Sputniks... an Alternate Space Race

[Shevek23]

Well.

That's certainly exciting!


But is it at all possible that an X-15 could have been boosted to full orbital speed using a rocket that could possibly be lifted by a B-52, and is it possible that said X-15 could survive reentry?

The second point I think you sort of addressed, first by saying it was a specially modified X-15b, presumably the mods included upgrading its thermal capabilities to the point where they hoped it could take it, and also by pointing out it just about didn't, what with the controls melting.

But it's that first step that's the killer. I'd buy it if the plane were launched from a rocket taking off from the ground.

But to get into orbit, a certain minimum of reaction mass is needed, depending on how good the rocket is. For hydrogen-oxygen engines that ratio is something like 9:1 or more. For kerosene-oxygen it would be worse, and so for just about any other possible chemical means.

I believe this is the proposal OTL that ITTL was made to work, sort of. But note that there was no suggestion here that the spaceplane should be launched from an airplane carrier! The Navaho missile was a cruise missile; the liquid-fueled rocket booster was meant to lift a fairly large ramjet to high altitude and nearly 3 times the speed of sound where its airbreathing engines would then sustain it for an intercontinental flight to its target. It would launch from a ground pad, vertically.

The X-15/Navaho proposal kept that mode of launch.

From the Astronautix X-15B page

Crew Size: 1. Spacecraft delta v: 2,450 m/s (8,030 ft/sec).

Gross mass: 13,500 kg (29,700 lb).
Unfuelled mass: 4,500 kg (9,900 lb).
Height: 15.00 m (49.00 ft).
Span: 6.80 m (22.30 ft).
Thrust: 262.45 kN (59,000 lbf).
Specific impulse: 276 s.

That's for the X-15 itself; having misplaced my calculator it's a bit beyond me to estimate the necessary orbital velocity for the low and elliptical orbit proposed, which had a perigee of just 70 km altitude (hence single-orbit, or if the Soviets wanted to scoff they could call it a 360 degree suborbital flight!). Call it 8000 meters/sec. The spaceplane stage then can boost itself the last 2450 of that, leaving the Navaho booster cluster to take it to 5550. Note that is far faster than the boosters were designed to reach in their main mission!

Data on the engines developed for the proposed operational version of Navaho:

Encyclopedia Astronautica
LR83-NA-1
XLR-83-NA-1
Credit: Boeing / Rocketdyne
Rocketdyne Lox/Kerosene rocket engine. 683 kN. Development ended 1958. Isp=282s. Planned production version of the engine for the booster of the Navaho G-38 intercontinental cruise missile.
Designed for booster applications. Gas generator, pump-fed. Three gimballed engines would have been used in the Navaho booster. The engine was fully developed before Navaho G-38 cancellation.

Thrust (sl): 602.000 kN (135,334 lbf). Thrust (sl): 61,393 kgf.

Status: Development ended 1958.
Diameter: 0.88 m (2.88 ft).
Thrust: 683.00 kN (153,544 lbf).
Specific impulse: 282 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 248 s.

Now totally ignoring the question of the mass of the engines themselves plus stage tankage and so on, I estimate the all-up weight of the spaceplane plus fuel alone for the booster would be 100 tons.

Launching from an airplane there are certain advantages to be sure. To make the above estimate not only did I ignore a really significant set of masses, I used the vacuum Isp; that would almost be justified with a stratospheric drop launch. Also the plane's own velocity helps--but just a tiny bit, it couldn't reduce the necessary launch mass by even as much as 10 percent.

So the question is, could any B-52, no matter how modified, take off and climb with a suspended load in the ballpark of 100 (minimum!) to as much as 200 tons? That's what it takes!

I think maybe the Antonov Mryia might do this today. Just as far as weight goes anyway. For a drop-launch such as the X-15 program used OTL, the plane was mounted on a modified missile-launch pylon on one wing; quite obviously we can't mount a 150 ton missile in the same configuration! They'd have to do something like mount it on the top of the fuselage, which the huge Antonov plane can do (having been upgraded from a standard production transport, already the most massive plane in commercial operation, to carry the Soviet Buran shuttle on its back)--then fire the engines while the plane separates and dives for its life with engine exhaust plume giving its tail a good blast! It would be nice to mount the thing below the plane but there is just no way to do that!

