Right Side Up: A History of the Space Transportation System
- Thread starter Polish Eagle
- Start date
General Dynamics was aware of that
They wanted for RAB the Atlas fuselage strengthened with Frames, Stingers and Compression Bulkhead and installment of H-1 engines from Saturn IB
for performance for (second stage manned Lifting body) is 3500 lb. to 5300 lb. with unmanned unit (Full reusable)
with second stage Centaur 8000 lb. to 10000 lb. all into 100 n.mi. orbit from ETR Florida (booster return only)
Next to that GD had very unhealthy Idea to Replace the Atlas Oxygen with FLOX30 mixture (70% Oxygens and 30% Fluorine)
also to fuel Centaur with pure Fluorine instead of Oxygen this would push payload to 20000 lb.
On Cost GD estimates for 5 year program with R&D cost of $4.216 billion up to $6.247 billions until first RAB are ready to launch
On Operation cost were estimation $234 million for 30 launch/year or $468 millions for 60 launches/year ($7.8 million launch cost)
All in today US dollar value.
Ignoring the insane FLOX30 variant, that sounds like a pretty nifty machine to build a space program around.
It makes me wonder how it could ever get enough funding to fly.
fasquardon
I told it was very unhealthy Idea, but that were the 1960s, they believed they could handle FLOX and Fluorine in 1970s...
They try to get founding form USAF, but those had handfuls with Titan III B and C variants and Manned Orbital Laboratory, in same time phase out of Atlas ICBM.
There was no budget for additional $6.247 billions for RAB in 1965 and as they had money to spent, USAF was enticed by a siren from NASA...
Archibald
Banned
Punching through the atmosphere (and sound barrier)
Reminds me of a quite similar picture with DynaSoar (related to Kolyma's shadow).
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Beautiful pictures, thanks Michel for pictures and ultimately source.
But that is addressed by the up-engine proposal Michel cites below. Here putting in a single F-1B would kick it up even further, with better ISP. So next issue...
Indeed the Atlas (and Centaur) used pressurization as a structural element. So what? Pressurization is maintained during the boost by releasing helium. At burnout the stage is still pressurized, just as rigid as it was on the pad. It would follow that a winged and larger version would remain pressurized on descent, flyback and landing, and as a bonus one recovers the full helium load for repurification and reuse.
I see that for this proposal Convair did nevertheless go over to a solid reinforcement system, and OTL the later "Atlas" series such as those offered for sale today gave up on the balloon approach and went over to stiffened skin. So there are drawbacks apparently--it is obvious to me for instance that if something were to punch a hole in the hull, it would lose pressure and thus be torn apart by transverse forces during descent.
Still, if the approach leads to a low mass and low cost reusable system, and since the proposal (in the ATL 1980s, not the OtL 1960s version Michel cited) would eliminate manned piloting of the stage in favor of automated landing, and thus eliminates the factor of human life at risk in a failed recovery, the main thing at risk in case of such a structural failure would be the stage itself, including the F-1B engine.
I'm suggesting scaling it up that big, about 1/5 the capability of the on the shelf Lifter. Maybe that's too big, but anyway it can be bigger than the historical Atlas. Especially since the strategy of installing heavy booster engines to be dropped in favor of 1/5 launch thrust being kept up by a central sustainer is evidently also being abandoned in favor of returning the whole engine set.
So anyway, if the Atlas-derived first stage is not manned, it is a betting game whether or not the pressure structure fails. If it does, perhaps it might be worthwhile to have provided for alternate backup recovery of the engine set. The point of balloon structure is to lighten the rocket structure, and while that might be diametrically opposed to cheapening it, in this case it may work to do that as well. If the engines can be recovered, and perhaps the avionics core as well, then building a replacement is a matter of making new wings, and a fuselage set, and installing the recovered avionics and engine(s). The price and maintenance cost estimates factor in an estimated probability of structural failure. If the risk applies on the launch pad or during the burn as much as afterward, then after all STS already includes launch escape options for the Shuttle; including a sensible launch failure escape strategy for anything manned (and I think the idea here is a craft for something smaller than manned after all) and giving customers the option of either having an escape system for their payload or simply insuring it to cover the cost of a replacement. Atlas had a good record of success I think, which means the rockets kept pressurized all the way to burnout; why should a scaled up winged version be worse?
Another question is whether the pressure hull strategy does scale up well or not.
As far as transverse loads, producing bending moments on the length of the rocket, would go, I think one finds that pressure vessels do scale up very nicely. At a given overpressure, skin thickness scales up linearly with the linear dimensions, meaning that the mass ratio of solid skin to volume is constant. Bending moments on a given shape scale with volume, or X^3 where X is the linear scale, but one of those factors is taken care of by the moment arm of the diameter, a second, by the linear scaling of the circumference, and the last by the increased thickness.
So, if one can make a suitable airplane fuselage out of a standard sized Atlas, a double length, 8 times the mass Atlas with proportional wings, doubled skin gauge, and the same internal pressure will perform just as well as far as transverse forces go.
There may be a bigger problem with compression forces. How does Atlas shove its payload? At launch, most of the thrust force is "absorbed" as it were by the propellant load, but near burnout, essentially all of it is accelerating the dry structure--mainly the payload. At that time, the cylindrical hull has to serve as a member in compression transferring the whole thrust of the engine to the payload, with a small deduction for the mass of the hull itself.
This can happen two ways. One, the pressure of the vessel acts as a piston; for this to be adequate at fuel burnout, the constant pressure force must be restrained by tension on the skin at launch, countering all but a residue to lift its weight under 1 G on the stack. In other words, the skin is in very high tension restraining a powerful pressure force, and the skin is gradually relieved as acceleration proceeds under constant thrust, then that pressure again tensions the skin upon burnout and release of the payload.
I don't think this is the case.
