Nope. Totally wrong.
I'm thinking of the British Interplanetary Society moon rockets. (Hmmm... I distinctly remember 2 studies, but https://www.bis-space.com/the-bis-lunar-spaceship/ only mentions 1).
LEVIATHAN Rising: An Alternative Space Age
- Thread starter Juumanistra
- Start date
I'm thinking of the British Interplanetary Society moon rockets. (Hmmm... I distinctly remember 2 studies, but https://www.bis-space.com/the-bis-lunar-spaceship/ only mentions 1).
Keep in mind that butterflies not withstanding, there is a bit of a disconnect between what the Space Cadets thing will happen, what the public expects to happen and what the government as a whole is willing to entertain
The Air Force, Army and now Navy advocates were getting annoyingly 'strident' in their advocacy towards space projects and how they related to the 'survival' of the United States. To the point the DoD put out a memo forbidding senior, (and by extension anyone BELOW that level) officers from discussing space or space planning in public forums or settings. With some stiff penalties attached for disregarding the order.Probably would have had a much more far reaching effect if it had not come out on October 3rd, 1957
Colliers and Disney brought the general public in the US (and elsewhere actually) around to the point where space travel was no longer "just" science fiction but neither actually increased the general support (or funding) for the effort either. One of the things Von Braun warned everyone about during and as Apollo wound down was that Apollo had been an aberration and that both public and political support for space flight was at a vastly lower level than had been around during Apollo. And he was very right.
And as Workable Goblin points out:
And at the time he was considered WILDELY optimistic by most "Space Cadets" let alone the general public and media!
No Dathi is right the general consensus was that space flight wasn't as hard or as expensive as it actually was mostly because they simply didn't know any better. They (like many today) were using a very simple 'aeronautical' analog and assuming that while airplanes were getting more expensive and complicated it would be a 'simple' step to go from supersonic to orbit. One need look no further than many of the concepts at the time from Von Braun's Ferry Rockets ('52/54) and Space Station to things like Goodyear's METEOR concept ('54/'60) to see how even the 'professionals' were making some pretty bold assumptions.
However:
The thing was that many were actually THINKING and PLANNING about the issues and challenges even if they were not thinking of the costs or support needed to accomplish the tasks. That they were often wrong or made unsupported assumptions was more to their ignorance than their inability to accurately estimate factors they could have no real basis to have known. It'd in distinct contrast to more modern concepts where the actual knowledge and data is out there are available but is generally ignored in favor of cool power points and sound bytes.
Randy
Somewhat but more to the point if the military went into space it would have to be ALL the military (as part of that 'bickering' was each branch thought it had the best case for "space" being in their ballpark and not the others which is why the Air Force was literally attacking the Army at this point having 'won' over the Navy in the late 40s) since each actually had their own needs and requirements. And that meant they would all want bigger budgets when he was trying to curtail military spending.
And keep in mind he's fallen into the "strategic bombing with atomic bombs wins all wars" trap which means the Air Force is going to be the 'primary' military arm at any rate. (With the CIA expected to 'handle' anything short of total war...)
Ike hate the idea of the IRBM and only really supported the development of the ICBM. Hence he had not issues cutting the Army out of space flight but Congress made such a fuss (and his hand picked commission on missile development went over it's chairman's head and publicly supported IRBM development) that he had to co-authorize IRBM and ICBM development at the same priority. But IRBM's had already been taken away from the Army and given to the Air Force who were in fact not interested in developing an IRBM but also didn't want to lose the 'mission' so built the Thor even though the Army had (in good faith) offered to build the Jupiter for them. It was a mess.
WVB had already designed the Redstone and Jupiter but when the Army lost the ability to field IRBM's that essentially meant that WVB and his team were superfluous and likely to be disbanded and drift away to industry. The Army tossed work WVB's way in order to hold the team together and one of those tasks as a "super-ICBM" concept that was eventually funded by ARPA, (off and on with lots of Air Force interference) that became Saturn and another was Project Horizon which was IIRC a response to a Navy Lunar proposal and was of course followed up by LUNEX from the Air Force.
The USAF had been the premier service since the end of WWII. Truman in fact had based the entire post-war military on the USAF having strategic bombers and atomic bombs so that no one would dare challenge the US. (He literally paid the military with whatever monies were left over at the end of the budget with the majority going to the USAF and that to Strategic Air Command. Mind you that wasn't even enough to maintain either the bombers or the bases but no one told him that.) As part of this his plan was to dismantle the Navy, assign the Marines to the Army and have all military aviation assigned to the Air Force. (Hence the "Revolt of the Admirals" which the Navy lost both politically and publicly, a version of which would play out during the Eisenhower administration where the the US Army was to be totally cut out of all missile development and use and they fought back) The Air Force was poised and primed to take over ALL US military space efforts, all military missile development and deployment and anything else they could get their hands on.
The problem was the US Air Force was not interested in anything OTHER than ICBM's using their supposed "Spy Satellite" development program as a 'stealth' manned space program but that was about it. Navigation? Who needs it? Communications? Why bother. I could go on but in general they tended to reject any of the other services 'requirements' in favor of either doing nothing or doing 'something' that only fed into their current projects.
And yes, they wanted a "Deep Space Deterrent Force" of Orion Battleships but not to match the Soviets but to match the Navy's Submarine missile force
The problem was that Eisenhower was pretty clear that he wanted a very incapable launch vehicle that had no military application and was not derived from a military missile. Which pretty much meant Viking and Aerobee were about the only choice. But even a slight increase in budget a better testing and more rigorous quality checks would go a long way towards making Vanguard a success.
Project Orbiter was attached to the Army which wasn't going to be given much of a shot because it was attached to that "ex-Nazi bastard" (Ike was unofficially quoted as noting to the selection committee so it was pretty clear which choice HE was not in favor of
) And the other choice was the Air Force Atlas which had not even flown yet in any capacity and again Ike didn't want a military missile as a basis. Much as I'd like to see Jupiter used it's again both an Army (and originally joint Navy) missile project which does not meet Ike's criteria AND WVB is attached to it so definitely two strikes is out here.Maybe Captain Heinlein suggests using a "bumper" Viking to put a radio package at "high altitude" to test the BOWDITCH concept with that being the basis of the NRL orbiter proposal. (Bonus because not they have a leg up on the actual launch vehicle as well
)Of course they still aren't likely to be 'first' for several reasons a major one being political which may not set well with some
Randy
In context this was actually seen as a plausible engineering thing which ranked right up there with "hydrogen" rockets both of which were supposed to be the ultimate rockets which would allow all sorts of fantasy scenarios. Either or both were supposed to allow Single-Stage-To-Anywhere vehicles, cheap as airplanes and twice as easy to build, etc, etc. And a lot of this was coming from literal experts in the fields involved!
1980s were used at a 'far away' date at the time. The 2000's were seen as "next century" or "very far away" dates
Arguably ARPA had a chance to get things organized but it was just as riddled with inter-service rivalry as the rest of the DoD was which limited it's effectiveness. NACA was just as split as everyone else over "space" at the time with a large segment (including most of the senior management) feeling that their remit did not include space but only aeronautics. But there were a lot of on-going work being done since there was an obvious and distinct over-lap as speeds and altitudes got higher. (The whole X-15 story is illustrative of that internal conflict)
Randy
Yes. You'll note that I said it was "funny" and that they would have to "figure it out for themselves" rather than saying anywhere or even implying anywhere that they wouldn't be thinking any of that, and then followed up in my later post by pointing out reasons for them to think nuclear technology would be more important than it actually proved to be. I'm not sure why everyone thinks that they need to point out that nuclear rockets were big at the time--I know that! I was just noting that they were seriously erring in their predictions here, but in a way that made sense at the time.
My only technical criticism--that is, criticism of their proposals as such rather than anything to do with merely the timeframe they were proposing--was that it was implausible for them to propose solar power satellites because of the lack of known methods of effectively generating power from sunlight or transmitting it to the ground in 1952. They would be more likely to propose large mirrors for illuminating areas on the ground as a means of harvesting sunlight from space. But otherwise everything is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a bunch of space nerds led by Robert Heinlein getting together in the early 1950s and coming up with their craziest ideas of what might be possible.
Sorry I didn't mean to imply that but to point out that people who arguably should have known better in fact didn't and often for reasons that are not clear
Randy
Hmmm, a more 'aggressive' Naval space program has some other down-stream effects as well now that I think about it.
It makes it more likely the Douglas D-684 gets the nod as the X-15 TTL (likely without the radioactive fuselage though... bummer ) as NAA TTL feels just as over-loaded as OTL and there's likely to be less incentive to grant the Air Force's suggested 8 month extension to NAA. On the other hand there's still going to likely be engine issues, (surprising how hard information about the Aerojet engine proposal is to come by) and the learning curve for Douglas with Inconel-X is likely to be steep and should they (or the Navy) convince NACA on the HK31 (3% Thorium in the mix makes it slightly radioactive ) skin for a lighter weight, higher performance vehicle.
I can also see Commander Truax pitching to Captain Heinlein the advantages of launching advanced Jupiter based orbital shots from the open sea
(Edit to add)
Oh and let's not forget the NOTSNIK and Caleb air launched satellite concepts/test programs
Randy
It makes it more likely the Douglas D-684 gets the nod as the X-15 TTL (likely without the radioactive fuselage though... bummer
) as NAA TTL feels just as over-loaded as OTL and there's likely to be less incentive to grant the Air Force's suggested 8 month extension to NAA. On the other hand there's still going to likely be engine issues, (surprising how hard information about the Aerojet engine proposal is to come by) and the learning curve for Douglas with Inconel-X is likely to be steep and should they (or the Navy) convince NACA on the HK31 (3% Thorium in the mix makes it slightly radioactive ) skin for a lighter weight, higher performance vehicle.I can also see Commander Truax pitching to Captain Heinlein the advantages of launching advanced Jupiter based orbital shots from the open sea
(Edit to add)
Oh and let's not forget the NOTSNIK and Caleb air launched satellite concepts/test programs
Randy
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You are crazy to think you can draw anything from Robert Truax being a naval officer through 1959 in a timeline that boasts a sea monster in its name and talks about flying NASA's shiniest never-flown toys.I can also see Commander Truax pitching to Captain Heinlein the advantages of launching advanced Jupiter based orbital shots from the open sea
Absolutely crazy.
I mean, whats an aeronautical project without some sick power points to go with it?
Chapter 3: I Vote "Absolutely" and "Utterly", Myself [December 1952]
Chapter 3: I Vote “Absolutely” and “Utterly”, Myself
Preposterous.
That was the term which RADM Calvin Williams Bolster, Chief of Naval Research, wished to use to describe the First Report of the Research Group on Leaving Earth Via a Theoretical Astronautical Navy when it crossed his desk, specifically Pages 122-125 of Volume II, “A Survey of Future Near-Earth Orbital Applications”. Though it needed at least an adverb or two to fully capture the splendor – and splendid ludicrousness – of what he was reading. What had earned his ire was the National Radiative Propulsion Array. Using a titanic collection of concentrating mirrors with a surface-area that the report could not even bring itself to broach, a “solar furnace” would heat a working fluid – supercritical steam – to a thousand degrees and drive a series of gargantuan turbines to create electrical power. That electricity would, in turn, be used to power a massive “ultra-low dispersion” microwave radio transmitter, which would “beam” the power to the fleet of orbital tugs necessary for the maintenance of the vast array of facilities in orbit. The tugs themselves were propelled by “radiothermal” rockets, in which a propellant would be pumped into a combustion chamber which was transparent to the particular frequencies broadcast by the NRPA and be flash-vaporized by the microwave beam. (The proposed propellant was water, due to its ease of storage and use.)