Anyway I doubt a B-52 could lift all that weight at all. I could be wrong about that I suppose, if it were modified with minimal fuel tankage weight for a short-endurance mission and otherwise lightened (but at the same time, reinforced in spots!) for its special mission. Perhaps.

A straight vertical ground launch, as proposed, on the other hand, would surely involve a somewhat more massive booster, say around 200 tons allowing for lower engine efficiency at sea level. So what? Either way, whipping up a suitable reconfiguration of Navaho components is a major task, why not keep it simple by extrapolating from the missile's designed mode of operation rather than mixing in a dubiously attainable air launch?

 

[Shevek23]

Using the Silverbird launch vehicle performance calculator and cross-checking against the version of Atlas used for Mercury orbital launches OTL, I estimate that a suitable Navaho-based booster for putting the X-15 into the proposed orbit from the ground (I had to choose Cape Canaveral as the launch base since nothing suitable in the southern California/southern Nevada/New Mexico areas was on the list and I still don't understand how to specify a custom ground base) would have these characteristics:

Empty stage mass (based on comparison with Atlas) 10,000 kg
Fuel mass, booster: 180,000 kg
Eight LR-83-NA-1 engines, total sea level thrust 4.82 million Newtons.

All up mass with 13,500 kg X-15 upper stage 203,500 kg.
Thus, initial launch acceleration would be 24 m/sec^2 minus gravity of course. If all 8 engines kept burning to burnout at full thrust then the 23.5 ton upper stage plus empty booster stage mass would be getting boosted at 20 Gs, so for the sake of the human pilot and perhaps the structure as well, I suppose engines would be successively shut down and perhaps dropped for a performance increase to offset the decrease caused by stretching out the boost time. If at burnout only 2 engines are still operating the craft will still be experiencing 5 Gs; dropping the outer 4 at once when the craft reaches 10 Gs and retaining the inner 4 all the way to burnout and separation implies a peak thrust of 10 Gs.

Note that while I used sea level thrust levels I also did not attempt to estimate the penalty caused by the lower Isp of these engines in sea level air. Actual masses may be greater therefore!

The Silverbird calculator is no help trying to figure out what benefit we might get from an air launch. It has the Pegasus system included, which is air-launched, but no options there for fiddling around with airplane location and heading, and it doesn't allow one to specify air launch for a user-defined system.

Air launch, if we could manage it, would improve engine performance a bit (by being already above the layers where it would be compromised in a ground launch, so no change in the upper atmosphere and vacuum performance of course). The benefit of going maybe 300 meters/sec in the desired launch direction already would I guess be about 10 percent; call it 20 to be generous (but that includes any improvement due to altitude!) This would allow us to reduce the all-up mass of the system to say 160 tons.

So again the question is, can any airplane lift and launch a 160 ton rocket in 1960?

Meanwhile, compare even this minimal rocket to the Atlas, at 116 tons gross mass--the Air Force is apparently using slush funds to design, build and successfully launch a rocket booster some 20 tons (at least, for the ground-launched version 60) bigger than the near-decade long Atlas development process.

It would seem to me that even if the spaceplane plans are put on hold after the near-disaster, the Air Force and NASA should both abandon the Atlas forthwith and go with these Navaho-derived systems.

Which to be sure are themselves much subject to improvement! Just improving the hydrocarbon burning engines could get the Isp up by 10 percent or so. Replacing them with hydrogen burning engines should improve performance considerably.
----
Yep, I judge if we could use something with an ISP and thrust of a single SSME, a ground launch vehicle's all up mass would drop down to under 120 tons, and an air launch one down below 100 tons.

I still think 100 tons is more than a B-52 could launch though.

 

[neopeius]

I still think 100 tons is more than a B-52 could launch though.

You are correct (the max load ~30 tons), and I had forgotten that the X-15b was not air-launched like its non-orbiting siblings.

But I am very impressed and gratified that you did all those calculations to show my error! That's very cool stuff.

