Most early possible flight to moon?

TFSmith121

Banned
Three-fault redundancy is a great goal to have;

Three-fault redundancy is a great goal to have; it's not a requirement.

Given an early enough start, a multiple element mission architecture - launch to LEO station and rendezvous; LEO to lunar orbital station and rendezvous; lunar orbit to lunar surface landing - is possible, and reduces both the necessary communications load and on-board electronics requirements.

Would it be hairy? Sure, but it wasn't like the Apollo architecture was a no fault system either.

Best,
 
Three-fault redundancy is a great goal to have; it's not a requirement.

Given an early enough start, a multiple element mission architecture - launch to LEO station and rendezvous; LEO to lunar orbital station and rendezvous; lunar orbit to lunar surface landing - is possible, and reduces both the necessary communications load and on-board electronics requirements.

Would it be hairy? Sure, but it wasn't like the Apollo architecture was a no fault system either.

Best,

Are you proposing the guidance system be back on Earth for lunar descent and ascent stages of the mission?
 

Delta Force

Banned
Are you proposing the guidance system be back on Earth for lunar descent and ascent stages of the mission?

Unmanned probes successfully landed on the Moon, so constant guidance isn't necessary. A person could look out for mountains, avoid landing on rough or inclined terrain, and generally avoid some of the issues thought to have led to the failure of some unmanned missions that successfully made it to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies but failed before landing.

Also, the signal delay between Earth and the Moon is only a few seconds. Studies have shown that people could operate unmanned vehicles on the Moon in real time without much issue.
 
Unmanned probes successfully landed on the Moon, so constant guidance isn't necessary. A person could look out for mountains, avoid landing on rough or inclined terrain, and generally avoid some of the issues thought to have led to the failure of some unmanned missions that successfully made it to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies but failed before landing.

Also, the signal delay between Earth and the Moon is only a few seconds. Studies have shown that people could operate unmanned vehicles on the Moon in real time without much issue.

Unmanned vehicles on the surface are operating at a lot slower speed than a lander descending from lunar orbit.

The Surveyor probes took a direct path to the Moon and didn't orbit it. Doing a lunar orbit rendezvous adds more computation to the overall mission. I am not saying it is impossible. I am just asking what the proposed mission mode is.

I would recommend to select a landing site and then land a probe ahead of time to act as a beacon and survey the site. You then launch several rockets into orbit to build up what you need for a lunar landing and Earth Return. You then launch a 2-man crew. The entire vehicle lands on the lunar surface with guidance from Earth and using the already landed beacon. You then launch with a earth return vehicle from the surface. This approach adds mass but eliminates all the tricky maneuvers in lunar orbit that require more computational power.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
That could be one approach; another would be a lunar orbital

Are you proposing the guidance system be back on Earth for lunar descent and ascent stages of the mission?

That could be one approach; another would be a lunar orbital station large enough to provide real time data to a landing craft.

Again, my estimate was (ROM, SWAG, etc.) 10 years of concentrated Manhattan Project level of effort as an option in comparison to 25 years of intermittant effort (1945-70) that ended with Project Apollo.

Keeping things as simple as possible, with a 1945 kickoff (say, a Anglo-American vs. Nazi Germany-occupied Europe cold war) I could see a basic building block approach around multiple RP-1/LH2 analogues of Atlas-Centaur or Titan-Centaur (with an RP-1-fuelled Titan, rather than the exotics), with the immediate need for LEO reconaissance. Lunar exploration is essentially the cover for the recon program.

Here's a (very back of the envelope) timeline:

1945: Manhattan II kicks-off;
1950: LEO Manned Orbiting Lab/KH level recon capabilities, but using HSF rather than automated systems;
1955: Orbital workshop to repair and sustain constellations of multiple MOLs; manned lunar fly-bys (free return) as cover
1960: Lunar orbital station as base for descent/ascent; first lunar landing.

That's 15 years of concentrated effort, as opposed to 25 years of intermittant effort historically; the basic launch vehicle will be substantially smaller than any of the Saturn variants, but there would be heavy reliance on rendezvous and both earth orbital and lunar orbital staitons, with what amounts to the classic concept of a "three legged" trip - ascent to and descent from LEO in a roughly Titan IV-Big Gemini type vehicle to a modular analogue of Skylab; department from the LEO station in a "flying dutchman" type EDS (clustered Centaurs?) for the Earth-Moon leg, to rendezvous with a lunar-orbital MOL-equivalent; department from the lunar orbital station in a reusable descent-ascent module roughly equivalent to a LM....

It wouldn't be cheap, but technically it would be doable, I think; multiple rendezvous is not simple, but it is fairly robust and with active piloting(which I think would be necessary given the state of electronics in the 1950s), it would actually be necessary to focus on HSF.

My two megabucks, anyway.;)

Best,
 
Multiple launches and EOR and an orbital workshop could allow attaching tanks to an earth-moon-earth-only vehicle, with a landing craft from lunar orbit; little easier to attach or detach what amount to drop tanks as modules than to pump RP-1, LH2, and/or LOX from a tanker into the EMEO vehicle.
TFSmith121 said:
That could be one approach; another would be a lunar orbital station large enough to provide real time data to a landing craft.

Again, my estimate was (ROM, SWAG, etc.) 10 years of concentrated Manhattan Project level of effort as an option in comparison to 25 years of intermittant effort (1945-70) that ended with Project Apollo.