Most annoyingly, however, was that the First Report knew that no small part of what it was detailing was fantastical and ridiculous. In the rather lengthy Preamble written by Captain Heinlein, he forewarned readers that the LEVIATHAN Group had subscribed to “miracle engineering” in constructing a world to illustrate the profound ways the Space Age could change the world. As he analogized, twenty-five years prior to the writing of the report in 1927, were you to present to a bystander something cutting-edge from 1952, such as the atom bomb, jet engine, or television, it would at first blush have seemed a miracle was required to produce it. Notwithstanding such, you could arrive at conceptually workable designs for all three by extrapolating from known scientific facts and making certain assumptions about future engineering accomplishments. With that in mind, the LEVIATHAN Group had made – and perhaps overly indulged in – a number of very generous and ambitious assumptions about what the next twenty-five years would bring.
Miracle engineering was also, the Preamble noted, required by the general lack of structure in the questions asked of the LEVIATHAN Group. Today, there were only three facts that could be definitely be stated with certainty regarding the future of the Space Age: 1) In the near future someone would successfully build an orbital rocket; 2) not long after that, man would go to space, for reasons that were likely both noble and less so; and 3) once it became possible to put a man into orbit, it would also be possible to use a rocket to launch a nuclear weapon at a foe anywhere in the world with neither warning nor ability to intercept it. The future was a malleable thing, however, and government reports “were replete with visions of futures past”. The LEVIATHAN Group was asked what the future might look like; the First Report provided that. Changing that vision – and building the roadmap to get there – would be task of LEVIATHAN’s future work, if allowed to continue.
That the LEVIATHAN Group had produced a report as…unique as the one he had received also did not surprise the Chief of Naval Research. LEVIATHAN had been neither fish-nor-fowl at the Naval Research Laboratory, with the project originating with the Secretary of the Navy personally and the Office of Naval Research being kept very much out of the loop on its creation. Most charitably, the SECNAV had wanted to capitalize upon the sudden popularity of Robert Heinlein following the Collier’s article to advance the service’s interests with the political branches without the filter of a senior leadership which still suffered from the reputation damage of the Revolt of the Admirals. Less charitably – and more likely, at least to the CNR – was that LEVIATHAN was little more than an attempt to line the out-going SECNAV’s pockets, for he was rumored to be destined for the chief executive position at Aerojet upon the inauguration of the new administration. Were it in his power, Rear Admiral Bolster would have simply forwarded the LEVIATHAN report to the new SECNAV and proceeded on with the day’s business.
Unfortunately, he did not have the luxury of simply washing his hands of the whole affair. For, the same day the First Report of the LEVIATHAN Group had been submitted, Captain Heinlein had also submitted A Comprehensive Technical Report on Project BOWDITCH. The Comprehensive Technical Report detailed the work done over the past three years by the Project BOWDITCH team and issued a formal determination that the program had reached sufficient maturity where field demonstration and validation were necessary. The report proposed bifurcating the project’s team going forward between a “payload engineering” group working on acquiring expertise to build a flyable satellite and a “astronautical engineering” group conducting a series of suborbital test flights to verify the operational principles of the BOWDITCH program. The anticipated launch vehicle for such was a new two-stage rocket, consisting of an RTV-N-12 Viking first-stage mated to a second-stage fashioned from an RTV-N-10 Aerobee. Also attached to the Comprehensive Technical Report was an engineering appendix from the Viking team outlining the basics of the “Viking Plus Aerobee (VIPER)” rocket and a memorandum, signed by Milton Rosen, as the head of Viking program, attesting that Captain Heinlein’s proposals were a natural evolution of the Viking program. And, the Comprehensive Technical Report dryly concluded, that should flight demonstration and validation not be approved, it was the opinion of the head of the project that Project BOWDITCH should be terminated, as no further gains could be expected from the lab and drafting table.
The Office of Naval Research would be expected to make a recommendation to the incoming civilian leadership regarding the future of Project BOWDITCH. And because LEVIATHAN had parasitized Project BOWDITCH, the Office would also be expected to have a recommendation on what to do with its “space midshipmen”, as one pejorative had dubbed them. Pushing forward with any kind of flight validation was liable to be a political hand-grenade, as just four years earlier the Pentagon’s newly formed Joint Research and Development Board had recommended satellites be limited to mere studies. Project BOWDITCH had been greenlit, in no small part, to keep the lights on in the hopes the political ground would change by the time it was in need of real-world engineering. And the timing was fortuitous, as the end of the Viking launches was in sight and no other follow-up program had yet been proposed. But keeping Project BOWDITCH almost certainly meant keeping Heinlein, which in turn meant keeping the circus that was developing in his shop.
Maybe, Rear Admiral Bolster mused, it wouldn’t be the worst of fates if Captain Heinlein got exactly what he wanted. Create a new Department of Rocketry within the Naval Research Laboratory, with Heinlein at its head, with formal responsibility for Project BOWDITCH, as well as the remainder of the Viking flights and the development of VIPER, as well as any further duties assigned to LEVIATHAN should the incoming SECNAV choose to keep it. A modest budget, real expectations, and above all significantly more work would keep their flights of fancy in check: There was no questioning the enthusiasm in the Project BOWDITCH shop, and their practical work was fine as well. If civilian leadership went for it, the Naval Research Laboratory stood to gain tremendously, if only from the research avenues opened by the more capable VIPER system.
So that would be the recommendation of the Office of Naval Research. And, if the civilian leadership didn’t go for any of it, that would be a bearable disappointment. As at least NRL’s preposterousness levels would return to their normal, merely elevated levels.
*=*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
I'm not saying I took @Workable Goblin 's (perfectly valid) point re: solar electricity as a challenge to prove him wrong, but the National Radiative Propulsion Array also didn't exist in my notes prior to today. So I think the lesson is to keep better track of things, because foul-ups are bound to happen when the operating principle for your TL lets you rummage through the pockets of damn near every space-related technical document from the last 50 years and most rocketpunk apocrypha.
And we're almost a year into an Admiral Heinlein Conquers Space TL and we don't even have an Admiral Heinlein yet, let alone any rockets worth punking over. Clearly I'm not doing this right. Just mostly have Vanguard ahead of schedule to show for it, though that's going to have...interesting butterflies.
Preposterous.
That was the term which RADM Calvin Williams Bolster, Chief of Naval Research, wished to use to describe the First Report of the Research Group on Leaving Earth Via a Theoretical Astronautical Navy when it crossed his desk, specifically Pages 122-125 of Volume II, “A Survey of Future Near-Earth Orbital Applications”. Though it needed at least an adverb or two to fully capture the splendor – and splendid ludicrousness – of what he was reading. What had earned his ire was the National Radiative Propulsion Array. Using a titanic collection of concentrating mirrors with a surface-area that the report could not even bring itself to broach, a “solar furnace” would heat a working fluid – supercritical steam – to a thousand degrees and drive a series of gargantuan turbines to create electrical power. That electricity would, in turn, be used to power a massive “ultra-low dispersion” microwave radio transmitter, which would “beam” the power to the fleet of orbital tugs necessary for the maintenance of the vast array of facilities in orbit. The tugs themselves were propelled by “radiothermal” rockets, in which a propellant would be pumped into a combustion chamber which was transparent to the particular frequencies broadcast by the NRPA and be flash-vaporized by the microwave beam. (The proposed propellant was water, due to its ease of storage and use.)
Most annoyingly, however, was that the First Report knew that no small part of what it was detailing was fantastical and ridiculous. In the rather lengthy Preamble written by Captain Heinlein, he forewarned readers that the LEVIATHAN Group had subscribed to “miracle engineering” in constructing a world to illustrate the profound ways the Space Age could change the world. As he analogized, twenty-five years prior to the writing of the report in 1927, were you to present to a bystander something cutting-edge from 1952, such as the atom bomb, jet engine, or television, it would at first blush have seemed a miracle was required to produce it. Notwithstanding such, you could arrive at conceptually workable designs for all three by extrapolating from known scientific facts and making certain assumptions about future engineering accomplishments. With that in mind, the LEVIATHAN Group had made – and perhaps overly indulged in – a number of very generous and ambitious assumptions about what the next twenty-five years would bring.
Miracle engineering was also, the Preamble noted, required by the general lack of structure in the questions asked of the LEVIATHAN Group. Today, there were only three facts that could be definitely be stated with certainty regarding the future of the Space Age: 1) In the near future someone would successfully build an orbital rocket; 2) not long after that, man would go to space, for reasons that were likely both noble and less so; and 3) once it became possible to put a man into orbit, it would also be possible to use a rocket to launch a nuclear weapon at a foe anywhere in the world with neither warning nor ability to intercept it. The future was a malleable thing, however, and government reports “were replete with visions of futures past”. The LEVIATHAN Group was asked what the future might look like; the First Report provided that. Changing that vision – and building the roadmap to get there – would be task of LEVIATHAN’s future work, if allowed to continue.
That the LEVIATHAN Group had produced a report as…unique as the one he had received also did not surprise the Chief of Naval Research. LEVIATHAN had been neither fish-nor-fowl at the Naval Research Laboratory, with the project originating with the Secretary of the Navy personally and the Office of Naval Research being kept very much out of the loop on its creation. Most charitably, the SECNAV had wanted to capitalize upon the sudden popularity of Robert Heinlein following the Collier’s article to advance the service’s interests with the political branches without the filter of a senior leadership which still suffered from the reputation damage of the Revolt of the Admirals. Less charitably – and more likely, at least to the CNR – was that LEVIATHAN was little more than an attempt to line the out-going SECNAV’s pockets, for he was rumored to be destined for the chief executive position at Aerojet upon the inauguration of the new administration. Were it in his power, Rear Admiral Bolster would have simply forwarded the LEVIATHAN report to the new SECNAV and proceeded on with the day’s business.
Unfortunately, he did not have the luxury of simply washing his hands of the whole affair. For, the same day the First Report of the LEVIATHAN Group had been submitted, Captain Heinlein had also submitted A Comprehensive Technical Report on Project BOWDITCH. The Comprehensive Technical Report detailed the work done over the past three years by the Project BOWDITCH team and issued a formal determination that the program had reached sufficient maturity where field demonstration and validation were necessary. The report proposed bifurcating the project’s team going forward between a “payload engineering” group working on acquiring expertise to build a flyable satellite and a “astronautical engineering” group conducting a series of suborbital test flights to verify the operational principles of the BOWDITCH program. The anticipated launch vehicle for such was a new two-stage rocket, consisting of an RTV-N-12 Viking first-stage mated to a second-stage fashioned from an RTV-N-10 Aerobee. Also attached to the Comprehensive Technical Report was an engineering appendix from the Viking team outlining the basics of the “Viking Plus Aerobee (VIPER)” rocket and a memorandum, signed by Milton Rosen, as the head of Viking program, attesting that Captain Heinlein’s proposals were a natural evolution of the Viking program. And, the Comprehensive Technical Report dryly concluded, that should flight demonstration and validation not be approved, it was the opinion of the head of the project that Project BOWDITCH should be terminated, as no further gains could be expected from the lab and drafting table.