It would seem to me that even if the spaceplane plans are put on hold after the near-disaster, the Air Force and NASA should both abandon the Atlas forthwith and go with these Navaho-derived systems.

The Magellan had already been made for the Atlas, and the Atlas was a mass-produced missile.

 

[Shevek23]

...
The Magellan had already been made for the Atlas, and the Atlas was a mass-produced missile.

Fair enough. Besides NASA is probably going to suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

And the Navaho booster system, even though successfully upgraded to a booster capable of launching a manned upper stage massing something like 3 times what a Mercury capsule did OTL, is hardly the apex of development either. They might want to consider it for whatever might take the place of Gemini ITTL, but they also might want to go with something else.

For instance there's that whole business of throttling and high Gs. I was fiddling around with the Silverbird calculator trying to find the minimum mass needed to hurl the X-15 into the minimal suborbital trajectory so that its own engines (using 9 tons of propellent, 4/5 the all up mass of the spaceplane) could finish the job. Obviously a Gemini type system would need its own presumably expendable type second stage to finish the job of attaining orbit.

It looks to me like the Titan II system used OTL for Gemini would be somewhat more efficient than a Navaho-upgraded one. At any rate comparing estimates of sufficient propellent mass to put a Gemini-massed satellite into the same orbits suggest the Navaho would be 30 or more tons heavier on the launch pad.

So yeah, the Navaho systems appear to be a one-off stunt.

 

[neopeius]

Fair enough. Besides NASA is probably going to suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

Indeed. Hence the Artemis (OTL Apollo), and the Orion, for that matter.

And the Navaho booster system, even though successfully upgraded to a booster capable of launching a manned upper stage massing something like 3 times what a Mercury capsule did OTL, is hardly the apex of development either. They might want to consider it for whatever might take the place of Gemini ITTL, but they also might want to go with something else.

For instance there's that whole business of throttling and high Gs. I was fiddling around with the Silverbird calculator trying to find the minimum mass needed to hurl the X-15 into the minimal suborbital trajectory so that its own engines (using 9 tons of propellent, 4/5 the all up mass of the spaceplane) could finish the job. Obviously a Gemini type system would need its own presumably expendable type second stage to finish the job of attaining orbit.

It looks to me like the Titan II system used OTL for Gemini would be somewhat more efficient than a Navaho-upgraded one. At any rate comparing estimates of sufficient propellent mass to put a Gemini-massed satellite into the same orbits suggest the Navaho would be 30 or more tons heavier on the launch pad.

So yeah, the Navaho systems appear to be a one-off stunt.

Right, and the real problem is there's no Navaho assembly line. What made the Space Race possible is both sides having these huge stockpiles of boosters for the purpose of delivering warheads to the other side of the world. There are lots of Atlases and lots of Titan IIs. Not a lot of Navahos (which, OTL, was discontinued in 1959).

 

[Shevek23]

In fact the X-15 launcher was entirely a custom job. The engine was developed, in the sense that models had been tested and there were blue prints, but no stockpiles. The booster fuselage--well, it would be silly to make the ones they were going to make for the missile system and then cluster them together; far lighter and no more expensive to make a single tank hull base for the engines.

But really the ball is in your court why the Air Force used the Navaho systems at all instead of modifying Atlas or Titan. Atlas alone would be too small I guess; it seems to me they should have gone with a Titan for the launcher.

 

[neopeius]

In fact the X-15 launcher was entirely a custom job. The engine was developed, in the sense that models had been tested and there were blue prints, but no stockpiles. The booster fuselage--well, it would be silly to make the ones they were going to make for the missile system and then cluster them together; far lighter and no more expensive to make a single tank hull base for the engines.

But really the ball is in your court why the Air Force used the Navaho systems at all instead of modifying Atlas or Titan. Atlas alone would be too small I guess; it seems to me they should have gone with a Titan for the launcher.

Dunno what to tell you. It was a matter of extending their Navaho or improving upon the Titan 1. Perhaps the Navaho was more scalable? The Titan II was a totally different system, and it wasn't ready until 1963.