Alternatively--the skin of the stage serves as a structural member, conceptually the same as if it were collected into a solid bar, with the compression strength of the metal bearing the increasingly heavy load. Pressurization allows the necessary cross-section of metal to be spread out evenly and lightly around the circumference of the stage and prevents it from buckling. This I think is pretty much how it works. It makes it tricky for me to estimate the necessary minimum pressure because I don't know the criteria for preventing buckling.
So if one were to make a double length scale model of Atlas, with an engine set 8 times the thrust (thus, with the same IsP it would burn up the 8 fold increased propellant in the same time--we'd hope for big improvements in the ISP thus stretching burn time a bit) presumably the upper stack is scaled up by a mass factor of 8 too, and we have 8 times the compression force acting on only double the circumference, meaning we need to thicken the skin by a factor of 4 not two, meaning the mass ratio of dry hull to propellant volume has doubled.
Clearly then if this is the case, then the advantage of balloon design is scale dependent, and falls with rising scale. It still might make sense to make a bigger Atlas style stage, if the weight savings on the original Atlas scale were better than X, where X is the scale difference between Atlas and the proposed bigger stage.
Consider also that with the skin gauge on a double-length Atlas design quadrupled instead of merely doubled, the overpressure the skin can take has also been doubled instead of kept constant. Doubling helium pressure in 8 times the volume means using 16 times more helium mass, so this also points to diminishing returns, but helium is pretty light stuff; the extra mass hit from the helium would be small, whereas the craft would have doubled transverse strength. Mass ratio suffers but the item is stronger and stiffer. Also, thicker gauge metal is easier to work with and offers more inherent stiffness without pressurization, so the craft is more likely to survive pressurization failure.
Finally, while I doubt pressure piston effects are a major share of the total compression load capability of the stage, raising the pressure will increase that share a bit, somewhat relieving the compression load--twice, I believe--that is it will bear a certain number of Newtons of force the skin no longer has to, and also every Newton due to pressure places tension on the length of the hull, that offsets the same number of Newtons of compression weight.
Note that if pressure piston effect were the main thrust bearing consideration, doubling the scale would require doubling the pressure anyway.
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Thus we can see that the Atlas pressure vessel strategy scales unfavorably; no matter how efficient it might be on one scale, it ceases to be competitive on a bigger scale, though with the larger scale come advantages such as structural stiffness. Vice versa we might ask what happens if we shrink the scale, allowing ever lighter structures--except that we'd run into minimum gauge issues for one thing. For another smaller rockets are not much use for launching from Earth to space.
I would think that the larger issue for balloon tanks being scaled up is that volume increases at the cube while tank skin increases at the square. That means that as the rocket gets bigger, the relative advantage from making the tank walls as thin as possible goes down because it is becoming a less important contributor to total weight.
Also, helium requirements will scale with tank volume rather than tank area, making helium costs rise faster than tank skin costs as the rocket gets larger.
And for a multi-stage LV, you don't need the extreme first stage performance that a single stage ICBM does. So a cheap simple thick skin on the first stage has a good few economic as well as engineering factors pushing in its favour as the rocket scales up.
fasquardon
Chapter 9: Staging
"Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth."
Chapter 9: Staging
The five F-1B engines of the RS-IC, between them, burned over 13 tonnes of propellant per second. As the Space Lifter ascended, its mass dropped, and the crew of the Lifter and the Orbiter were pressed back into their seats by a growing acceleration. At T+120 seconds, the center F-1B was shut-down to limit total acceleration to 4 G, while the four outboard engines gradually throttled back. This was the toughest part of the ascent on the crew, though compared to Commander Young’s Gemini flights, it was downright forgiving.
At last, the flight computers, through a combination of accelerometer input, ground-based tracking, measuring mission elapsed time, and readings of the actual level of propellant in the tanks, determined that the Lifter’s boost phase had reached its end. The four remaining F-1Bs shut down, and for a moment, the Lifter, Orbiter, and S-IVC coasted over the Bahamas unpowered. Then the pyro bolts on the S-IVC’s rear adapter fired, separating the upper stage from the blunt, graphite-covered nose of the Lifter and exposing the J-2S-2 engine to the near-vacuum of Earth’s mesosphere.
Commander Young and Pilot Crippen could watch the S-IVC drift away before the engine lit, but only for a moment. Peroxide thrusters on the nose and tail of the Lifter put it into its pitch-over maneuver--first, to protect the fragile windshield and upper surfaces of the Lifter from the high-speed steam and hydrogen blasting out of the J-2S-2, and second, to prepare for the retro burn that would return Constitution to Kennedy Space Center. The nose pitched upward, slowly, and the S-IVC disappeared from view. After a time period that felt much longer than it truly was, Young and Crippen felt a gentle acceleration from the cooling gasses of the J-2S-2 plume bouncing off their heat shield--just 1.2 meters per second per second, and tapering off quickly--and happily reported to the ground, “Houston, be advised, Lifter crew confirms S-IVC ignition.”
“Roger, Constitution, we copy. Orbiter crew and telemetry confirm.”
As the S-IVC sped away from the Lifter, Young noted not for the first time that the acceleration felt familiar. “Almost feels like the Moon,” he observed over the comm loop. “I don’t know about the Moon, but if you’re done catching our wake, we’ll see you on the other side of the sky,” Fred Haise replied from Endeavour, now tinged with the crackle of relay instead of the crispness of the stack’s internal communications links. The gentle acceleration, indeed close to lunar gravity experienced by NASA’s last flying moonwalker--but not by the STS-1 Orbiter Commander--had been brief, though. The S-IVC was already further away from the Lifter, and no longer pointing dead-center toward the Lifter’s flat underbelly. The force of the rocket exhaust on the Lifter dropped away as the booster slowly, gracefully continued its pitch. The blue-white arc of Earth was beginning to crawl back into view in the Lifter’s windshield, as the immense craft’s engines oriented themselves forward, along the line of flight.