The Office of Naval Research would be expected to make a recommendation to the incoming civilian leadership regarding the future of Project BOWDITCH. And because LEVIATHAN had parasitized Project BOWDITCH, the Office would also be expected to have a recommendation on what to do with its “space midshipmen”, as one pejorative had dubbed them. Pushing forward with any kind of flight validation was liable to be a political hand-grenade, as just four years earlier the Pentagon’s newly formed Joint Research and Development Board had recommended satellites be limited to mere studies. Project BOWDITCH had been greenlit, in no small part, to keep the lights on in the hopes the political ground would change by the time it was in need of real-world engineering. And the timing was fortuitous, as the end of the Viking launches was in sight and no other follow-up program had yet been proposed. But keeping Project BOWDITCH almost certainly meant keeping Heinlein, which in turn meant keeping the circus that was developing in his shop.
Maybe, Rear Admiral Bolster mused, it wouldn’t be the worst of fates if Captain Heinlein got exactly what he wanted. Create a new Department of Rocketry within the Naval Research Laboratory, with Heinlein at its head, with formal responsibility for Project BOWDITCH, as well as the remainder of the Viking flights and the development of VIPER, as well as any further duties assigned to LEVIATHAN should the incoming SECNAV choose to keep it. A modest budget, real expectations, and above all significantly more work would keep their flights of fancy in check: There was no questioning the enthusiasm in the Project BOWDITCH shop, and their practical work was fine as well. If civilian leadership went for it, the Naval Research Laboratory stood to gain tremendously, if only from the research avenues opened by the more capable VIPER system.
So that would be the recommendation of the Office of Naval Research. And, if the civilian leadership didn’t go for any of it, that would be a bearable disappointment. As at least NRL’s preposterousness levels would return to their normal, merely elevated levels.
*=*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
I'm not saying I took @Workable Goblin 's (perfectly valid) point re: solar electricity as a challenge to prove him wrong, but the National Radiative Propulsion Array also didn't exist in my notes prior to today. So I think the lesson is to keep better track of things, because foul-ups are bound to happen when the operating principle for your TL lets you rummage through the pockets of damn near every space-related technical document from the last 50 years and most rocketpunk apocrypha.
And we're almost a year into an Admiral Heinlein Conquers Space TL and we don't even have an Admiral Heinlein yet, let alone any rockets worth punking over. Clearly I'm not doing this right. Just mostly have Vanguard ahead of schedule to show for it, though that's going to have...interesting butterflies.
I still think it's pushing the bounds of plausibility a tad (while obviously mirror-heated steam is perfectly plausible for 1952, I'm unsure of the state of microwave energy beaming at the time), but I'm not really complaining; it's probably more interesting this way, anyway. Heinlein being given the Navy's space program, hmmm, I wonder where else that sort of thing has recently led to a naval officer getting an excessively large head...(well, since I already said this, it's hardly spoilers to say that I'm seeing some strong parallels to Hyman Rickover).
Chapter 4: Just IRONSing Out the Bugs [February 1953]
Chapter 4: Just IRONSing Out the Bugs
For all the hopes and fears that there might be drama with the incoming administration regarding Project BOWDITCH and the continued work of LEVIATHAN, the matter resolved itself rather anticlimactically. Despite the fatefulness of President Dwight Eisenhauer’s pick for Secretary of the Navy – Robert B. Anderson – there simply were too many irons in the fire, between the still-ongoing conflict in Korea, the construction of U.S.S. Nautilus, and the development of the Terrier surface-to-air missile, to pay Project BOWDITCH much heed. The recommendation of the Office of Naval Research was adopted without further comment and on February 13, 1953, the Department of Rocketry at the Naval Research Laboratory was created under the direction of Captain Robert Heinlein.
At requested by Heinlein and Milton Rosen, the Department of Rocketry was assigned responsibility for an enlarged Project BOWDITCH, whose portfolio now included conducting of the Viking test-flight regime and the development of the new Viper rocket. The Department was also assigned supervision of Project PAMOR, the ongoing demonstration program to use the Moon as a natural communications satellite as well as an espionage tool. The NRL further authorized the Department to, “as circumstances and funding permit,” continue to conduct “LEVIATHAN-type basic and conceptual research which furthers the Navy’s potential future needs in space.”
One can be forgiven for imagining that the Department’s energies would have been absorbed in its first year by the task of developing the Viper rocket. Counterintuitively, of the tasks facing the Department, the Viper was perhaps the easiest. The Viking and Aerobee rockets were already mature systems and the Viking team at the Department had significant experience working with both The Glenn L. Martin Company and Aerojet as subcontractors on rocketry programs. While staging the Aerobee atop a Viking was not a matter of simply stacking one atop the other, Rosen’s team and its industry partners were confident that the technical problems would be swiftly resolved and that all which was really required was the money to do the work. If fully funded, it was expected that the Viper would have completed initial flight testing by the end of the existing Viking launch schedule in Q1 1955. The Project BOWDITCH team, meanwhile, had its date to aim for with regard to its suborbital flight validation regime, as they’d finally have a booster with which to conduct meaningful investigation of whether the program could work as intended.
The problem child for the Department of Rocketry, rather, was Project PAMOR. The NRL had – it seemed -- assigned the program to the Department of Rocketry on the basis that, since the Department of Rocketry was keenly interested in satellites and Luna is a satellite, it just made sense the two of them went together. And, despite the facetiousness that might be read into the NRL’s choices, there were significant synergies between the BOWDITCH and PAMOR teams, with both being strongly interested in the potential of communications satellites. The problem was that Project PAMOR was reaching a critical programmatic bottleneck of its own, the resolution of which risked both the ire of Naval leadership and the wrath of the other services.
Since 1951, PAMOR had operated a specially built parabolic radio antenna located in Stump Neck, Maryland for conducting its research. Despite the significant potential in the use of the Moon as a passive communications relay, what truly drove the Navy’s interest was the Moon’s potential as a means of electronic intelligence collection on the Soviets. As it had been verified by the Stump Neck antenna that it was possible to receive transmissions which naturally echoed off the Moon. It was, therefore, possible to eavesdrop on the Soviets by way of the Moon, provided the Moon was visible to both the broadcaster and receiver. The Stump Neck antenna, however, was insufficiently powerful to resolve echoes from within the Soviet Union and a new, much larger facility had been proposed to be built in Sugar Grove, West Virginia. The building of the Sugar Grove antenna would require approval by NRL, about which the department head to which Project PAMOR reported was expected to make a recommendation.
And the matter would have been simple for Captain Heinlein to approve of, had he not received a competing proposal. As the two masterminds behind Project PAMOR – Eugene Lorenzen and James Trexler – had become intensely interested in the work being done by the Project BOWDITCH team and had come to believe that there was a better way to snoop on the Soviets. That being an artificial “snooper” satellite in a polar orbit, that would act as the Moon did in the PAMOR system, but at much lower altitude and much finer control of the reflection geometries, as well as the ability to use an orbiting constellation to daisy-chain the echoes and make the system usable even when either the U.S. or Soviet Union were not within line-of-sight of a given snooper-sat. This would yield a significantly more capable surveillance system that simultaneously was capable of operating with much smaller terrestrial antenna demands.
The problem, of course, was that artificial satellites were not yet a practical thing. And even BOWDITCH, the most advanced satellite program in the whole of the United State., would not begin basic conceptual demonstration for another two years. (And a snooper-sat constellation would need its own flight demonstration regime a la BOWDITCH.) The PAMOR team, meanwhile, argued that there wouldn’t be meaningful disruption if a major redesign was pursued, as it would be at least 1960 in any event before the Sugar Grove antenna was functional due to the scale of the construction required. Which was the year which the BOWDITCH team was confident the first of its operational satellites would be orbited and who were equally confident that, with significant sharing of subsystems, a snooper-sat of the sort envisioned by the PAMOR team could be flown “about the same time”.
Further complicating things, Project PAMOR was being watched in a way that neither Project BOWDITCH was nor LEVIATHAN had been. The Office of Naval Intelligence was acutely interested in PAMOR’s potential and could be expected to react poorly to a major reworking of the project in favor a highly experimental method of surveillance which a substantial risk of failure. It also risked raising the ire of the other services, as PAMOR was able to operate unmolested in no small part because the Army – which had likewise investigated usage of the Moon as an intelligence-gathering tool – determined there was no military value to be had, while the military value of the PAMOR team’s snooper-sats was obvious.
The upsides of the PAMOR team’s proposal – as well as his own belief that the future lay in satellites – drove Captain Heinlein to conclude that a major reworking of PAMOR’s conceptual framework was required. And while he could not control the reaction of the other services, he could at the very least ensure ONI was swept-off its feet with evidence in favor of the Department of Rocketry’s position. In March 1954, Captain Heinlein formally paused Project PAMOR conduct a comprehensive review of the program to validate its technical fundamentals. At the same time, the Department of Rocketry began drafting An Inventory of Roles for Naval Satellites, which posterity would remember as the IRONS Survey. The IRONS Survey was intended to build on the previous First LEVIATHAN Report’s categorization of potential varieties of artificial satellites, adjusting for what was deemed “technically feasible” within a “foreseeable time-frame” of ten years, and prioritizing what were critical to the conduct of the Navy’s missions. Such would conveniently find ELINT-collection near the top and justify the redevelopment of PAMOR as a Navy-controlled satellite constellation. Or at least convince ONI the concept was worthwhile enough to fight the ensuing inter-service scrum on behalf of the NRL.
Not for the first time – and certainly not the last – the Department of Rocketry lost the plot in the course of performing its duties. Originally expected to be turned-around in three weeks, the IRONS Survey took on a life of its own that would consume the rest of the year to produce a written report. The wheels began to fall off the trolley through an entirely innocuous request that was received from the Naval Observatory. As the report produced by the IRONS Survey was supposed to encapsulate the whole of the Navy’s interests, someone at the Naval Research Laboratory believed it prudent to extend an invitation to the Naval Observatory to consult on the IRONS Survey, as its interests in space were unique enough to warrant their voice being heard
The Naval Observatory’s liaison, having read both the Collier’s series and the First LEVIATHAN Report, was intrigued about how “space telescopes” were to be treated in the IRONS Survey. As the Naval Observatory was immensely enthused about the possibilities afforded by a telescope placed in orbit. But the First LEVIATHAN Report had strongly implied its space telescopes were unmanned and it was difficult to imagine an unmanned satellite containing an astronomically useful telescope. (“Miracle engineering” notwithstanding.)
What the Naval Observatory was, in effect, inquiring about was a space station, which should have been well beyond the scope the IRONS Survey. Consideration of the feasibility of an orbital observatory, however, was exactly the type of “LEVIATHAN-type” conceptual research the Department of Rocketry was empowered to perform. And what could be more appropriate, after all, than doing such at the behest of the Navy’s very own astronomers? And thus was born the Naval Observatory’s Orbital Extension, whose examination was immediately spun-off as the newly-minted Project Charybdis, to ensure some level of organization within the Department and guarantee that ongoing programs were not cannibalized the way LEVIATHAN had Project BOWDITCH.
