Hello everyone,
I'm new here.
Now, what I'd like you to think about is the following:
Could Sealion be succesful if the Germans built more Ju-52s to use for their paratroopers instead of He-111s?
I hope I've managed to ease up the atmosphere a bit with this.
I've been thinking of a different Space Race for quite some time now, and I've come up with the following POD:
Sputnik 1 is launched successfully, but R-7 failures start mounting dramatically (let's assume a combination of malfunctioning explosive charges on the lateral boosters and engine failures, with no new satellites getting into orbit until 1959. In fact, March '59 would see the US launch Pioneer 4, whilst the 10th(?) iteration of Sputnik 2 would make a nice fireball mid-air!
Khruschev calls in Glushko and Korolev for a talk, the 2 engineers fall out in front of Khruschev, who "mediates" the conflict by ordering Glushko to only work with Yangel on his little ICBM, while Korolev is ordered to cooperate with Kuznetsov even more than before, and to draw&build a completely new rocket... The result being that the NK-9 morphs into the rather more massive NK-15(V), and then this cute little bugger gets approved for production:
The work on most spacecrafts should proceed like it did IOTL, possibly the Soviet efforts might be even more fruitful due to there being no haste... there's nothing available to loft them into space anyway!
And then, in '60, we have the 1st flight tests of this new rocket [do keep in mind that it is, from a design perspective far simpler than the R-7 ever was, that Korolev & his team have accumulated a fair bit of experience by now] with... guess what! A Vostok capsule with turtles in it! Isn't that cute?
Sadly, as 2 of the 4 engines were turned off during ascent to prevent 5+ G-loads, the 17th March becomes the pogo-oscillation-turtle-soup-day for Soviet rocket engineers!
However, they should put a men into space as IOTL in 1961.
There are some other choices I'd like to make which are much farther from being finalized... So I'd need some input here from more knowledgeable forum members...
1)What are the chances of Soviet leadership putting, due to the Nedelin-disaster, all their intercontinental eggs into the nuclear-weapons-in-orbit basket? If any hypergolics are used, they're far away in space, no expensive silo-complexes have to be built... (Continues mumbling silently:And economies of scale make larger and larger LVs possible to bring more and more man to a Mars-flyby traje... err, more and more bombs into space, with more and more spare rockets lying around for science purpo... err, less and less money being sucked away from the conventional military and consumer goods, keeping Khruschev in power...) What would be the perfect time for the 1st launch of an orbital nuke complex? '64-'65 mayhaps?
2)If 1) ever happens, could NASA still have a significant civillian space program?
3)Taking the big dumb booster approach farther, what would be the big deficiencies of stretching a conical stage (as pictured above), assuming that Forsirovanny and Modifitsirovanny 11D51s would come on-line, sooner or later?
If something is unclear, please do make me aware of it, I will try to formulate my thoughts a bit better then... English isn't my native language.
I'm new here.
Now, what I'd like you to think about is the following:
Could Sealion be succesful if the Germans built more Ju-52s to use for their paratroopers instead of He-111s?
I hope I've managed to ease up the atmosphere a bit with this.
I've been thinking of a different Space Race for quite some time now, and I've come up with the following POD:
Sputnik 1 is launched successfully, but R-7 failures start mounting dramatically (let's assume a combination of malfunctioning explosive charges on the lateral boosters and engine failures, with no new satellites getting into orbit until 1959. In fact, March '59 would see the US launch Pioneer 4, whilst the 10th(?) iteration of Sputnik 2 would make a nice fireball mid-air!
Khruschev calls in Glushko and Korolev for a talk, the 2 engineers fall out in front of Khruschev, who "mediates" the conflict by ordering Glushko to only work with Yangel on his little ICBM, while Korolev is ordered to cooperate with Kuznetsov even more than before, and to draw&build a completely new rocket... The result being that the NK-9 morphs into the rather more massive NK-15(V), and then this cute little bugger gets approved for production:
The work on most spacecrafts should proceed like it did IOTL, possibly the Soviet efforts might be even more fruitful due to there being no haste... there's nothing available to loft them into space anyway!
And then, in '60, we have the 1st flight tests of this new rocket [do keep in mind that it is, from a design perspective far simpler than the R-7 ever was, that Korolev & his team have accumulated a fair bit of experience by now] with... guess what! A Vostok capsule with turtles in it! Isn't that cute?
Sadly, as 2 of the 4 engines were turned off during ascent to prevent 5+ G-loads, the 17th March becomes the pogo-oscillation-turtle-soup-day for Soviet rocket engineers!
However, they should put a men into space as IOTL in 1961.
There are some other choices I'd like to make which are much farther from being finalized... So I'd need some input here from more knowledgeable forum members...
1)What are the chances of Soviet leadership putting, due to the Nedelin-disaster, all their intercontinental eggs into the nuclear-weapons-in-orbit basket? If any hypergolics are used, they're far away in space, no expensive silo-complexes have to be built... (Continues mumbling silently:And economies of scale make larger and larger LVs possible to bring more and more man to a Mars-flyby traje... err, more and more bombs into space, with more and more spare rockets lying around for science purpo... err, less and less money being sucked away from the conventional military and consumer goods, keeping Khruschev in power...) What would be the perfect time for the 1st launch of an orbital nuke complex? '64-'65 mayhaps?
2)If 1) ever happens, could NASA still have a significant civillian space program?
3)Taking the big dumb booster approach farther, what would be the big deficiencies of stretching a conical stage (as pictured above), assuming that Forsirovanny and Modifitsirovanny 11D51s would come on-line, sooner or later?
If something is unclear, please do make me aware of it, I will try to formulate my thoughts a bit better then... English isn't my native language.