In the Orbiter, Haise and Truly performed the immediate post-staging checks. The J-2S-2 struggled to push the stretched upper stage and its 40-tonne payload along, managing only ⅓ G at first, but steadily increasing as propellant burned off. It didn’t need to subject its crew to bone-crushing forces at this point, though--the Orbiter and its stage were still coasting upward on the momentum imparted by the RS-IC, and the J-2S-2 worked to impart the horizontal velocity needed to stay in space, rather than just get there. Without the Lifter’s power, the flight could not have happened--but without the S-IVC’s high-energy engine, it wouldn’t have had much point. Slowly, steadily, the Orbiter gained speed, pushing out over the Atlantic, the apoapsis of its orbit stretching further and further off ahead.
The middle of the decade brought a slow maturation in the Space Transportation System. The system’s flight rate continued to increase, with the 50th launch of a Space Lifter carrying the Space Shuttle Destiny to space on her maiden flight in May, 1984. The flight was the last for several months for the RS-IC-602 Constitution, which had reached its 18th launch, and thus was due for its SLIP-II inspection to check how the booster’s structures and systems had aged since the SLIP-I inspection four years and a dozen flights before. The expectations were for a clean bill of health, like the one her sister Independence had just recieved on her own SLIP-II inspection the year before. The largest complications in the inspection had been the replacement of several of the booster’s avionics and cockpit controls, bringing the 1970s-vintage computers closer to modern standards. The cost of the STS continued to trend down, as STC and NASA were able to spread costs for commercial, USAF, and NASA missions across more flights, and as cost reductions and increased automation were implemented in the production of the expendable fairings and upper stages for Space Lifter missions. Given that a Space Lifter launch was already cheaper not just per-kilogram but per-flight than a traditional expendable Titan or similar rocket, it was little surprise that the vehicle had been embraced by institutional and commercial payload planners, with many customers beginning to order satellite busses which could barely be lofted by expendable launchers at all. Beyond cost reduction, taking advantage of the Space Lifter’s immense payload capacity gave engineers the chance to add more margin to satellite payloads for only a marginal increase in cost. In some cases, adding redundant systems and more propellant capacity reduced insurance premiums, reducing the overall cost of communications satellites even as they grew in size and capability. This benefit is perhaps best demonstrated in the recovery of the Geostar 1 satellite in 1986.
The brainchild of space colonization visionary and physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, Geostar was an early forerunner to the satellite telephone craze of the early 1990s. Combining position triangulation with satellite text messaging, Geostar was conceived as a method of helping airplane pilots avoid collisions. O’Neill, himself an avid pilot, had been horrified by the 1978 collision of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 with a Cessna 172 light aircraft, which killed 144 people. Blaming inadequate aircraft navigational and positioning systems, O’Neill resolved to address the problem himself, and generate income for his Space Studies Institute in the process. After receiving patents for the geostationary communications/navigation satellite system, he founded Geostar Incorporated in 1983. Following successful ground tests of the system, which would relay signals from three GEO satellites covering the entire United States through a ground-based supercomputer that would compute latitude and longitude coordinates and relay them back to the receiver, Geostar purchased a launch of the Space Lifter in 1986, to inject all three satellites into their staggered, 30-degree-apart positions in geostationary orbit.
The Geostar design was not perfect, and issues with the satellites’ relatively complex electronics cropped up within hours of orbit circularization. Though Geostar 2 and 3 operated fairly nominally after a few hours of troubleshooting, Geostar 1 continued to malfunction. Far beyond the Low Earth Orbit that could enable servicing by the Space Shuttle, Geostar had to rely on software fixes implemented on Earth. After a time, Geostar’s engineers succeeded in contacting Geostar 1 by first relaying signals through the Geostar 2 satellite, thirty degrees behind Geostar 1. Using the Geostar satellites’ redundant omnidirectional communications system (a system designed primarily for emergency telemetry transmission), Geostar’s engineers discovered that the satellite had lost attitude control during its apogee-raise maneuver. Though it was in the correct orbit, it was unable to point either toward the Earth for high-gain communications or toward the sun for efficient battery charging. Luckily, the satellite had larger-than-usual batteries (added in order to retain full operability during the eclipse phases of its orbit), and the engineers had many hours to reprogram the satellite and reset its attitude control system before they wore down. After a frightening first day in geostationary orbit, Geostar 1 joined its fully-operational sisters and enabled the company to perform the final tests of the Geostar satellite communications system before pre-ordered receivers could begin shipping out.
The recovery of Geostar 1 enabled Geostar to gain a foothold in the growing field of personal satellite communications and in satellite navigation. Though the system was not so all-encompassing as the Global Positioning System, which was entering commercial use at the same time, it made up for that with the added utility of direct, receiver-to-receiver satellite communication. Though O’Neill had designed the system for aviation, it found greater use in the land-based shipping industry, connecting truckers to dispatchers more efficiently. Businessmen also found immense use for the Geostar system, using it to stay connected to their offices even when on vacation (the image of the neglectful father, so engrossed in his work that he “taps” out messages to his office even on family vacations, became ingrained in American culture through family movies in the 1990s). Geostar also found use as a disaster-relief tool, keeping emergency workers in close communication with their dispatch centers following the Northridge and Great Hanshin Earthquakes in 1994 and 1995, when power failures disrupted both landline telephones and cellular communications. Though not the most versatile satellite-based communications system (the long light lag and power requirements for communication between Earth and geostationary orbit making use for voice communications impractical), Geostar retained a large stake in the market. With a text only system and relatively infrequent information transfers between receivers and the orbiting satellites, Geostar could offer a longer battery life for its receivers, which made it particularly useful as an emergency communication system that needed to work any time, for a long time. However, the limitations of Geostar’s geostationary platforms pointed the way for advocates for lower-orbiting satellite telephone constellations of the 1990s.
More significant in the minds of space colonization advocates, however, is the relationship between Geostar and O’Neill’s Space Studies Institute. Two years after he founded the SSI in 1977, O’Neill realized that modest donations would never suffice to develop the capital needed for a real expansion onto the High Frontier. He declared that all income from his future patents would go to SSI, and made the SSI the majority (though non-voting) shareholder in Geostar. The Space Studies Institute, created to research ways to industrialize space, ranging from lunar mass drivers and mining plants to space solar power stations, became the only space advocacy organization to have a large, consistent source of funding--an advantage that would make SSI by far the most influential of the organizations that emerged in the aftermath of the Apollo Program to promote the vision of the human conquest of space.