Despite its enthusiasm for the NOOE, the Project Charybdis team soon realized that no matter how thoroughly they might be able to imagine a space station, that did little to make it flyable. While all technically inclined, the background of most in the Department of Rocketry – outside of Rosen’s Viking team, who were walled off to ensure Viper was delivered on time – was related to radio and electrical engineering. Realizing outside assistance would be required, it was decided by the Project Charybdis team to reach out to the Langley Research Center, the geographically closest of the National Advisory Committee on Aerospace’s research facilities to the Naval Research Laboratory. NACA, as the nexus of many non-military space-related projects, was thought to be a natural enough resource to call upon. NACA’s expertise, it was also rationalized on post hoc, would also be useful in preparing the IRONS Survey. As one of the IRONS Survey’s stated design criteria was identifying only those satellite classes which must be operated by the Navy, meaning any expertise which might winnow the list would be desirable.
NACA was interested in the basic concept of the NOOE. And, as it just so happened, it had just come into possession of a technical study from the most recent International Astronautical Federation conference for a small, four-man, multirole space station. A joint invitation from the NRL and NACA to discuss that paper would surely be accepted by the author, which would in turn provide exactly the kind of the guidance the Project Charybdis team was searching for.
As it turned, Dr. Krafft Ehricke did just that.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
I'd intended to get significantly further in 1954 than this, but IRONS kind of spiraled out of control. You start recalling -- and rereading -- what different folks have proposed at different times and it's amazing how you easily you can get shanghaied by your own ideas. Guess that just means the rest of the fun gets saved for next time! Because once one German rocketeer shows up, they all do. Maybe next time we'll even get to Tethys and the start of the Rocket Wars. I mean, it was inevitable that there'd be blood between the services with the USN having any level of muscularity in its space program beyond OTL, so we've got to have properly melodramatic naming. (Besides, how cool would history class be if you got to spend a day or two talking about an event called "The Rocket Wars"?)
Also, any excuse to shout-out Krafft Ehricke is appreciated. He's not the most famous of the Peneemunde refugees and tends to get overlooked in favor of von Braun (and in some contexts Ley), but he's a wealth of allohistorical gems for the enterprising space cadet. (Atomic midshipman? I'm thinking "atomic midshipman" will end up TTL's "space cadet".)
For all the hopes and fears that there might be drama with the incoming administration regarding Project BOWDITCH and the continued work of LEVIATHAN, the matter resolved itself rather anticlimactically. Despite the fatefulness of President Dwight Eisenhauer’s pick for Secretary of the Navy – Robert B. Anderson – there simply were too many irons in the fire, between the still-ongoing conflict in Korea, the construction of U.S.S. Nautilus, and the development of the Terrier surface-to-air missile, to pay Project BOWDITCH much heed. The recommendation of the Office of Naval Research was adopted without further comment and on February 13, 1953, the Department of Rocketry at the Naval Research Laboratory was created under the direction of Captain Robert Heinlein.
At requested by Heinlein and Milton Rosen, the Department of Rocketry was assigned responsibility for an enlarged Project BOWDITCH, whose portfolio now included conducting of the Viking test-flight regime and the development of the new Viper rocket. The Department was also assigned supervision of Project PAMOR, the ongoing demonstration program to use the Moon as a natural communications satellite as well as an espionage tool. The NRL further authorized the Department to, “as circumstances and funding permit,” continue to conduct “LEVIATHAN-type basic and conceptual research which furthers the Navy’s potential future needs in space.”
One can be forgiven for imagining that the Department’s energies would have been absorbed in its first year by the task of developing the Viper rocket. Counterintuitively, of the tasks facing the Department, the Viper was perhaps the easiest. The Viking and Aerobee rockets were already mature systems and the Viking team at the Department had significant experience working with both The Glenn L. Martin Company and Aerojet as subcontractors on rocketry programs. While staging the Aerobee atop a Viking was not a matter of simply stacking one atop the other, Rosen’s team and its industry partners were confident that the technical problems would be swiftly resolved and that all which was really required was the money to do the work. If fully funded, it was expected that the Viper would have completed initial flight testing by the end of the existing Viking launch schedule in Q1 1955. The Project BOWDITCH team, meanwhile, had its date to aim for with regard to its suborbital flight validation regime, as they’d finally have a booster with which to conduct meaningful investigation of whether the program could work as intended.
The problem child for the Department of Rocketry, rather, was Project PAMOR. The NRL had – it seemed -- assigned the program to the Department of Rocketry on the basis that, since the Department of Rocketry was keenly interested in satellites and Luna is a satellite, it just made sense the two of them went together. And, despite the facetiousness that might be read into the NRL’s choices, there were significant synergies between the BOWDITCH and PAMOR teams, with both being strongly interested in the potential of communications satellites. The problem was that Project PAMOR was reaching a critical programmatic bottleneck of its own, the resolution of which risked both the ire of Naval leadership and the wrath of the other services.
Since 1951, PAMOR had operated a specially built parabolic radio antenna located in Stump Neck, Maryland for conducting its research. Despite the significant potential in the use of the Moon as a passive communications relay, what truly drove the Navy’s interest was the Moon’s potential as a means of electronic intelligence collection on the Soviets. As it had been verified by the Stump Neck antenna that it was possible to receive transmissions which naturally echoed off the Moon. It was, therefore, possible to eavesdrop on the Soviets by way of the Moon, provided the Moon was visible to both the broadcaster and receiver. The Stump Neck antenna, however, was insufficiently powerful to resolve echoes from within the Soviet Union and a new, much larger facility had been proposed to be built in Sugar Grove, West Virginia. The building of the Sugar Grove antenna would require approval by NRL, about which the department head to which Project PAMOR reported was expected to make a recommendation.
And the matter would have been simple for Captain Heinlein to approve of, had he not received a competing proposal. As the two masterminds behind Project PAMOR – Eugene Lorenzen and James Trexler – had become intensely interested in the work being done by the Project BOWDITCH team and had come to believe that there was a better way to snoop on the Soviets. That being an artificial “snooper” satellite in a polar orbit, that would act as the Moon did in the PAMOR system, but at much lower altitude and much finer control of the reflection geometries, as well as the ability to use an orbiting constellation to daisy-chain the echoes and make the system usable even when either the U.S. or Soviet Union were not within line-of-sight of a given snooper-sat. This would yield a significantly more capable surveillance system that simultaneously was capable of operating with much smaller terrestrial antenna demands.
The problem, of course, was that artificial satellites were not yet a practical thing. And even BOWDITCH, the most advanced satellite program in the whole of the United State., would not begin basic conceptual demonstration for another two years. (And a snooper-sat constellation would need its own flight demonstration regime a la BOWDITCH.) The PAMOR team, meanwhile, argued that there wouldn’t be meaningful disruption if a major redesign was pursued, as it would be at least 1960 in any event before the Sugar Grove antenna was functional due to the scale of the construction required. Which was the year which the BOWDITCH team was confident the first of its operational satellites would be orbited and who were equally confident that, with significant sharing of subsystems, a snooper-sat of the sort envisioned by the PAMOR team could be flown “about the same time”.
Further complicating things, Project PAMOR was being watched in a way that neither Project BOWDITCH was nor LEVIATHAN had been. The Office of Naval Intelligence was acutely interested in PAMOR’s potential and could be expected to react poorly to a major reworking of the project in favor a highly experimental method of surveillance which a substantial risk of failure. It also risked raising the ire of the other services, as PAMOR was able to operate unmolested in no small part because the Army – which had likewise investigated usage of the Moon as an intelligence-gathering tool – determined there was no military value to be had, while the military value of the PAMOR team’s snooper-sats was obvious.
The upsides of the PAMOR team’s proposal – as well as his own belief that the future lay in satellites – drove Captain Heinlein to conclude that a major reworking of PAMOR’s conceptual framework was required. And while he could not control the reaction of the other services, he could at the very least ensure ONI was swept-off its feet with evidence in favor of the Department of Rocketry’s position. In March 1954, Captain Heinlein formally paused Project PAMOR conduct a comprehensive review of the program to validate its technical fundamentals. At the same time, the Department of Rocketry began drafting An Inventory of Roles for Naval Satellites, which posterity would remember as the IRONS Survey. The IRONS Survey was intended to build on the previous First LEVIATHAN Report’s categorization of potential varieties of artificial satellites, adjusting for what was deemed “technically feasible” within a “foreseeable time-frame” of ten years, and prioritizing what were critical to the conduct of the Navy’s missions. Such would conveniently find ELINT-collection near the top and justify the redevelopment of PAMOR as a Navy-controlled satellite constellation. Or at least convince ONI the concept was worthwhile enough to fight the ensuing inter-service scrum on behalf of the NRL.
Not for the first time – and certainly not the last – the Department of Rocketry lost the plot in the course of performing its duties. Originally expected to be turned-around in three weeks, the IRONS Survey took on a life of its own that would consume the rest of the year to produce a written report. The wheels began to fall off the trolley through an entirely innocuous request that was received from the Naval Observatory. As the report produced by the IRONS Survey was supposed to encapsulate the whole of the Navy’s interests, someone at the Naval Research Laboratory believed it prudent to extend an invitation to the Naval Observatory to consult on the IRONS Survey, as its interests in space were unique enough to warrant their voice being heard
The Naval Observatory’s liaison, having read both the Collier’s series and the First LEVIATHAN Report, was intrigued about how “space telescopes” were to be treated in the IRONS Survey. As the Naval Observatory was immensely enthused about the possibilities afforded by a telescope placed in orbit. But the First LEVIATHAN Report had strongly implied its space telescopes were unmanned and it was difficult to imagine an unmanned satellite containing an astronomically useful telescope. (“Miracle engineering” notwithstanding.)
What the Naval Observatory was, in effect, inquiring about was a space station, which should have been well beyond the scope the IRONS Survey. Consideration of the feasibility of an orbital observatory, however, was exactly the type of “LEVIATHAN-type” conceptual research the Department of Rocketry was empowered to perform. And what could be more appropriate, after all, than doing such at the behest of the Navy’s very own astronomers? And thus was born the Naval Observatory’s Orbital Extension, whose examination was immediately spun-off as the newly-minted Project Charybdis, to ensure some level of organization within the Department and guarantee that ongoing programs were not cannibalized the way LEVIATHAN had Project BOWDITCH.
Despite its enthusiasm for the NOOE, the Project Charybdis team soon realized that no matter how thoroughly they might be able to imagine a space station, that did little to make it flyable. While all technically inclined, the background of most in the Department of Rocketry – outside of Rosen’s Viking team, who were walled off to ensure Viper was delivered on time – was related to radio and electrical engineering. Realizing outside assistance would be required, it was decided by the Project Charybdis team to reach out to the Langley Research Center, the geographically closest of the National Advisory Committee on Aerospace’s research facilities to the Naval Research Laboratory. NACA, as the nexus of many non-military space-related projects, was thought to be a natural enough resource to call upon. NACA’s expertise, it was also rationalized on post hoc, would also be useful in preparing the IRONS Survey. As one of the IRONS Survey’s stated design criteria was identifying only those satellite classes which must be operated by the Navy, meaning any expertise which might winnow the list would be desirable.
NACA was interested in the basic concept of the NOOE. And, as it just so happened, it had just come into possession of a technical study from the most recent International Astronautical Federation conference for a small, four-man, multirole space station. A joint invitation from the NRL and NACA to discuss that paper would surely be accepted by the author, which would in turn provide exactly the kind of the guidance the Project Charybdis team was searching for.
