Again the re-reading of that TASSEL report kind of brought home the 'thinking' of the time in that one of the main reasons for 'three' crew was to have someone on 'duty' at all times because at the time (late '50s through early '60s OTL as well) "communications" was actually a problem with the orbital vehicle being "out-of-contact" with the ground for large segments of time due to a lack of surface stations. (Granted the Navy is going to quickly consider using ships as communications stations and relays the ability of most 'normal' ships to support such is rather minimal and there fore you need to get into the idea of dedicated support ships which cost you even more money....)
Mini-track was never as 'good' as it was hoped to be specifically because it was never as integrated or efficient as it was envisioned to be and it took OTL Apollo levels of spending for the US (and near such for the USSR) to get a truly world-wide tracking and data system up and running. The less you have financially and support wise the less you have capability and technology wise...
And a lot of the utility is "baked-in" from the start in that (for example) OTL the Soviets had bigger boosters and therefore bigger capsules whereas the US was limited on boosters and therefore limited on capsule space. Hence Vostok could take one, two or three with a bit of stuffing (albeit the latter was a one-time stunt the two-person "Voshkod" was arguably 'operationally' possible for longer use) while Mercury was never going to be able to take more than one person* no matter how much you 'rebuilt' it so the US was 'stuck' until the planned "Apollo" capsule came on-line. (*Arguably Gemini OTL was a pretty hefty rebuild of Mercury but that's also a minimum and given different priorities and assumptions a "two" person orbital crew may not make a lot of sense)
Which just goes to show that Future Bob Truax is right, the answer really is sea-launching everything. And then you can spend all the money you would've sunk into building expensive terrestrial launch pads into building a proper sky-gazing tracking network. And, of course, have a massive fight with the USAF and maybe the Army over who gets to control them.
The @9Klbs for Gemini was actually "in-the-ballpark" figured to be what the minimum (original) Apollo configuration was going to be, so two to three isn't going to seem that much of a stretch I suspect. ("Fun" part is a "bigger" initial spacecraft means that the US is going to find out all about SAdS sooner rather than later
)
It could! But this is the fun of early design specifications: They're always subject to change. But "stretch" is probably the wrong term to use in the context of a Gemini-like ballistic capsule where there's lots of talk of space stations. As Totally Not Big G is bound to show-up sooner or later, at least conceptually.
Well they ARE 'only suggestions' unless you tell them you really, really, really, (and by that we're not paying you a dime for anything OTHER than the requirements) mean it... At which point they only offer a half a dozen or so 'suggestions' for why you really, really, really need gold-plated tweezers for this concept...
Man in space soonest? Oh not a problem... Wait what? You want them to survive? grumble, grumble, grumble.. WHAT? And do "something useful" as well? Look if you're going to put these wild and irrational "requirements" on the contract...
This will unironically be a thing once the folks from the Atomic Reactors Branch get involved, as "safety" is going to become a four-letter word for contractors working with the Navy. As the safety culture that they're going to be demand be cultivated -- at least if Team Heinlein wants access to nuclear reactors -- frowns upon things like "orbital rendezvous without docking with all people and cargo transferred via spacewalking being SOP". (And Hyram Rickover considers every atomic pile used in nuclear-thermal rockets to be his rightful property.)
Actually I'd argue that Horizon by it's nature had more "Collier's" than LUNEX which was strictly more closer to Apollo than the former given it was essentially a "flag-n-footprints" design whereas Horizon was "built" (unrealistically to be sure) around a "military base on the Moon" as a basic goal. (Providing enough fodder for US Army Weapons Command "
Future Weapons" Division to jump on the band-wagon in 1965
Horizon looked to a permanent presence of both humanity and the military in space and on the Moon. (Unsurprising given who was involved in both Colliers and Horizon) LUNEX, like Apollo, only looked to a single immediate goal and how to resolve it. Any long term "planning" (beyond ensuring Air Force supremacy and requirements) were left to some "later" date.
Which is a fair point. And the fairer point to von Braun and the Redstone Arsenal/MSFC was that their pre-Apollo plans -- between
Collier's and Project Horizon -- got thrown into a cocked hat by Uncle Sam actually bankrolling the Saturn V and making a Lunar Rendezvous mission viable.
The Army at least kept some sense of space being the ultimate "high ground" (Horizon after all was 'supposed' to entail ending up with military missiles on the Moon aimed at Earth) while the Navy (OTL) focused more on the utility of space as it related to Naval surface and sub-surface operations. Both lost out to the superior Air Force PR and Congressional lobbying machine which saw most of the "space" missions handed over to the Air Force and many of which were 'shelved' simply because the Air Force was too focused on chasing the unclear 'shadows' of capability for missions it would never clearly define.
Yes, which is why the USAF is both a punching bag and a villain in TLs like this. As what the USAAC/USAF did between 1945 and 1961 was squander a vast amount of resources and opportunities as it first monopolized the military space program and then had it taken away (almost) entirely because of just how much of a Pentagon prestige-and-territory operation the USAF ran it as. Without getting into whether an expansive military space program was desirable, the USAF had precious little to show at the end of the day beyond its satellites. Blue Gemini withered on the vine, Dyna-Soar died to McNamaraism, Project Orion never got off the ground, and we never got our promised nuclear-turbojet planes with on-station endurances measured in months. I guess there was Project Pluto? Given that it's probably the most insidious strategic bomber the USAF ever developed, I suppose that means that Curtis LeMay really did win.