Such workaday successes heralded the success of the Space Transportation System in many of the goals for which it had originally been approved, even as the regular and repeated flights meant that the latest Space Lifter mission received little more than an occasional mention on nightly news or a few paragraphs in the newspaper. Crowds attending flights of regular Space Lifter launches ebbed, and even Space Shuttle missions began to see dropoffs in attention. The crowds heralded a transition in the way the public and even NASA thought of the STS: it was no longer exciting to see a massive first stage returning to land only minutes after carrying an upper stage and payload to space. The potential lay instead in the payloads it could carry, and the missions it could enable. Spacelab, the Galileo and Ulysses space probes, and the European LDEF were just a few examples of these, but one of the most publicly heralded was that of space-based telescopes, both those looking outward, and those with their gaze turned earthwards.
Plans for a large, multispectrum orbital observatory had originally begun in 1965, but in 1970, NASA divided work on the project into two overall camps: a Large Space Telescope Task Group, tasked with determining the engineering requirements of such a device, and a Scientific Advisory Committee to determine the scientific requirements. Though both Marshall and Goddard Space Flight Centers had conducted Phase A studies of the telescope, Marshall’s work on what would become Space Lifter, along with Skylab and the last few Apollo missions, meant that Goddard took on more work as time went on. Both the LST Task Group and SAC transferred to Goddard permanently in 1972.
The Large Space Telescope (eventually shortened to just “Space Telescope,” when certain managers suggested that it might be greatly outclassed in the coming decades,) had a hard fight in Congress. As with the Lifter and Orbiter, NASA attempted to deflect congressional hostility by underreporting the estimated cost of the Telescope, giving a cost target far below that calculated by Goddard in 1973. Hostility from astronomers from West Coast universities (who had been spoiled by their high, dry mountains and deserts and the large observatories placed at their peaks, and viewed the Space Telescope as unnecessary and unfeasible) did not help the telescope’s case. It took aggressive lobbying of the National Academy of Sciences to get the Telescope recommended as a top-priority project. President Ford’s federal budget cuts and renewed attacks by William Proxmire in 1975 again delayed the start of the program to FY 1978.
The final design of the telescope hinged on a major decision about the diameter of its mirror. At the start of the program, a general consensus emerged that one of the major scientific goals of the project--measuring the Hubble Constant to within 10% certainty--required a mirror at least 120 inches (3 meters) across. The facilities to build such a mirror did not exist in 1968, and so the program’s budget would need to account for the facilities that would manufacture it. While this initially seemed an insurmountable hurdle for the program, it was also an opportunity--if one needs to build new facilities anyway, why stop at 120 inches?
Such was the reasoning of the National Reconnaissance Office, whose unmanned reconnaissance satellite technology overlapped, in many respects, with that required for orbital telescopes. As plans solidified in the 1970s for Department of Defense Lifter flights, the NRO increasingly took into account the unmatched lifting capacity and payload fairing size of the Space Lifter stack. While their then-current Titan IIID topped out at 120 inches across, with a 12-tonne payload, Lifter would loft over 40 tonnes under a 260-inch fairing. Though they had just placed the KH-9 series of reconnaissance satellites into service in 1971, the NRO was already planning the next generation. The planned KH-11 series was to demonstrate the revolutionary new technology of solid-state electro-optical imaging. By removing the need to drop film canisters from orbit, electro-optical imaging promised cheaper, faster recovery of intelligence and longer satellite lifetimes.
KH-11 was rapidly replanned as an interim system, a technology demonstrator for electro-optical imaging using many KH-9 components. The true focus of NRO’s planning in the 1970s was the KH-12 project. Building on experience with the KH-11 in the late 1970s, KH-12 (code-named LUCID) would combine electro-optical imaging with an unprecedentedly large mirror--168 inches, to be ground in a new facility jointly operated by Kodak and Itek Corporation, which had previously built cameras for the CORONA spy satellites and for the Apollo Program.
The existence of this facility and its capabilities were disclosed to planners at NASA in 1977, and plans for the Space Telescope were redrawn to include a mirror up to 180 inches across. The program found a surprising backer in President Carter, who, according to declassified documents, considered it a way to demonstrate to the Soviet Union an American capability to monitor compliance with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties without having to officially disclose the LUCID platform’s capabilities. With the enthusiastic backing of the new President easing the objections of the Office of Management and Budget over the program’s expanded scope, NASA officially began the Space Telescope program in FY1978, though for cost reason they were ultimately forced to accept the same 168-inch mirror size as the KH-12.
The development process for both the Space Telescope and its classified cousins was long and troubled by frequent budget overruns. Even had the telescopes been ground-based, they would have been the world’s third-largest. Launching an optical apparatus this large, this sensitive, and this complex was a massive undertaking whose cost repeatedly overran Goddard’s estimates, while millions vanished into NRO’s black budget. Coordination with the astronomers who would eventually use the telescope also posed challenges--astrophysicists from West Coast universities were, again, slow to warm to the project, and regarded the increase in angular resolution as unnecessary for the resolution of astrophysical questions. University astronomers in general wanted to ensure that scientific control of the project was handed over to a non-NASA institution, as Goddard was expected to preferentially assign viewing priority to its own in-house astronomers. Finally, ESRO, in exchange for covering the cost of the Space Telescope’s solar arrays, received 15% of the telescope’s viewing time, to the chagrin of American astronomers.