As it turned, Dr. Krafft Ehricke did just that.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
I'd intended to get significantly further in 1954 than this, but IRONS kind of spiraled out of control. You start recalling -- and rereading -- what different folks have proposed at different times and it's amazing how you easily you can get shanghaied by your own ideas. Guess that just means the rest of the fun gets saved for next time! Because once one German rocketeer shows up, they all do. Maybe next time we'll even get to Tethys and the start of the Rocket Wars. I mean, it was inevitable that there'd be blood between the services with the USN having any level of muscularity in its space program beyond OTL, so we've got to have properly melodramatic naming. (Besides, how cool would history class be if you got to spend a day or two talking about an event called "The Rocket Wars"?)
Also, any excuse to shout-out Krafft Ehricke is appreciated. He's not the most famous of the Peneemunde refugees and tends to get overlooked in favor of von Braun (and in some contexts Ley), but he's a wealth of allohistorical gems for the enterprising space cadet. (Atomic midshipman? I'm thinking "atomic midshipman" will end up TTL's "space cadet".)
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Chapter 5: Beware Germans Bearing Gifts [May 1954]
Chapter 5: Beware Germans Bearing Gifts
The most profound impact of Krafft Ehricke’s conversations with the Project Charybdis team was what the latter learned it didn’t know. On some level, it was always obvious that the NOOE project was merely a definitional study of requirements rather than an attempt to actually design a flyable payload. As, absent even an inkling of the capabilities of available boosting platforms, it was impossible to assess what might be feasible in terms of station dimensions. (The only even vaguely tangible booster in the Department of Rocketry was the assumed follow-up to the unflown Viper that would launch BOWDITCH satellites, with a payload of tens of pounds (at worst) to hundreds of pounds (at best).) An even bigger problem for an orbital observatory, Dr. Ehrlicke noted, was that the lack of a booster made it impossible to determine the maximum size of the NOOE’s telescope’s mirror. Because any orbital observatory will be built around its primary telescope, which will be as big as allowed by the booster, which in turn will be governed by the booster’s payload faring. Notwithstanding such, the Charybdis team felt significant progress was made on refining the concept, at least sufficiently enough for both NACA and Ehrlicke to continue with technical cooperation and consultancy for the remainder of the year. It was hoped that funding would be made available in Fiscal Year 1955 to issue technical study contracts to industry.
Unfortunately for Captain Heinlein, the strides made by Project Charybdis were to make his – and the Department of Rocketry’s – life even more complicated. As Krafft Ehrlicke’s involvement with Project Charybdis “blew the Peenemunde Whistle”, as Heinlein himself would later call it, whereby interacting with one refugee of Operation Paperclip meant interacting with all of them. He didn’t hate them per se, but he had more than enough of them during the Collier’s symposium and wouldn’t disagree with James Kaplan’s characterization of them as “arrogant Nazi bastards”. Further, as a matter of professional obligation, he was always skeptical of Army men bearing glad tidings. And so it was that, on June 6, 1954, a smiling Wernher von Braun paid a visit to the Naval Research Laboratory.
And von Braun very much was an Army man that day, as he was present in his capacity as the head of Army Ordnance’s Department of Guided Missiles. For he had a proposal for Captain Heinlein! He was here to discuss what he called Project Orbiter, a joint proposal for the Army and Navy to cooperate to launch an artificial satellite as soon as possible. His new rocket – what would become the Jupiter-C – would be the first available to the United States which was capable of placing an object in orbit. He was confident that he could do this by the end of 1956. Given NRL’s being home to the most mature American satellite program, it only made sense to propose a joint Army-Navy launch using the new rocket and a payload supplied by NRL. The White House was favorable to it, as it desired mightily to see the first American satellite originate from a non-military source and it considered the NRL just such a place. The Army was on-board as well, but the Department of the Navy referred him directly to Captain Heinlein, as only Captain Heinlein could determine if such was feasible without disrupting critical research programs.
It was the first time Heinlein had ever heard Project BOWDITCH referred to as a critical program. Though the allusion might also have been to Project PAMOR. But it was most likely just Pentagonese. And, if so, “without disrupting critical research programs” in fact meant “without disrupting any research programs”. Given the birth of Project Charybdis, it was highly unlikely that the Department of Rocketry’s programs would avoid disruption if Heinlein declined to partake in Project Orbiter, as he’d face an open revolt from his shop. Which left him no choice but to participate, no matter how much disruption might actually be caused, though he believed that the BOWDITCH team – the one most likely to be affected – would rise to the challenge in light of getting to space a full four years ahead of their existing schedule.
And if he had to work with von Braun, Heinlein also wanted something of his own for his troubles. The Army’s rocketry program consulting on the IRONS Survey would provide additional clarity and heft, as well as smoothing out no small number of feathers that might otherwise be ruffled at the Pentagon by the Navy seeming to stake out a space-going fiefdom. As it so happened, von Braun had heard about IRONS – through Ehrlicke – and believed it a laudable effort, especially with NACA’s involvement. Between their three agencies, von Braun mused, they might just stand a chance against the real enemy: The Air Force.
Despite his glibness, von Braun was not wrong that the Air Force considered space its own domain, and the next month – when the Department of Rocketry invited the Air Force to join in the IRONS satellite classification-and-definition project and make IRONS a full tri-service endeavor – such was put into print, as the Air Force not only had no interest in participating in IRONS but also believed that the conducting of the IRONS Survey amounted to a usurpation of the Air Force’s prerogatives. As the implication of IRONS was that there were valid roles for satellites operated by the Navy; the natural and obvious choice to operate any artificial satellite was the Air Force, after all.
Even without the Air Force’s participation, the collaboration on IRONS produced a remarkably prescient document. Delivered in December 1954 after months of detours (of which NOOE was not the only one) and wrangling between the participants, the IRONS Survey started from two first-principles: 1) Space is sufficiently large to support the institutional ambitions of all entities who have a reasonable claim to a seat at the “space policy” table; and 2) space is a sufficiently difficult and hostile environment that some form of institutionalized coordination and division-of-labor is necessary in order to properly operate in it. From there, IRONS classified and detailed a dozen types of satellites which were believed to meet its technical criteria. And further proposed a color-coded system of potential users – blue (Navy), green (Army), white (civilian/NACA), and red (Air Force) – and potential limiting principles for fashioning allocation of responsibilities in near-orbital space. IRONS further concluded that additional action should be taken by the civilian leadership in this sphere to harmonize space policy between the various agencies, as the nature of institutional interests generally limited cooperation to only for as long as those interests remained aligned. To highlight this point, the collaborators on IRONS all agreed that each would submit a separate memorandum through their reporting channels in addition to the report, making agency-specific recommendations in addition to the general ones made by the IRONS Survey itself. (The Department of Rocketry’s consisted of the adoption of the IRONS usage system and adoption of programmatic changes to Project PAMOR’s ELINT component, which was recommended to transition to an artificial satellite-based system.)
While 1954 wound-down and IRONS finally drew to a close, a bigger problem loomed on the horizon. Over the second half of the year, the halls of the NRL began to hear murmurs about “the Launcher Problem”. Specifically, the lack of one, as Project Charybdis’s frustration attested. Opinion across the Department of Rocketry was hardening on the need to make firmer plans for the launching of Projects BOWDITCH and PAMOR, as well as for defining characteristics of potential future missions of interest like NOOE. With the Viper project squarely with industry for prototype production and the final Viking flight completed, Milton Rosen’s design team found itself turning its attention to the Launcher Problem. The team, however, found itself split by a heated debate about how to proceed once Viper was flight-verified and the BOWDITCH concept demonstration flights were commenced.
On one hand, Rosen himself championed the Viper Evolution program. The Department of Rocketry’s launcher would be developed in two phases. The first, the Viper 3, would consist of a Viper with a newly added third-stage for orbital insertion and the lengthening of the tankage of the first- and second-stages as necessary to allow a payload of 20 pounds (~9kg) to be placed into a low-orbit. This would be used to validate BOWDITCH on-orbit and gain valuable experience in boosting orbital payloads. From there, in the second phase, a Viper 3E – “E” for “Evolved” – would be constructed using that knowledge and advancements in rocket engines to increase its payload to the estimated 400 pounds (~182kg) required for a BOWDITCH satellite.
The Viper Evolution proposal met firm resistance internally and externally. From within, the Project BOWDITCH team was apprehensive about the promise from Project Orbiter about orbital access by 1956, a full year ahead of Rosen’s preliminary Viper 3 timetable, and with three times the initial payload. On the Viking/Viper team itself, meanwhile, dissent was anchored by Commander Robert Truax, who strenuously argued that the Viper Evolution program was insufficiently ambitious and would be utterly obsolete by the time it was able to launch BOWDITCH payloads. Aerojet was, likewise, distinctly unenthused, in no small part because of its own ongoing work on engines that would prove Truax right. (While the infamous quote “if we’re going to use a fattened rocket designed by a Nazi, let’s at least use the one designed this year,” that is often attributed to Truax is almost certainly fictional, it did aptly capture the simmering tension inside Rosen’s team.)
On the other hand, Truax – along with the Viper’s industry contractors – advocated for starting from scratch, as the Viper’s first-stage was essentially a fattened and elongated version of a rocket designed almost fifteen years earlier. Specifically, he championed Tethys. An entirely new two-stage rocket capable of delivering 8,000 pounds (3,800kg) to a 114-mile (185km) orbit. Preliminary engineering discussions had been conducted with both The Glenn L. Martin Company and Aerojet, with a belief that – based on their prior work with the Viking/Viper team -- Tethys could be delivered by the end of 1960. A 4-ton payload would be more than sufficient for any final BOWDITCH design and more besides, including orbiting a man in a ballistic return capsule. Tethys also provided immensely more potential for future growth. Its downside, of course, was that an entirely new rocket would be expensive and face significant technical risks. If Tethys was delayed, as was entirely possible, it could be 1963 or 1964 before BOWDITCH could launch. At least the Viper Evolution program was unlikely to fail and would be more cost-effective, even if its future growth was limited.
Like many of the decisions he had made in 1954, what to do with the Launcher Problem was not one which Captain Heinlein could resolve on his own. It was a question for the political branches, to whom he would be required to forward it on to, along with a recommendation on how they should proceed. This decision, at least, had the benefit of being clear-cut.
There could be no choice other than Tethys.
*=*=*=*=*
Author's Notes
Oh boy. It feels like significant things are finally happening, and they kinda are, so let me try to separate big butterfly-driven moving parts. This isn't to condescend to my dear readers. It is merely to help those who are not avid space cadets keep track, especially as we're starting to the OTL Project By A Different Name thing:
Given that Joseph Kaplan quote re: von Braun and "arrogant Nazi bastards" comes from the Ad Hoc Committee on Special Projects and his bending every effort to ensure the choosing of Project Vanguard over Project Orbiter, I'm sure you can start imagining all kinds of things.
The most profound impact of Krafft Ehricke’s conversations with the Project Charybdis team was what the latter learned it didn’t know. On some level, it was always obvious that the NOOE project was merely a definitional study of requirements rather than an attempt to actually design a flyable payload. As, absent even an inkling of the capabilities of available boosting platforms, it was impossible to assess what might be feasible in terms of station dimensions. (The only even vaguely tangible booster in the Department of Rocketry was the assumed follow-up to the unflown Viper that would launch BOWDITCH satellites, with a payload of tens of pounds (at worst) to hundreds of pounds (at best).) An even bigger problem for an orbital observatory, Dr. Ehrlicke noted, was that the lack of a booster made it impossible to determine the maximum size of the NOOE’s telescope’s mirror. Because any orbital observatory will be built around its primary telescope, which will be as big as allowed by the booster, which in turn will be governed by the booster’s payload faring. Notwithstanding such, the Charybdis team felt significant progress was made on refining the concept, at least sufficiently enough for both NACA and Ehrlicke to continue with technical cooperation and consultancy for the remainder of the year. It was hoped that funding would be made available in Fiscal Year 1955 to issue technical study contracts to industry.