The trouble is that OTL the Air Force quite effectively used the fact that they didn't have a clear 'plan' to allow them to avoid defining either budgets or clear proposals (thereby avoiding 'discrediting' themselves) while at the same time claiming any and all 'success' as part of those ill-defined "plans" thereby gaining 'credit' for being forward looking and the obvious 'choice' to lead US military space efforts. (One of my 'hoped for' time-line concepts is what if the Army had retained the long range missile folks/mission
)
I'm sure there is absolutely no foreshadowing whatsoever in the Army's talking about a "nuclear stool" and how the only way to maintain harmony in American strategic nuclear policy is for each service to have its own robust deterrent that has rough parity with the other services in terms of importance.
Here the Navy is taking a huge leap (and I applaud it btw
) by sticking their necks out to actually define and plan for a viable militarization of space to the extent of not only seeking practical concepts (the Air Force mess that was SAMOS is a good story to read to get how trying to 'side-ways' a manned space capsule program disguised as a reconnaissance satellite can go wrong) but accurately addressing how to get from point A to point B rather than just assuming the "and then a miracle occurs" thing in-between just happens when needed.
One of the things I've always wondered was, to what extent, Ike's reticence about the military in space was the fault of a serious negative feedback loop. As there was no question he was deeply skeptical about the military in space -- at least in terms of manned missions -- and was predisposed to dislike any plan that involved
only military manned space programs. OTL both the Army and Air Force played into that horribly with Horizon and LUNEX, plans that had fuzzy-at-best military rationales behind them and which promised to preclude a civilian space program by doing the sorts of things that a NASA-like entity would naturally gravitate towards. And when someone you're predisposed to dislike does exactly what you're expecting them to, that is going to harden those predispositions, and make you even less receptive to their future proposals. What the Navy's doing TTL, at the very least, avoids such a feedback loop to the extent such is possible.
It's actually a lot deeper than that and as is pointed out in the "Orion" book by one of the pulse-unit designers the implications of JUST even how you design the pulse units and the path that leads down (Casba-Howitzer for example) means an awful lot of your ability to even consider a viable 'arms-control' environment goes right out the window if Orion drives are around. The ability to produce thousands of 'bombs' (and while pulse-units are lousy bombs they are still bombs) a month skews your capability to produce 'regular' weapons even if you keep the "lines" totally separate on paper.
What
does an arms control regime for Orions look like? I'd think you'd be looking at something like this, at a bare minimum:
1) Separate fissile material production facilities -- be it breeder reactors or uranium enrichment facilities -- which are jointly supervised and inspected by the signatories.
2) Separate pulse-unit assembly facilities which are jointly supervised and inspected by the signatories.
3) The right of all signatories to conduct on-demand inspections of all pulse-unit storage facilities.
4) The right of all signatories to supervise and inspect the transport and loading of all pulse-units.
5) The *Outer Space Treaty, whose provisions are understood to prevent the deployment of any nuclear-explosion-based space weapon (neutralizing the Casaba Howitzers of the world) as well as prohibiting deployment of strategic nuclear bombardment weaponry.
6) The right of all signatories to conduct on-pad and in-orbit on-demand inspections to verify compliance with the *Outer Space Treaty.
That's a system where the Soviets see the production of all Orion-related fuel and see it turned into pulse-units, as well as the ability to follow those pulse-units around from when they leave the factory to when they're floating around in orbit. While also (nominally) curing the problem of pulse-unit design leading to Casaba Howitzers. The problems which remain are fundamentally political, as it requires giving away bomb-making secrets (as the other side gets to see exactly how you build your pulse-unit) and that it requires no small amount of trust between the parties to make it work. There is also the cost, but I think we're talking on different scales of Orion usage. There's a difference between a production line to support launching Orions at a rate of once a year or two, plus resupply of pulse-units for in-orbit vessels, versus launching an Orion every two weeks which is implied by producing thousands of pulse-units per month.
Couple that with the fact that as noted above the design process and requirement to increase the efficiency of the "pulse-units" tends to lead towards certain lines of research both in miniaturization and energy direction (CB above) and your deterrence environment suddenly evaporates as now the 'need' to actually land a bomb near a target is replaced by the ability to literally vaporize any 'target' on Earth from hundreds if not thousands of miles out into space...
Have there ever been serious discussion of using orbital bomb-pumped directed energy weaponry to strike terrestrial targets? As my understanding of the little bits and pieces of Casaba Howitzer testing that've leaked was that their math and testing had shown trouble keeping "beam" coherence at ranges in the single-digits of miles in a vacuum, let alone with atmospheric interference. And that testing was done, IIRC, during the Casaba Howitzer's renaissance during the SDI era.
But that's also why you still need the *Outer Space Treaty as part of your arms control regime. Just to keep anyone from getting too cute and trying to build small production run "pulse-units" with rated outputs on par with Ivy Mike and Tsar Bomba.
Meaning an attack can literally come with almost no notice... Ya, there were a number of sound political reasons for avoiding deploying Orion despite how much of an awesome concept it is. You end up with having to develop things like the "Mini-Mag Orion" to get it t be politically viable and frankly that negates a lot of it's advantages. (Like being able to deploy to stop a short-notice impactor for example)
Oh, I've never questioned the very sound political reasons why it didn't happen. And am glad it didn't, because so long as the USAF is allowed within the same ZIP Code as a flying Orion drive, there'll be mad cacklings about the Deep Space Nuclear Deterrent. But this a TL where that might as well have the subtitle "How the USAF Learned to Live In the Astro-Doghouse", the proliferation and security problems can at least in theory be addressed. Whether the actual political climate allows for that is another question entirely.