Among other causes of the Telescope’s long development time was the requirement that it be serviceable by the Space Shuttle Orbiter. NASA had no intention of dropping a telescope this massive and costly into the Pacific until every last photon could be squeezed into its sensors, and thus required that the telescope be capable of receiving upgrades carried on Lifter-Orbiter flights and installed by astronauts. This meant that the Telescope had to be cooperative during the docking procedures and safe for astronauts to work around (sharp edges in particular had to be removed from any place an astronaut’s glove might work), and that the instruments be modular rather than hard-wired in. Originally intended to launch in late 1985, the telescope’s planned launch date slipped first to 1988 and then to late 1989. In the meantime, the program had acquired a new name. Though some had proposed to name the Telescope after Lyman Spitzer, for his tireless advocacy for the project since 1946, Spitzer himself declined the honor and proposed instead to name it for Edwin Hubble. The alternative had twofold meaning: not only would it would honor the importance of his study of cosmic expansion to modern cosmology, but measurement of the Hubble Constant was one of the main scientific objectives of the program. Thus, in 1985, the program was formally renamed the Hubble Space Telescope
A major, though unheralded, milestone for the Large Telescope program came in 1985, with a west coast launch of the Space Lifter Intrepid. In an unheralded and highly classified mission, Intrepid carried to a polar orbit the first of the the KH-12 LUCID series of reconnaissance satellites which shared some ancestry and a main mirror diameter with the civilian and scientific Hubble. The deployment of the first LUCID platform was largely trouble free, and subsequent launches were planned for the following years, enabling the replacement of the interim KH-11 CCD prototype satellites with the larger platforms using similar imagers and larger mirrors. Though details of LUCID’s capabilities remain mostly classified to this day, KH-12 was dramatically revealed to be the first American spy satellite with color photograph capability in 1986 when color photographs of a Typhoon-class submarine under construction were leaked to Jane’s Fighting Ships. Though the publication would not print another edition of its famous book until after the end of the Cold War, LUCID photographs would be a minor plot point in the film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October, and writer Tom Clancy is known to have a framed copy of one of the leaked photographs hanging in his study.
This particular rising tide did not lift all boats. Unfortunately for Martin Marietta, the entire CRLV program came under fire soon after its approval in 1985 as the Space Transportation System’s flight rate accelerated and costs remained under control. Congressional backers of the STS viewed CRLV as a threat to their favored program, and pointed out that two reusable launch vehicles split a market that was being addressed well by one. Over the objections of the administration and of Martin Marietta, Congress directed the USAF to change the program into a Contingency Expendable Launch Vehicle program--a limited purchase of some 30 expendable LVs to be kept in storage against any day when STS might actually have to stand down. With the program’s flight rate reaching new heights and few issues encountered, Congressional leadership was confident that CRLV was an unnecessary redundancy.
The CELV program very quickly converged on Martin Marietta’s Titan IIIC as the launch vehicle of choice. The heaviest of America’s expendable launch vehicles, Titan III was also considerably easier to store long-term than Atlas-Centaur. Unlike the latter, which needed constant pressurization to retain structural integrity, Titan III could stay in a warehouse for years without degradation. In August of 1985, Martin Marietta received a contract for a block purchase of 30 Titan III rockets, after which point the USAF would purchase no more.
Martin Marietta’s Phase A contract for the Terminal Descent Demonstrator managed to survive the cancellation of CRLV by the skin of its teeth, through a transfer of the program to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, a part of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization that was, later in 1985, renamed U. S. Army Strategic Defense Command. Though SDIO’s plans, as of 1985, assumed the use of Space Lifter for the heavy anti-missile payloads they had in mind, payloads far too heavy for CRLV as-specified, the Terminal Descent Demonstrator was considered an important proof-of-concept for future autonomous RLVs, and the ballistic-propulsive landing profile proposed by Martin-Marietta scaled up much more easily than the winged aerodynamic systems used by the Lifter. Though the United States Air Force had abandoned CRLV, Martin-Marietta and SDIO intended to soldier on with it as far as they could.
While the Americans were beginning to take the success of their Space Transportation System for granted, the competing system from the Soviet Union began to slowly come out from behind the iron curtain. Unlike the American Space Lifter, whose RS-IC and S-IVC were simple modifications of 1950s-vintage rocket technology and 1960s-vintage structural design, the Soviet equivalent involved several new technologies, and a radically different approach to the basic questions of reuse and vehicle sizing. Of all the rocket engine cycles proposed to date, staged combustion has been the hardest to master. Most rocket engines burn their propellant in a combustion chamber, and blast the hot gas out as quickly as possible, minimizing heating by simply pushing the fire away from the engine with great haste. In order to supply sufficient power to the engine’s turbopumps, a staged combustion engine must burn a substantial fraction of its propellant internally, and drive a turbine with the combustion products, which are so hot and so corrosive that they are capable of burning common steel and aluminum into ashes. Unsurprisingly, despite having already built and flown staged-combustion-cycle engines, the Soviet Union still struggled to produce the RD-170 family of engines. Though the RD-170’s development began in 1976, it was not until 1985 that the engine was ready for flight. As this engine was almost literally the beating heart of the Groza rocket program, its development paced the entire program’s progress.
In the absence of a working RD-170, Soviet engineers had to find alternative ways to test the cutting-edge automated landing technology of the Raskat rocket boosters and Uragan spacecraft. While the engineers from the Ministry of Aviation Industry were able to test Uragan in both piloted and unpiloted landing modes by simply developing a gliding airplane, analogous to the American Pathfinder, Raskat’s engineers had to take a slower and more expensive approach to validating their product. These engineers, based at the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in the Ukrainian SSR, needed to validate the aerodynamics and control systems for Raskat at high velocities, in the supersonic and hypersonic regimes in which the rocket would operate and in which it would have to safely pull itself away from the Groza core stage and begin maneuvering to its landing strip. Though sub-scale models carried on Tu-144s and Mig-25s were useful for gathering data in the design process, testing the actual recovery system would need a real flight to Mach 10 and beyond.