Keeping things as simple as possible, with a 1945 kickoff (say, a Anglo-American vs. Nazi Germany-occupied Europe cold war) I could see a basic building block approach around multiple RP-1/LH2 analogues of Atlas-Centaur or Titan-Centaur (with an RP-1-fuelled Titan, rather than the exotics), with the immediate need for LEO reconaissance. Lunar exploration is essentially the cover for the recon program.

Here's a (very back of the envelope) timeline:

1945: Manhattan II kicks-off;
1950: LEO Manned Orbiting Lab/KH level recon capabilities, but using HSF rather than automated systems;
1955: Orbital workshop to repair and sustain constellations of multiple MOLs; manned lunar fly-bys (free return) as cover
1960: Lunar orbital station as base for descent/ascent; first lunar landing.

That's 15 years of concentrated effort, as opposed to 25 years of intermittant effort historically; the basic launch vehicle will be substantially smaller than any of the Saturn variants, but there would be heavy reliance on rendezvous and both earth orbital and lunar orbital staitons, with what amounts to the classic concept of a "three legged" trip - ascent to and descent from LEO in a roughly Titan IV-Big Gemini type vehicle to a modular analogue of Skylab; department from the LEO station in a "flying dutchman" type EDS (clustered Centaurs?) for the Earth-Moon leg, to rendezvous with a lunar-orbital MOL-equivalent; department from the lunar orbital station in a reusable descent-ascent module roughly equivalent to a LM....

It wouldn't be cheap, but technically it would be doable, I think; multiple rendezvous is not simple, but it is fairly robust and with active piloting(which I think would be necessary given the state of electronics in the 1950s), it would actually be necessary to focus on HSF.
These look really good to me.:cool: I'd make only one small change: rather than a man-rated booster, swap to something akin to a large X-15 & launch from under a B-52. (The idea being, it's intended to lead to a "large" {6-place?} civil aerospace craft.)

Does that make it easier? Or harder?:eek::(
 

Zagan

Donor
Earliest possible? To get a man on the Moon... somehow... not necessary alive? :p
Antiquity! Have a great volcanic eruption blast him! It is known that volcanic material from Earth gets to the Moon sometimes. So if he jumps into the crater... :);)
 
Of course, Cyrano de Bergerac claims to have visited the moon before 1650 already. He did so by covering himself in the bone marrow of a freshly slaughtered oxen, as it is widely known that the full moon will suck the marrow out of a bovine's bones. Of course this stipulates that he must have been naked during his flight, which for an exploration team might not be practical. (where do you put your flag and your camera for instance). Still, if a serious scholar would have looked more deeply into his methods, we might have gotten to the moon in 1776 already.
 
But if we had better rockets earlier on, would we have aimed for the moon right away?

First of all, in "The Right Stuff" Tom Woolfe claims that the US lost three years at the start of the space race because president Eisenhower shut down the manned spaceflight studies of the army and air force because he wanted his new agency Nasa to be the sole organization going into space. And it took Nasa the better part of three years to get from an agency on paper to an actual entity.

Then again: without Nasa, there would not only be a space race between the US and the USSR, but also one between the Army and the Air Force... So while we did loose three years jn the short term, in the long term we eliminated lots of lost time over duplicate research and lots of budget wars in Washington.

Which brings me to my main point: If the US... Even just the US Air Force, had the rocketry needed and had put a man into space before the Russians, would Kennedy still set that ambitious goal to go to the moon by 'the end of the decade'? I mean, it set the timetable and forced Nasa to skip some other projects in favor of a direct moonschot. If the US would have won leg one of the space race, my guess is they would go ahead with the 'safe' plan of first building a space station and then using that station to assemble a moon lander. With all this, we might have seen men on the moon only in 1975 instead of 1968, and if Nasa would get hit by budget cuts in the 1970s as hard as in OTL, we would have to wait for president Reagan to make the moon a priority again and see the moon landing compete with Star Wars III
 

Driftless

Donor
Arthur C. Clarke & British Interplanetary Society friends - HMS Moon Rocket (1930's) - thought project

In the summer of 1939, the members of the British Interplanetary Society may have been the only optimists left in Europe. Nazi Germany was steadily building up its military machine, and the continent appeared to be slipping inexorably toward another devastating conflict.

But the small band of English eccentrics that made up the BIS had their attention elsewhere. Their gaze was fixed on the coming age of space travel, and more specifically on the problem of sending a rocket to the moon. They had formed their organization in 1933—at about the time rocket societies were blooming in Germany, Russia, and the United States—dedicating themselves to “the stimulation of public interest in the possibility of interplanetary travel…and the conducting of practical research in connection with such problems.”

From 1937 to 1939, about a dozen armchair astronauts on the BIS “Technical Committee” played the game by carrying out the first detailed study of a manned lunar mission, from propulsion to payload to pressure suits. Rather than dream up an anti-gravity drive or some other staple of science fiction, they used only physical principles and technologies already in hand. Some of the ideas, like a propulsion system based on 2,000 solid rocket motors, would certainly not have worked, while others—aerobraking and a parachute descent to Earth, a three-man crew, and a focus on geological prospecting once the moon had been attained—proved amazingly prescient.

Those thoughts just give some evidence that informed discussions were taking place at an early date.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Only issue with that is how do you get everything else into orbit?

These look really good to me.:cool: I'd make only one small change: rather than a man-rated booster, swap to something akin to a large X-15 & launch from under a B-52. (The idea being, it's intended to lead to a "large" {6-place?} civil aerospace craft.)

Does that make it easier? Or harder?:eek::(

More expensive.

Hypersonic gliding re-entry for a personnel carrier is one thing, but if you need boosters to throw the cargo into LEO, may as well adopt ballistic re-entry and develop more dual-use hardware.

Best,
 
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