Unfortunately for Captain Heinlein, the strides made by Project Charybdis were to make his – and the Department of Rocketry’s – life even more complicated. As Krafft Ehrlicke’s involvement with Project Charybdis “blew the Peenemunde Whistle”, as Heinlein himself would later call it, whereby interacting with one refugee of Operation Paperclip meant interacting with all of them. He didn’t hate them per se, but he had more than enough of them during the Collier’s symposium and wouldn’t disagree with James Kaplan’s characterization of them as “arrogant Nazi bastards”. Further, as a matter of professional obligation, he was always skeptical of Army men bearing glad tidings. And so it was that, on June 6, 1954, a smiling Wernher von Braun paid a visit to the Naval Research Laboratory.
And von Braun very much was an Army man that day, as he was present in his capacity as the head of Army Ordnance’s Department of Guided Missiles. For he had a proposal for Captain Heinlein! He was here to discuss what he called Project Orbiter, a joint proposal for the Army and Navy to cooperate to launch an artificial satellite as soon as possible. His new rocket – what would become the Jupiter-C – would be the first available to the United States which was capable of placing an object in orbit. He was confident that he could do this by the end of 1956. Given NRL’s being home to the most mature American satellite program, it only made sense to propose a joint Army-Navy launch using the new rocket and a payload supplied by NRL. The White House was favorable to it, as it desired mightily to see the first American satellite originate from a non-military source and it considered the NRL just such a place. The Army was on-board as well, but the Department of the Navy referred him directly to Captain Heinlein, as only Captain Heinlein could determine if such was feasible without disrupting critical research programs.
It was the first time Heinlein had ever heard Project BOWDITCH referred to as a critical program. Though the allusion might also have been to Project PAMOR. But it was most likely just Pentagonese. And, if so, “without disrupting critical research programs” in fact meant “without disrupting any research programs”. Given the birth of Project Charybdis, it was highly unlikely that the Department of Rocketry’s programs would avoid disruption if Heinlein declined to partake in Project Orbiter, as he’d face an open revolt from his shop. Which left him no choice but to participate, no matter how much disruption might actually be caused, though he believed that the BOWDITCH team – the one most likely to be affected – would rise to the challenge in light of getting to space a full four years ahead of their existing schedule.
And if he had to work with von Braun, Heinlein also wanted something of his own for his troubles. The Army’s rocketry program consulting on the IRONS Survey would provide additional clarity and heft, as well as smoothing out no small number of feathers that might otherwise be ruffled at the Pentagon by the Navy seeming to stake out a space-going fiefdom. As it so happened, von Braun had heard about IRONS – through Ehrlicke – and believed it a laudable effort, especially with NACA’s involvement. Between their three agencies, von Braun mused, they might just stand a chance against the real enemy: The Air Force.
Despite his glibness, von Braun was not wrong that the Air Force considered space its own domain, and the next month – when the Department of Rocketry invited the Air Force to join in the IRONS satellite classification-and-definition project and make IRONS a full tri-service endeavor – such was put into print, as the Air Force not only had no interest in participating in IRONS but also believed that the conducting of the IRONS Survey amounted to a usurpation of the Air Force’s prerogatives. As the implication of IRONS was that there were valid roles for satellites operated by the Navy; the natural and obvious choice to operate any artificial satellite was the Air Force, after all.
Even without the Air Force’s participation, the collaboration on IRONS produced a remarkably prescient document. Delivered in December 1954 after months of detours (of which NOOE was not the only one) and wrangling between the participants, the IRONS Survey started from two first-principles: 1) Space is sufficiently large to support the institutional ambitions of all entities who have a reasonable claim to a seat at the “space policy” table; and 2) space is a sufficiently difficult and hostile environment that some form of institutionalized coordination and division-of-labor is necessary in order to properly operate in it. From there, IRONS classified and detailed a dozen types of satellites which were believed to meet its technical criteria. And further proposed a color-coded system of potential users – blue (Navy), green (Army), white (civilian/NACA), and red (Air Force) – and potential limiting principles for fashioning allocation of responsibilities in near-orbital space. IRONS further concluded that additional action should be taken by the civilian leadership in this sphere to harmonize space policy between the various agencies, as the nature of institutional interests generally limited cooperation to only for as long as those interests remained aligned. To highlight this point, the collaborators on IRONS all agreed that each would submit a separate memorandum through their reporting channels in addition to the report, making agency-specific recommendations in addition to the general ones made by the IRONS Survey itself. (The Department of Rocketry’s consisted of the adoption of the IRONS usage system and adoption of programmatic changes to Project PAMOR’s ELINT component, which was recommended to transition to an artificial satellite-based system.)
While 1954 wound-down and IRONS finally drew to a close, a bigger problem loomed on the horizon. Over the second half of the year, the halls of the NRL began to hear murmurs about “the Launcher Problem”. Specifically, the lack of one, as Project Charybdis’s frustration attested. Opinion across the Department of Rocketry was hardening on the need to make firmer plans for the launching of Projects BOWDITCH and PAMOR, as well as for defining characteristics of potential future missions of interest like NOOE. With the Viper project squarely with industry for prototype production and the final Viking flight completed, Milton Rosen’s design team found itself turning its attention to the Launcher Problem. The team, however, found itself split by a heated debate about how to proceed once Viper was flight-verified and the BOWDITCH concept demonstration flights were commenced.
On one hand, Rosen himself championed the Viper Evolution program. The Department of Rocketry’s launcher would be developed in two phases. The first, the Viper 3, would consist of a Viper with a newly added third-stage for orbital insertion and the lengthening of the tankage of the first- and second-stages as necessary to allow a payload of 20 pounds (~9kg) to be placed into a low-orbit. This would be used to validate BOWDITCH on-orbit and gain valuable experience in boosting orbital payloads. From there, in the second phase, a Viper 3E – “E” for “Evolved” – would be constructed using that knowledge and advancements in rocket engines to increase its payload to the estimated 400 pounds (~182kg) required for a BOWDITCH satellite.
The Viper Evolution proposal met firm resistance internally and externally. From within, the Project BOWDITCH team was apprehensive about the promise from Project Orbiter about orbital access by 1956, a full year ahead of Rosen’s preliminary Viper 3 timetable, and with three times the initial payload. On the Viking/Viper team itself, meanwhile, dissent was anchored by Commander Robert Truax, who strenuously argued that the Viper Evolution program was insufficiently ambitious and would be utterly obsolete by the time it was able to launch BOWDITCH payloads. Aerojet was, likewise, distinctly unenthused, in no small part because of its own ongoing work on engines that would prove Truax right. (While the infamous quote “if we’re going to use a fattened rocket designed by a Nazi, let’s at least use the one designed this year,” that is often attributed to Truax is almost certainly fictional, it did aptly capture the simmering tension inside Rosen’s team.)
On the other hand, Truax – along with the Viper’s industry contractors – advocated for starting from scratch, as the Viper’s first-stage was essentially a fattened and elongated version of a rocket designed almost fifteen years earlier. Specifically, he championed Tethys. An entirely new two-stage rocket capable of delivering 8,000 pounds (3,800kg) to a 114-mile (185km) orbit. Preliminary engineering discussions had been conducted with both The Glenn L. Martin Company and Aerojet, with a belief that – based on their prior work with the Viking/Viper team -- Tethys could be delivered by the end of 1960. A 4-ton payload would be more than sufficient for any final BOWDITCH design and more besides, including orbiting a man in a ballistic return capsule. Tethys also provided immensely more potential for future growth. Its downside, of course, was that an entirely new rocket would be expensive and face significant technical risks. If Tethys was delayed, as was entirely possible, it could be 1963 or 1964 before BOWDITCH could launch. At least the Viper Evolution program was unlikely to fail and would be more cost-effective, even if its future growth was limited.
Like many of the decisions he had made in 1954, what to do with the Launcher Problem was not one which Captain Heinlein could resolve on his own. It was a question for the political branches, to whom he would be required to forward it on to, along with a recommendation on how they should proceed. This decision, at least, had the benefit of being clear-cut.
There could be no choice other than Tethys.
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Author's Notes
Oh boy. It feels like significant things are finally happening, and they kinda are, so let me try to separate big butterfly-driven moving parts. This isn't to condescend to my dear readers. It is merely to help those who are not avid space cadets keep track, especially as we're starting to the OTL Project By A Different Name thing:
- Project Orbiter was a competitor to Project Vanguard to launch the first American satellite. Most of this is OTL: von Braun proposed a joint Army-Navy mission that both Army and Navy leadership were onboard with and a Jupiter-C infamously launched in September 1956 that could have put a payload into orbit had the development of what would become the Juno I fourth-stage been allowed to occur. The White House was also keenly interested in a "peaceful" satellite be the first launched to establish a clear-skies precedent. The key difference is that OTL, Project Orbiter expected a payload to be furnished by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (One of the largest technical reasons for Project Vanguard being chosen over Project Orbiter was that the former addressed the and proposed payload, while Orbiter only focused on the rocket.) TTL, thanks to the existence of NPL's Department of Rocketry and Project BOWDITCH, von Braun actively wishes to cultivate a partnership with NPL to satisfy the President and acquire a payload.
- Viper 3 is essentially OTL's Vanguard rocket, whose TV3 iteration infamously exploded on live television. I say "essentially" because Vanguard was assembled three years after the Viking program ended from a parts-bin that turned into a nightmare to make fit together. In the LEVIATHAN Rising TL, Viper is a proto-Vanguard (composing what would be Vanguard's first- and second-stages) and an intermediate step created while Viking is still flying. So the engineering should have many fewer surprises and things should fit together much better given Viper (theoretically) ironing out most of the bugs.
- Tethys is OTL's Titan rocket. OTL, Titan was greenlit as the "back-up" USAF ICBM program in 1955, intended to only go into full development if the "primary" ICBM -- Atlas -- failed. The Glenn L. Martin Company (the future Martin of Martin-Marienetta and eventually Lockheed-Martin) was the major contractor for Titan and, in 1955, broke up the team that had worked on Viking with the Naval Research Laboratory and reassigned most of them to work on Titan. The break-up of that team is (one of) the reasons that's argued to have caused Project Vanguard to have been such a dumpster fire. TTL, with Viking ending up in a slightly different home, Martin's effectively proposing Titan to the Navy as a pure launch vehicle and will continue a partnership with the NRL that's lasted half-a-decade. Stats are from the GLV Titan II, the earliest of the launchers I believe flew, because of the weirdness where Titan I wasn't ever used as anything other than an ICBM. Six years to operationality at Normal Funding is probably optimistic, but Titan I got there with two years of Back-Up To Atlas Funding and then two-and-a-half of ALL THE MONEY post-Sputnik, so I'd call it a wash. (And there's no reason to think our little Soviet friend who beeps at twenty mega-cycles isn't coming on schedule...)