The Yuzhnoye engineers turned to their previous product, the Tsyklon satellite launcher. Though narrower than Raskat by about 25%, Tsyklon shared its 40-meter length and had a broadly similar thrust:weight ratio to the loaded Raskat/Groza stack. Indeed the effort to automate the Tsyklon launch process through the late 1970s meant that the older boosters’ electronics were still close to top-notch, by Soviet standards, and had a great deal of commonality with the systems designed for Raskat. Until the RD-170 was actually completed, Tsyklon would be the closest possible surrogate.
Three Tsyklon rockets were fitted with Raskat’s aerodynamic controls and air-breathing propulsion package, and launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome from 1983 to 1984. The first rocket was lost in flight, as a failed wing deployment caused the vehicle to disintegrate due to aerodynamic stresses, with its scattered remains tumbling into the desert east of Baikonur. The next two were far more successful, demonstrating successful deployment of the wings, hypersonic and supersonic flight, and operation of the jet engines. These test flights were noted by the CIA in the 1984 issue of their “Soviet Military Power” report to Congress. Although correctly identifying the tests as part of the Soviet response to Space Lifter, the report cautioned that they could also have application as a new ICBM/cruise missile hybrid intended to thwart the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative missile shield.
By mid-1984 it appeared that the RD-170 had finally overcome the worst of its development problems and was on-course for integrated testing with the Raskat booster the following year. However, the delays meant that progress on Uragan had continued to outpace that of its carrier rocket, with two flight models of the spaceplane, designated OK-1.01 and OK-1.02, now fitted out and possessing fully functional power and thermal control systems, as well as a basic life-support capability. Unfortunately, without the Groza rocket they remained mere aircraft, not spaceplanes, as even their 25 metric ton structural weight was too great for Proton, the largest existing Soviet rocket. Consideration was given to using Proton to launch one of the planes on suborbital trajectory, but in the end it was decided that the additional resources needed to modify both Proton and Uragan for the test out-weighed the value of the new data such a mission would generate.
The first test flight of the Raskat-Groza system came on November 4, 1985, when two Raskat boosters lifted off carrying an inert dummy Groza core stage and an inert dummy upper stage. The system launched on a typical orbital trajectory east from Baikonur, both the Raskat performing flawlessly through their ascent phase. The RD-170’s temperamental nature seemed to have been tamed in repeated static testing on the ground, something on which Glushko had insisted after the disaster of the N1 program. Following separation from the dummy Groza, the two boosters coasted downrange until they reentered the sensible atmosphere southwest of the city of Dzhezkazgan, at which point the range safety officers destroyed the water-filled Groza boilerplate, while the Raskats deployed their wings and opened their jet engine inlets. Falling down into the atmosphere, the Raskats shed their velocity over the Kazakh steppe, before turning around to fly back to Baikonur. Though this flight was not announced to the Soviet public, photographs of a Raskat booster landing at the airfields were published in Pravda the following week, announcing a successful test of a new Soviet space launch system.
The test was not entirely successful, however. While multiple runways had been provided for the boosters in the plentiful land downrange in Kazakhstan, weather changes near launch had forced the boosters to divert to a different runway than originally programed. The change, made near launch time, had resulted in erroneous updates fed to the flight controllers of the Raskat boosters, locking both onto the same runway. While the boosters’ landing times had been staggered to simplify landing operations, the stages were not capable of taxiing themselves off the runway after landing, and the second Raskat rear-ended the first, mangling both and starting a fire on the runway as released kerosene and LOX spilled off. These pictures, naturally, were not shared with Pravda. The accident, a stain on an otherwise flawless first mission for the system, demonstrated the risks of automatic flight controls and the Groza multiple-booster system, but the other benefit was that production of Raskats was far cheaper, and no lives had been lost in the accident. While engineers went to work resolving the software problems once and for all, another two Raskat contracts were assigned to the Yuzhnoye Bureau, bringing the initial order of ten to an even dozen.
The second test flight came on April 12, 1986, launching into a thick snowstorm. This flight involved two Raskat boosters carrying a live Groza core stage, with a vacuum-optimized RD-170 engine, and a Blok-D upper stage, together with a small Oko (“Eye”) early warning satellite to a Molniya orbit. This highly elliptical orbit gave far better coverage of the high-latitude USSR than did the geostationary orbit favored by the Americans and Europeans, and gave particularly good coverage of the North Pole, over which American missiles would have to pass in a first-strike on the Soviet Union. This particular Oko was modified with a newly-redesigned optical sensor, following a near-disaster in 1983 when an earlier model had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds for missile exhaust. The injection was successful, and verified the ability of the Raskat-Groza system to put satellites into high orbit using the old Blok-D upper stage.
It would be up to the third test flight, on June 6, 1986, to demonstrate both the massive new kerosene-powered Groza upper stage and the Uragan spaceplane. OK-1.02 had been the first spacecraft fitted with engines, maneuvering propellant, and a space-rated heat rejection system, and had been christened Berkut (“Golden Eagle,” particularly one used in falconry) by its crew and the technicians who serviced her. Flying unmanned on her first orbital flight, Berkut was launched by a Raskat-Groza stack in a heavy configuration, with four Raskat boosters around a core stage topped by a large 120-tonne kerosene-fueled upper stage. Berkut completed two orbits around the Earth, opening her payload bay and maintaining steady contact with mission control through the Soviet communication satellite network (a combination of Molniya-orbit and geostationary-orbit satellites). Berkut returned to Baikonur exactly 206 minutes after launch, touching down on the runway dead-center just hours after her boosters had done the same downrange. Berkut’s first flight had shown the world that the Soviet Union had a heavy manned spacecraft to match the American one.
Great stuff! I've really enjoyed the past few updates, seeing the STS mature into a properly 'boring' space truck. What I really enjoy about this TL is that it takes its time in showing the more mundane aspects of space programs, which are often way more crucial to the success of space exploration and utilisation than the flashy prestige missions. Now, however, it seems we're coming into a renewed era of competition, as the soviets get themselves a space truck too...
That looks to be a much more capable KH-12 and Hubble in TTL.
