrysler nevertheless attracted and hired people who more or less shared both the Germans' vision and competence.
So now the OTL handing off the Saturn 1 first stage construction to Chrysler makes a lot more sense; these same people had built the operational Redstone and Jupiter stages that the Saturn I design ganged together for that stage and were the natural candidates to build the cluster as well.
That's OTL. Here, the same relationship between the Redstone Arsenal team and the company has presumably been built up--only to be smashed like a child stomping on an anthill when Huntsville is decidedly passed over for further development despite their accomplishments, and the Army is rudely dismissed from the space business, not even as per OTL being robbed of Redstone wholesale--it's just effectively discarded as redundant.
So if von Braun moves over to Chrysler, it looks much less random than poor information would suggest--these people were the closest thing he had left to a place, whereas now if Chrysler management does not want to give up completely on the space biz like a normal car company, they pretty much have to hire a whole new aerospace team to direct their already established (and otherwise redundant) rocket mechanics. Who better than von Braun?
The trouble here is that now, both the company and the Chief Designer are complete outsiders to the space business as the government currently sees it; the Air Force has its favored contractors, the Navy its, and Chrysler, whether the Army remains a good customer for trucks and tanks and so forth or not (also radar antennae
) has no leverage in space policy circles.
It's enough to make me wonder just what angle von Braun sells the company management on taking.
Like say, going back to Walt Disney for instance for some much-needed publicity and advocacy? I had a whole thing going here, but I just leave it to everyone's imagination for now.
----
Meanwhile, what can the powers that be in the USA turn to while waiting for Titan III to be developed? Can they speed it up? Will von Braun pull the rabbit out of the hat they need and will TTLs Space Age be deeply branded with Chrysler's five-sided logo and perhaps Mickey Mouse ears as well?
Or I was wondering, can Atlas be upgraded?
Unfortunately I watched many hours of old TV shows in lieu of trying to fish up info on the 1960 state of the art American ker-lox engines and trying to shrewdly tease out just how much structural strength Convair's Atlas (presumably pretty much identical with OTL's) has, and how much it owes this to the pressure of its balloon tankage and how much to the solid if thin steel walls of that tank, stabilized by that pressure. What is clear is that the Atlas of OTL, though too small for Dyna-Soar and barely capable of orbiting Mercury, was an extreme and a triumph of minimizing rocket structural mass, so much so that the single stage (well, "stage and a half," with the early-dropped booster rocket(s) (depending on how one counts, one or two of them) providing more than 80 percent of launch thrust) could launch
itself (and a modest payload not much more than a single ton) into orbit.
That almost unique balloon structure, replicated only in the same designer and company's Centaur upper stage of half a decade later, is as I've said not amenable to upgrading via the route of strapping on solid boosters. But what about simply making it bigger, and using more powerful rocket engines? A cluster of five identical engines, with the outer 4 in a cross being dropped about halfway or a third through the boost and the central one going on two or three times longer as a sustainer, would match Atlas's burn profile pretty closely. We might have as many as six in the outer circle with a seventh in the center, and not get too far astray. The tankage ought to scale up pretty well, in most respects. Where we tend to lose is that the strength of the tankage, as a beam in compression lofting the upper stages if any and payload, will not scale up linearly with stage mass--it would be more like to the power of 2/3 the volume since at a given pressure, the part of the strength coming from the pressure would scale as the square of the diameter, as would that of the outer skin considered as a pipe with a very narrow wall, but the mass would go as the cube of linear dimensions. Otherwise we are in good shape--at a constant pressure for instance aerodynamic bending moments scale up with the volume but so do the moments of structural resistance to them.
But the crushing force this tank can take going down the axis only goes as the square, so if we could say have an Atlas-derived stage twice as long and twice as wide as OTL (about 60 by 6 meters that would be) it could contain 8 times the fuel--but only bear 4 times the maximum upper stack mass. To bring that up closer to 8, we'd need to nearly double the pressure and then double the wall thickness (beyond scaling up in proportion to linear dimensions)--so the overall stage would be 16 times the dry mass, but only contain 8 times the fuel.
However, if we can come up with engines that deliver twice the thrust of the boosters' total on an Atlas (or 8 times the sustainer engine) I'd think the design would scale up well enough, and while the single stage probably could not launch an 11 ton payload into orbit, it could probably manage something between Gemini or Soyuz in mass boosted most of the way there by the giant main stage and then stabilized in final orbit by a small second stage. We might manage something Gemini sized with a considerably smaller increment of linear dimensions and engine thrust.
So I submit that as a third possibility--that someone will ask Convair to scale up Atlas and arrive at some suitable interim "Heavy" lifter within a few years of placing the order. Meanwhile there is little reason to doubt that Centaur will get the go-ahead, and while there is some doubt it can survive the worst setbacks it endured OTL, there is a good chance it will eventually be recognized as a triumph.