- It was an inevitability Robert Truax would show up. You can't write about a naval program without reckoning with him. He being OTL's proponent of Sea Dragon, the magnificently ridiculous launcher depicted most memorably in For All Mankind. And as fun as it would be for him to just show up and go straight to building giant rockets in shipyards (and smiting naysayers with a 360 MN thrust-plume), you've got to ease into things. Good (sea-launched, 550-metric-tonnes-to-600km-orbit) things come to those who wait. But this is not terribly far from OTL, as at this time, he was working on Viking and then went on to detached duty helping with Thor. So if Tethys goes forward, he'll just be spending the next few years working on that instead.
Given that Joseph Kaplan quote re: von Braun and "arrogant Nazi bastards" comes from the Ad Hoc Committee on Special Projects and his bending every effort to ensure the choosing of Project Vanguard over Project Orbiter, I'm sure you can start imagining all kinds of things.
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Visions of Futures Past #1: Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman
Visions of Futures Past #1: Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman
Realistic Designs (R-Z) [>] SPS Intrepid (FSN-14)
One of the seminal works of Golden Age science-fiction owes its existence to the early Cold War’s all-encompassing paranoia.
In 1954, the Walt Disney Company and Wernher von Braun partnered to adapt the 1952 Collier’s series “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” for the Tomorrowland segments of the Disneyland television show. Most of the Collier’s panel were brought on as technical consultants with one notable exception: Captain Robert Heinlein, who declined and cited the current nature of his professional obligations would not allow for him to meaningfully contribute. At the time, almost all of Heinlein’s work with the Naval Research Laboratory’s Department of Rocketry was considered top secret (which was also dreaming even bigger dreams than von Braun), and he feared he might inadvertently disclose what were considered state secrets.
Undeterred, Disney’s concept executive Ward Kimball pressed him on what he would be comfortable consulting on. As they corresponded, a vision of a project began to coalesce about which Heinlein’s enthusiasm was palpable: An adaptation of the classic military coming-of-age story, where a callow youth attends an officer’s school and then ventures to distant shores, finding adventure while shouldering responsibility beyond his experience, and in the process becomes a man. All set in a World of Tomorrow, where honest-to-God atomic rockets plied the spaceways, while those nefarious Martians plotted and those pesky Belters schemed. Kimball took the idea back to Disney, where it was greenlit by Walt Disney himself subject to one condition: It had to star Donald Duck, for it was only appropriate that Disney’s premiere sailor star in something set in the Sea of Stars. And so was born the original Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman serials, which would air between 1956 and 1958.
And what would those serials be without the SPS Intrepid? The fair maid of the Solar Patrol, bearing the pennant of the 14th atomic frigate commissioned, it’s still difficult to find depictions of starships in visual media that pay more attention to their working details than the Intrepid. An entire generation learned the basics of Newtonian motion from watching the Intrepid’s episodic turning-and-burning and the three manners in which heat may be transferred when her radiators were imperiled. And we also learned that the only way for a rocket to properly land is on its tail, as God and…well, Robert Heinlein intended. (A phrase I first heard in reference to staff assigned to Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman expressing their exasperation with the Department of Rocketry’s exacting and uncompromising “consultations”.)
Of course, as this was the mid-Fifties, there are parts that haven’t aged particularly well. The Intrepid’s “nuclear light-bulb” was…let’s charitably call it ambitious, as with a mono-H exhaust velocity of a hundred-twenty-miles a second, my slide-rule tells me that’s a specific-impulse in the 18,000-second range. Without even getting into the rather optimistic use of mono-H remass in the first place. But the Intrepid still Respects Science for the most part by modern standards, let alone for something that was created prior to the orbiting of the first satellites. And the Golden Age Disney animation that brought her to life remains timeless.
Besides, the modern-day reboot gave us Sturmbannfuhrer Ludwig von Mises. What atomic midshipman can’t smile at that? I’m not heartless, you know.
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Author’s Notes:
I’ll be honest: I wanted to do something a little different today, so I thought I’d roll out Visions of Futures Past, something I think I’ve referenced in earlier comments. These posts are an interlude done as write-ups from an in-universe, modern-day website called, appropriately enough, Visions of Futures Past. VoFP occupies roughly the place in the space enthusiast taxonomy as OTL’s Atomic Rockets. (From whom I shall shamelessly steal, because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.) As ITTL, you can’t very well just call a site “Atomic Rockets” when https://astro.navy.mil/atomicrockets is a valid URL. Numbers taken from Atomic Space Cruiser Polaris, because it’s a shame to waste perfectly good math, especially when I’m doing a falsetto of Mr. Chung in the first place.
Trying to envision sci-fi – and wider pop culture – without Robert Heinlein is difficult, given just how foundation stuff like Space Cadet was for a lot of people. Niven’s attempt in The Return of William Proxmire to fashion a patch is amusing and serves the narrative role in a short story, but for something wider-ranging like LEVIATHAN Rising, a more durable solution was needed. And so we get the metanarrative Ouroboros of Robert Heinlein staying in the Navy and not writing his sci-fi and then ending up writing his sci-fi for the Navy.
But, really, this needed done mostly for the Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman expanded universe that, eventually, gives us Darkwing Duck IN SPAAAAAAAACE!.
Realistic Designs (R-Z) [>] SPS Intrepid (FSN-14)
One of the seminal works of Golden Age science-fiction owes its existence to the early Cold War’s all-encompassing paranoia.
In 1954, the Walt Disney Company and Wernher von Braun partnered to adapt the 1952 Collier’s series “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” for the Tomorrowland segments of the Disneyland television show. Most of the Collier’s panel were brought on as technical consultants with one notable exception: Captain Robert Heinlein, who declined and cited the current nature of his professional obligations would not allow for him to meaningfully contribute. At the time, almost all of Heinlein’s work with the Naval Research Laboratory’s Department of Rocketry was considered top secret (which was also dreaming even bigger dreams than von Braun), and he feared he might inadvertently disclose what were considered state secrets.
Undeterred, Disney’s concept executive Ward Kimball pressed him on what he would be comfortable consulting on. As they corresponded, a vision of a project began to coalesce about which Heinlein’s enthusiasm was palpable: An adaptation of the classic military coming-of-age story, where a callow youth attends an officer’s school and then ventures to distant shores, finding adventure while shouldering responsibility beyond his experience, and in the process becomes a man. All set in a World of Tomorrow, where honest-to-God atomic rockets plied the spaceways, while those nefarious Martians plotted and those pesky Belters schemed. Kimball took the idea back to Disney, where it was greenlit by Walt Disney himself subject to one condition: It had to star Donald Duck, for it was only appropriate that Disney’s premiere sailor star in something set in the Sea of Stars. And so was born the original Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman serials, which would air between 1956 and 1958.
And what would those serials be without the SPS Intrepid? The fair maid of the Solar Patrol, bearing the pennant of the 14th atomic frigate commissioned, it’s still difficult to find depictions of starships in visual media that pay more attention to their working details than the Intrepid. An entire generation learned the basics of Newtonian motion from watching the Intrepid’s episodic turning-and-burning and the three manners in which heat may be transferred when her radiators were imperiled. And we also learned that the only way for a rocket to properly land is on its tail, as God and…well, Robert Heinlein intended. (A phrase I first heard in reference to staff assigned to Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman expressing their exasperation with the Department of Rocketry’s exacting and uncompromising “consultations”.)
Of course, as this was the mid-Fifties, there are parts that haven’t aged particularly well. The Intrepid’s “nuclear light-bulb” was…let’s charitably call it ambitious, as with a mono-H exhaust velocity of a hundred-twenty-miles a second, my slide-rule tells me that’s a specific-impulse in the 18,000-second range. Without even getting into the rather optimistic use of mono-H remass in the first place. But the Intrepid still Respects Science for the most part by modern standards, let alone for something that was created prior to the orbiting of the first satellites. And the Golden Age Disney animation that brought her to life remains timeless.
Besides, the modern-day reboot gave us Sturmbannfuhrer Ludwig von Mises. What atomic midshipman can’t smile at that? I’m not heartless, you know.
*=*=*=*=*
Author’s Notes:
I’ll be honest: I wanted to do something a little different today, so I thought I’d roll out Visions of Futures Past, something I think I’ve referenced in earlier comments. These posts are an interlude done as write-ups from an in-universe, modern-day website called, appropriately enough, Visions of Futures Past. VoFP occupies roughly the place in the space enthusiast taxonomy as OTL’s Atomic Rockets. (From whom I shall shamelessly steal, because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.) As ITTL, you can’t very well just call a site “Atomic Rockets” when https://astro.navy.mil/atomicrockets is a valid URL. Numbers taken from Atomic Space Cruiser Polaris, because it’s a shame to waste perfectly good math, especially when I’m doing a falsetto of Mr. Chung in the first place.
Trying to envision sci-fi – and wider pop culture – without Robert Heinlein is difficult, given just how foundation stuff like Space Cadet was for a lot of people. Niven’s attempt in The Return of William Proxmire to fashion a patch is amusing and serves the narrative role in a short story, but for something wider-ranging like LEVIATHAN Rising, a more durable solution was needed. And so we get the metanarrative Ouroboros of Robert Heinlein staying in the Navy and not writing his sci-fi and then ending up writing his sci-fi for the Navy.
But, really, this needed done mostly for the Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman expanded universe that, eventually, gives us Darkwing Duck IN SPAAAAAAAACE!.
Heh... though on question? Wouldn't it be the Bureau of Rocketry being Navy?
Considering where that "Atomic Midshipman" comes from I can see that happening
Good update
Couple of points? "Project Orbiter" actually used the Redstone IRBM of which the improved version to test Jupiter parts was dubbed the Jupiter C and Von Braun was aware that the basic Jupiter C could loft a possible satellite which is where the initial Project Orbiter (as an Army only concept) came from. This was still when the Jupiter missile itself was still a joint Army/Navy missile development project but OTL the Army did not consult with the Navy on the idea. Kudo's for finding a way to get them to cooperate more
But that kind of leaves you still having two competing LV development programs which is ripe for political cutting. Keep in mind cooperation or no both the Redstone/Jupiter C and Jupiter itself are straight up military missiles which Ike wanted to avoid. (And still designed by the "Ex-Nazi" which was another problem)
A pure launch vehicle at this point has to directly compete with Naval submariner missile development for both funding and support which is likely a loosing battle. The joint "Project Orbiter" concept has some merit because the Army is paying for and developing the launch vehicle. If TTL's follow up is anything like OTL then the Navy dropped out of Jupiter development as a missile due to issues with shipboard liquid propellant use and turned to developing the Polaris solid propellant missile all on their own and the reasoning is still there in any case. The Navy might still toss some funding towards the Army in looking to develop a better LV than the Jupiter C Redstone in the actual Jupiter but they wouldn't really see a reason to put funding into a brand new LV especially something of the Titan class. Worse the Titan was specifically noted for and set up as a development backup to the Atlas with more payload and more capability from the start so I don't see any plausible reason it would be pitched to or accepted by the Navy.
Now once things more along a bit and the Army team gets some traction with "Super-ICBM/Launch Vehicle" that will become the Saturn from ARPA they Navy could jump in and support that.