I'll be interested to see what you do with that.
fasquardon
I'll be interested to see what you do with that.
fasquardon
Archibald
Banned
A 168 inch Hubble and KH-12, with color pictures ? YOWZA. THIS. IS. GREAT.
With a 94 inch mirror KH-11 could see details as small as 4 inches. With such monster you could nearly count the hair atop the head of Gorbachev (if he hadn't been bald)
Same goes with Hubble. Even with its "small" 94 inch mirror it already made bold contribution to the exoplanet quest, finding traces of oxygen into exoplanet atmospheres.
IOTL there were plans for a monster LEO space telescope, the Large Deployable Reflector to be assembled at a space station. But who need it ITTL ?
http://giphy.com/gifs/b5LTssxCLpvVe/html5
I really like what you did with O'Neill, Geostar and the L-5 society. I wonder where you got that idea of satellite phones / constellation funding space colonization (cough, SpaceX, cough, Musk, cough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA_Flight_182
It happened that O'Neill had a friend aboard the doomed jet.
I'm glad to see NASA-NRO incestuous relationship percolating in a space TL. That stuff is amazing.
With a 94 inch mirror KH-11 could see details as small as 4 inches. With such monster you could nearly count the hair atop the head of Gorbachev (if he hadn't been bald)
Same goes with Hubble. Even with its "small" 94 inch mirror it already made bold contribution to the exoplanet quest, finding traces of oxygen into exoplanet atmospheres.
IOTL there were plans for a monster LEO space telescope, the Large Deployable Reflector to be assembled at a space station. But who need it ITTL ?
http://giphy.com/gifs/b5LTssxCLpvVe/html5
I really like what you did with O'Neill, Geostar and the L-5 society. I wonder where you got that idea of satellite phones / constellation funding space colonization (cough, SpaceX, cough, Musk, cough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA_Flight_182
It happened that O'Neill had a friend aboard the doomed jet.
I'm glad to see NASA-NRO incestuous relationship percolating in a space TL. That stuff is amazing.
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As others have mentioned, it's going to be very interesting on your take on the new satellite sizes and just what they're going to be capable of. I wonder if you're also going to do something similar to @sts-200 story The Selene Project, where they created incredibly large broadcast satellites. There's potential for a great deal of utility for them in large landmass countries like the US, and they should be an easy seller if both your production capacity and lift capacity is a relative sure bet as is the case in this story. This would also get another thing to launch on the lifter to lower it's operating cost, and some political pork for Congressmen and Senators is always helpful.
Other countries like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Brazil would easily benefit and are within the United States sphere, Europe and Japan could be persuaded to purchase some even though they have already developed their infrastructure as the satellites should be more efficient, and it would be a useful tool in the US soft power for other developing countries. India and Indonesia would also be a good candidate, but politically may be more difficult due to relations.
Other countries like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Brazil would easily benefit and are within the United States sphere, Europe and Japan could be persuaded to purchase some even though they have already developed their infrastructure as the satellites should be more efficient, and it would be a useful tool in the US soft power for other developing countries. India and Indonesia would also be a good candidate, but politically may be more difficult due to relations.
Forget Hubble and KH-12
imagine a 120 inches Mirror on board of a KEPLER launch by STS !
(instead of a 37 inch it got now)
Oddly no info about Ariane rocket and what market they serve
but i think it's gone be a Nice for payload the STS not serve...
imagine a 120 inches Mirror on board of a KEPLER launch by STS !
(instead of a 37 inch it got now)
Oddly no info about Ariane rocket and what market they serve
but i think it's gone be a Nice for payload the STS not serve...
fasquadron wrote:
Archibald wrote:
Pitching to the Air Force was a mistake as by the time it was done the Air Force no longer had a requirement for manned orbital flight. They were struggling to justify MOL and Blue Gemini and had to move both to "in cooperation with NASA" status and very soon after they were canceled. Not that they had much choice because not only was NASA not interested but they couldn't spare the time, attention, or money to pursue the concept with Apollo hitting its stride.
As it was almost everything was being canceled or deferred until after Apollo was done. (Hence the lifting body fight tests were done on a shoestring budget)
Best bet to see it fly is to have the Air Force with an actual manned space mission this could service.
Polish Eagle wrote:
Atlas/Centaur did a pretty good job OTL of servicing the market Upgrading to the H1 would help, (Shevek23, I don't think the airframe could handle an F-1 of any type) and you still have the options of adding launch SRBs and additional upper stages. "Fully" reusable would run into some problems pretty fast but if most flights were semi with booster recovery you might see some very big butterflies in space launch practices.
Just imagine this booster lofting all the Lifting Bodies on suborbital and orbital flights and satellites of all types for a decade or so. Think of all the additional and VERY informative economic, engineering and maintenance data NASA would then have to play with for designing the actual Shuttle
And keep in mind that it probably won't be as 'cheap' and effective as advertised as they have a steep learning curve ahead. Once the booster is past Mach-6 going in either direction it's past the ability of "X-15" materials and technology to cope with. The expendable upper stages are pretty straight forward but the lifting body reentry vehicle is going to be a bear to get working. (You're choices at the time have significant drawbacks such as metallic TPS being extremely heavy and ablative TPS having hypersonic and supersonic changing aerodynamic characteristics as they burn off) But there would be no arguing it would make a great test and evaluation vehicle
Randy
Archibald wrote:
Pitching to the Air Force was a mistake as by the time it was done the Air Force no longer had a requirement for manned orbital flight. They were struggling to justify MOL and Blue Gemini and had to move both to "in cooperation with NASA" status and very soon after they were canceled. Not that they had much choice because not only was NASA not interested but they couldn't spare the time, attention, or money to pursue the concept with Apollo hitting its stride.
As it was almost everything was being canceled or deferred until after Apollo was done. (Hence the lifting body fight tests were done on a shoestring budget)
Best bet to see it fly is to have the Air Force with an actual manned space mission this could service.
Polish Eagle wrote:
Atlas/Centaur did a pretty good job OTL of servicing the market
Upgrading to the H1 would help, (Shevek23, I don't think the airframe could handle an F-1 of any type) and you still have the options of adding launch SRBs and additional upper stages. "Fully" reusable would run into some problems pretty fast but if most flights were semi with booster recovery you might see some very big butterflies in space launch practices.Just imagine this booster lofting all the Lifting Bodies on suborbital and orbital flights and satellites of all types for a decade or so. Think of all the additional and VERY informative economic, engineering and maintenance data NASA would then have to play with for designing the actual Shuttle
And keep in mind that it probably won't be as 'cheap' and effective as advertised as they have a steep learning curve ahead. Once the booster is past Mach-6 going in either direction it's past the ability of "X-15" materials and technology to cope with. The expendable upper stages are pretty straight forward but the lifting body reentry vehicle is going to be a bear to get working. (You're choices at the time have significant drawbacks such as metallic TPS being extremely heavy and ablative TPS having hypersonic and supersonic changing aerodynamic characteristics as they burn off) But there would be no arguing it would make a great test and evaluation vehicle
Randy
They are, yes, but the clock is ticking on the Soviet state. How will Russia and Ukraine use Raskat-Groza? Stay tuned...
Quite a bit--depending on what instruments you attach to those mirrors.
A 168 inch Hubble and KH-12, with color pictures ? YOWZA. THIS. IS. GREAT.
With a 94 inch mirror KH-11 could see details as small as 4 inches. With such monster you could nearly count the hair atop the head of Gorbachev (if he hadn't been bald)
Same goes with Hubble. Even with its "small" 94 inch mirror it already made bold contribution to the exoplanet quest, finding traces of oxygen into exoplanet atmospheres.
IOTL there were plans for a monster LEO space telescope, the Large Deployable Reflector to be assembled at a space station. But who need it ITTL ?
http://giphy.com/gifs/b5LTssxCLpvVe/html5
I really like what you did with O'Neill, Geostar and the L-5 society. I wonder where you got that idea of satellite phones / constellation funding space colonization (cough, SpaceX, cough, Musk, cough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA_Flight_182
It happened that O'Neill had a friend aboard the doomed jet.
I'm glad to see NASA-NRO incestuous relationship percolating in a space TL. That stuff is amazing.
Glad you like it!
Geostar is actually taken from O'Neill's OTL efforts--with a bigger margin, his team added more redundancy than we had IOTL. That Musk converged on a similar funding model is a fortunate coincidence.
TTL Geostationary satellites are actually already bigger than those in The Selene Project or IOTL 1986--approximately the size of the biggest GTO birds today, at some 6.5 tonnes. The ADVENT satellites, which the Hermes satellites in TSP are apparently based on, were some 550 kg--payloads which, ITTL, are dispensed from a ring at the top of the S-IVC or from the Shuttle payload bay for $5 million to fill up extra margin.
Will GEO satellites get heavier? The satellite communications boom of the 1990s will increase demand, but that's not the only factor...
Ariane is, unfortunately, too expensive to capture much market at all--it's basically a national launcher for France and West Germany. But European engineers have ideas for how to put the upstart Yanks in their place...
fasquadron wrote:
Atlas/Centaur did a pretty good job OTL of servicing the market
Just imagine this booster lofting all the Lifting Bodies on suborbital and orbital flights and satellites of all types for a decade or so. Think of all the additional and VERY informative economic, engineering and maintenance data NASA would then have to play with for designing the actual Shuttle
And keep in mind that it probably won't be as 'cheap' and effective as advertised as they have a steep learning curve ahead. Once the booster is past Mach-6 going in either direction it's past the ability of "X-15" materials and technology to cope with. The expendable upper stages are pretty straight forward but the lifting body reentry vehicle is going to be a bear to get working. (You're choices at the time have significant drawbacks such as metallic TPS being extremely heavy and ablative TPS having hypersonic and supersonic changing aerodynamic characteristics as they burn off) But there would be no arguing it would make a great test and evaluation vehicle
Randy
Atlas-Centaur did a great job IOTL, when the competition was the OTL Shuttle and Titan III. ITTL, its price tag makes it uncompetitive with ride-sharing on the Shuttle, and the mods to make the first stage reusable make it too small for most GEO payloads.
Modifications to make Atlas reusable starting in the 1950s are beyond the scope of this TL (though, much as this TL was born of looking at SpaceX and saying "reusable first stages are so obvious! What if they'd done it in the 1970s?", people ITTL probably ask "What if they'd done the obvious from the get-go rather than messing around with Saturn?").
Indeed, the best POD is probably during WWII to get a reusable Atlas. But I digress.
Polish Eagle wrote:
When space travel becomes an 'everyday' thing then we've won
Randy
Indeed. And it's getting there ITTL, though it's not quite there yet. But its fruits infiltrate day-to-day life in ways people don't even think twice about--the Geostar receivers, for example, will make cameos in dozens of movies.
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Dam, that make only 4 launches a year for Ariane rocket: for France mostly recon satellite, Earth observation satellites and GEO communications satellites, while for the germans Science applications satellites, the rest is ESA satellites and weather satellite.
The telecom satellites might outgrow Ariane to keep with the rest of the market, which would leave Ariane with more like 2-3/year. Not a good place to be for sure!
No wonder !
With RS-IC/S-IVC bring very big telecom satellites to GTO (around 2x 9 tons ? )
Against that a Expendable Ariane 3 has not much chance with only 2.7 tons to GTO.
ITTL next Ariane generation must be a hell of beast, reusable and bring 6 to 9 tons to GTO
OTL had CNES and Germans made allot study for Reusable Ariane rocket in 1980s what became Ariane 6 studies in 1990s and...
...Nothing ! the stupid ministers of science who run ESA and Arianespace are quite conservative bureaucrats
Even on 22 December 2015 "The day the Rocket came back to Launch site", any change at ESA ministers ? nope ! those little minds stuck on Expendable
Despite Airbus offer a Solution: Adeline