Well Truax is already known for his rocket fighter concept, (@1946) and he's already got ideas for experiments for Sea-Bee, (Aerobee sea-launch) and Sea-Horse (WAC Corporal missile sea launch) but he's just as willing and able to work on any missile or launcher the Navy is working on
But his initial Sea-Launch ideas were rather modest to say the least You've already mentioned the main 'enemy' which is the Air Force and they don't play well with others to say the least
Budget wise both the Army and Navy were still enjoying Korea's largess in funding but while Ike wasn't as bad a Truman once the war is over he's going to want to reign in military spending and like Truman he was a believer in Air Force strategic attack with nuclear weapons be that by ICBM or manned bomber. In either case he tended to regulate both the Army and Navy to secondary roles. So likely cuts are coming.The problem was that was a toned down version of what Ike supposedly said about Von Braun specifically and a clear hint as to why "Project Orbiter" would not be chosen. The good news is that you've given them Naval support which could change some minds but not if the Navy is trying to develop an ICBM (Tethys) all on it's own. The IRONS report says it all in that any launch vehicle is also an ICBM of sorts and it would swiftly come down to choosing one that has application for Navy use (Polaris) or one that only has a limited Navy use (Tethys) and the Navy will choose the one they can deploy as a weapon.
I like that the Navy has actually reached out to the other services to work jointly which was what the USAF was 'supposed' to do OTL through ARPA. Hopefully they have better luck than OTL's outcome.
Channeling you inner Narath the nearly Wise and doing a credible job of it no less
Loved the cultural and specific call outs and yes I can easily see TTL's "Space Cadet" being "Atomic Midshipmen" under these circumstances. You DO realize you'll have to post some of the serials and plot-lines now?
You did well
I assume this butterflies away Woody Woodpeckers brush with Sci-Fi fame though which is a shame Randy
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I think those two 'heads' will be worn down by constantly butting into each other
Randy
Technically, Heinlein's shop is attached to the Naval Research Laboratory. The NRL, from what I understand, at that time was organized into departments which were in turn organized into separate branches. So Project BOWDITCH, for example, is run by the Satellites Branch of the Department of Rocketry of the Naval Research Laboratory. (Chapter 6 is actually intended to address the internal structure of the Department of Rocketry, but creating a metafictional Space Cadet send-up was more pressing.) And given that the very first sentence of the TL referenced something called the "Astronautical Service of the United States Navy", it's safe to assume that the NRL will not always be home to the Navy's rocketeers.
Couple of points? "Project Orbiter" actually used the Redstone IRBM of which the improved version to test Jupiter parts was dubbed the Jupiter C and Von Braun was aware that the basic Jupiter C could loft a possible satellite which is where the initial Project Orbiter (as an Army only concept) came from. This was still when the Jupiter missile itself was still a joint Army/Navy missile development project but OTL the Army did not consult with the Navy on the idea. Kudo's for finding a way to get them to cooperate more
Good catch re: Jupiter-C. I had (mistakenly) thought it went Redstone --> Jupiter-A --> Jupiter-C. And that the PGM-19 Jupiter was tied into that evolution, when it's really its own little universe, even if it's also a Redstone-descended system. All of which were being worked on contemporaneously in the 1954-ish period being discussed in Chapter 5. Given how many rocketry projects von Braun was working on called "Jupiter", you might he has a complex of some kind.
I'm also seriously tempted to go and edit that portion to just have Heinlein suggest calling Jupiter-C something different right out of the box, and they both immediately cotton onto the name "Juno", for space would be ruled by the king of the rocketry gods PGM-19 Jupiter's atomic fury and by his side the peaceful queen of the rocketry gods Juno satellite-launcher. Future readers, if this is the scene you saw, know that it was different once!
Working as intended. This is all going somewhere, for which Ike's own notions about "military" and "civilian" rockets will play a significant (and lasting) role.
It's worth remembering that Chapter 5 left off specifically at the end of 1954. So the U.S. Navy hasn't yet signed onto co-development of the PGM-19 Jupiter, which came in 1955 with the changing of the guard following Arleigh Burke becoming Chief of Naval Operations. The presence of a serious proposal for vehicle that, while in no way presented as an ICBM, could easily be turned into one, is going to produce interesting butterflies for the discussion to sign onto the PGM-19 program. It's also going to cause interesting ripples for the ICBM discussions that were had in 1955 which OTL greenlit Atlas and Titan. As the SECNAV is keenly aware of those impending discussions and the Deputy SECDEF at this time will be Robert Anderson, who was previously the SECNAV and who is acquainted with the precise brand of innocent insanity kicking around NRL TTL. So the Navy immediately finds itself in the quandary of getting into a pissing match with the USAF if it greenlights Tethys, because the USAF will argue (not incorrectly, even if it's not being pushed as one) that it's a bloody ICBM and by right of Curtis LeMay's hard-on for atomic hellfire it should belong to them. A USAF that will also shout from the rooftops the virtues of Atlas in the coming ICBM discussions, lest anyone think heretical thoughts like making them adopt a Navy-designed missile.
So plenty of good reasons to just shit-can Tethys. (Or make an inter-service peace-offering of turning it over to the USAF with a different name. "Titan", for example!) But, you know, letting the USAF win an inter-service fight that the USAF started is a pretty powerful motivation to push forward. Especially as it'd set a bad precedent in an area where precedent-setting matters at this time. So it'll be interesting to see what kinds of headaches the Navy brass and political leadership get into. I mean, yeah, it's a foregone conclusion that Team Heinlein's probably going to win, as you need a rocket to start conquering space with, but I should hope I've established by this point that what's fun about this TL is the details and consequences of that victory.
Well Truax is already known for his rocket fighter concept, (@1946) and he's already got ideas for experiments for Sea-Bee, (Aerobee sea-launch) and Sea-Horse (WAC Corporal missile sea launch) but he's just as willing and able to work on any missile or launcher the Navy is working on
Legitly, part of the Project BOWDITCH suborbital testing regime is sea-launched Vipers that're an outgrowth of Truax's earlier work, as you'd need to verify signal strength over water and the ability of a ship underway to pick up the Doppler shift. Given the relatively limited travel ranges you're working with when dealing with two-thirds of a Vanguard, sea-launch is attractive for trying to test in actual operational conditions. (Might a certain Father of the Nuclear Navy also take a day-trip out to observe some proof-of-concept testing involving the launching of submerged rockets? Maaaaaaybe. We're overdue for a Hyram Rickover cameo.)
You've already mentioned the main 'enemy' which is the Air Force and they don't play well with others to say the least
I think it's useful to try to keep scale in mind here. Thus far, Team Heinlein started as a single project with a total number of souls involved in the dozens to a small bureau with three meaningful ones (BOWDITCH, PAMOR, and Viking), plus a glorified astronautics club (Project Charybdis), and a smattering of floating staff who support the day's insanity, with several hundred souls in total employed. It's why the Department of Rocketry's own initiatives thus far has been doing big picture dreaming and definitional studies, because while they aren't without money, it's overwhelmingly allocated to the major pre-existing line-items of BOWDITCH, PAMOR and Viking and leftovers consisting of a few thousands of dollars here and there to augment raw enthusiasm. (It's why there's precious little inter-service territoriality in Team Heinlein, because playing with shinier toys is the priority when you're a small fish in a very big five-cornered pond.)
Part of the upside of this is that they're highly resistant to cuts from their current state, as most of its major programming is tied one way or another into BOWDITCH and the Navy's been willing to fund that since the pre-Korea fiscal environment, so the interest isn't going anywhere. What makes Tethys such an explosive -- and dangerous -- proposition for Heinlein's shop is that it sets the Department of Rocketry on playing an entirely different game, because it's inevitable that once Tethys's basic capabilities leak into the wider Department that fairly detailed studies for manned missions are going to burst into existence, regardless of whether they're actually commissioned. Along with requests to start doing serious engineering work with industry. That's going to put a target on the back of the Department of Rocketry both inside the Navy (because of setting the USAF on the war-path by merely proposing things) and outside of it (how receptive the Army and NACA will be to good-spirited cooperation when manned flight starts getting seriously talked about is a question with interesting and spoilerific consequences).
To tie into earlier: Working as intended. You're not wrong that in a world of equals, the Fleet Ballistic Missile Program gets priority over everything else. But 1955 isn't a world of equals re: SLBMS, as ballistic missiles and payloads just aren't where they need to be yet to truly meet the Navy's needs and the Navy, institutionally, isn't ready to get on the SLBM bandwagon. While the Navy does get on-board with the PGM-19, it always hated cryogenic propellants and exited within a year anyway, after the Nobska Exercises cause a sea change in how the Navy approaches ballistic missiles and caused a serious reappraisal on the usage of storable propellants due to anticipated reductions in the size of nuclear weapons which would still take a few years to achieve. So regardless of what ICBM program the USN initial signs onto, be it Jupiter or a militarized Tethys, there's no reason to think they won't be exiting for the OTL Fleet Ballistic Missile Program (and eventually Polaris) on-schedule. And there's potentially interesting fights to be had in the Eisenhauer White House about the merits of a highly capable "civilian" rocket in Tethys, if there's belief in its merits, and what might be done to demonstrate its "peaceful" nature despite being an easy conversion into an ICBM.
Loved the cultural and specific call outs and yes I can easily see TTL's "Space Cadet" being "Atomic Midshipmen" under these circumstances. You DO realize you'll have to post some of the serials and plot-lines now?
Oh, we'll get there. It's worth noting that there were significantly more serials in the expanded Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman expanded universe through the rest of the Fifties and into the Sixties, but the originals/classics are those which were directly worked on with Heinlein and in which the Department of Rocketry was deeply involved for technical consultancy. Events, needless to say, quickly demanded Heinlein step back as his day-job demanded more and more attention. Don't know why, though. Nothing meaningful happened in the realm of spaceflight in 1956 or 1957, right?
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Given the Navy's need for solids, could RAH take a proto-Polaris and put a couple of upper stages on it for an orbiter?
No, for several reasons:
1. The TL is currently at ~January 1, 1955. The Fleet Ballistic Missile Program, which is what will create Polaris, is still two years away from happening if everything happens as OTL. (Which even if they don't, there's nothing (yet) to accelerate the coming of the FBMP.) And once initiated, it still took four years for Polaris to become a flying thing, because it was from the very beginning an entirely new system and was a major technical achievement for it. By 1961, Team Heinlein would hope its own pet project -- Tethys/OTL Titan -- would be fully operational. And, even if it wasn't, there would also be Atlas and (maybe) TTL's Thor to choose from, both of which would be markedly more capable platforms than a Polaris-derived launcher.
2. Polaris is a terrible platform to use as a launcher. It's very much an IRBM and makes no pretensions about its orbital capabilities, because it doesn't need them. All it has to do is have a range of a few thousand miles and be small enough to fit inside a specially built submarine, which it does. The size issue is appreciable: Polaris has a diameter of 1.4m (54") versus PGM-19 Jupiter's 2.67m (105") versus Tethys/Titan's 3.05m (120"). It's just not going to work at a time when the trendline for every new booster is greater size and capability, especially when Polaris by itself isn't able to loft anything but the smallest of payloads into orbit. (Like, payloads measured in grams, as the thing really isn't supposed to be doing this.)
My thoughts had come from the other direction: Trying to develop strap-on solid-fuel boosters derived from the Polaris parts bin. I'd need to do more research on the financial viability of that, though, as I am unsure if there are cost savings to be had from that. (I've no earthly clue at the moment how cost-effective it'd be, as I'm not sure how efficient the Polaris missile's first-stage engine is.)