There's not a whole lot out there on the X-15b.

 

[Robert9640]

Since this is about an alternate space race, I almost wonder if Space Shuttle Challenger could have survived along with Space Shuttle Columbia. If Challenger hadn't been lost, Endeavour would have most likely not been built to replace Challenger as it did in real life.

 

[e of pi]

Since this is about an alternate space race, I almost wonder if Space Shuttle Challenger could have survived along with Space Shuttle Columbia. If Challenger hadn't been lost, Endeavour would have most likely not been built to replace Challenger as it did in real life.

Since we've yet to know if there will even be a Space Shuttle, much less one like OTL's 1.5 stage semi-reusable nightmare, much less one that would experience OTL's Challenger and Columbia accidents in exactly the same way...why ask? I could see asking if we had any reason to think any of those might happen, but with all the butterflies this TL has, I'd say it's likely that the Shuttle may be entirely avoided. I get that this obviously has some importance to you, but why ask in this TL just because it happens to be space related?

 

[Robert9640]

Since we've yet to know if there will even be a Space Shuttle, much less one like OTL's 1.5 stage semi-reusable nightmare, much less one that would experience OTL's Challenger and Columbia accidents in exactly the same way...why ask? I could see asking if we had any reason to think any of those might happen, but with all the butterflies this TL has, I'd say it's likely that the Shuttle may be entirely avoided. I get that this obviously has some importance to you, but why ask in this TL just because it happens to be space related?

You are right, but it will be interesting to see how this alternate space race plays out, and if the space shuttle will be developed in this alternate timeline or not. Either way, I look forward to learning more about how this will play out. But I guess we won't know for a while if the space shuttle would be developed in this timeline since right now, it is focusing on the beginning of the space race with the launch of Sputnik, and there are some possibilities there.

 

[Shevek23]

I suspect Crossland's successful (qualified partial, but he walked away!) X-15 mission is going to bring the focus on spaceplanes to designs closer to it. The X-15 almost made it unscathed; some incremental improvements in its heat-handling ability and voila, a viable spaceplane.

Something about 4 times the mass of the X-15 scaled up (doubled linear dimensions give 4 times the lift area, and a bit of elbow room for possibly more than 4 astronauts) could be routinely boosted into orbit, given more efficient engines than the Navaho types, on launchers far smaller than the Shuttle system. That's because the craft is much smaller than the Orbiter of course! Something in the range of an Apollo CSM/SM combo.

A reasonable philosophy to me seems to be, use unmanned rockets to send up cargo, use manned systems just for bringing people to and from orbit. Something like the upgraded X-15 could carry up four, maybe 7, astronauts, and clearly (in this timeline) could carry them safely down again.

So, assuming that a Moon race gets under way and sucks up most but not quite all the oxygen much as OTL, as it is nearing climax, designers could lay on the table two parallel launch systems, probably based on common technology, one to boost near-20-ton payloads of cargo of various kinds--whole spacecraft to be boosted on to deeper space with fuel shipped up in another load; station modules; supplies, etc. And the other the system for launching the spaceplanes, very possibly the same rocket. Then you'd have missions around 2 or more launches. If the fuel tanks for the rockets can arrive in target orbit (a soon to be defined standard orbit, with stuff accumulating at one point, strapped together there not floating around loose) the tanks can be used as structural units for assembling a space station. Presumably manned launches can be seen as mainly taking people up to this station and from there, further missions launch using spacecraft that in no way have to be designed for the rigors of launching and landing through Earth's atmosphere. (Let me qualify that two ways--the elements of the ships have to be boosted up to orbit at high G, riding as stowed cargo, and it seems likely to me a number of missions might want to take advantage of aerobraking even if they are ultimately going to the station, to save on reaction mass when coming in to low orbit from someplace higher). Only the spaceplanes normally go both ways, and if for some reason someone wants to bring down some other material, a launch can send up an ablative-protected return capsule (presumably stuffed full of useful payload for the station) to put it in and send it down to a splashdown.

This is pretty much the Von Braun/Collier Magazine space program of the 1950s. With this timeline's greater continuity with the Eisenhower Administration mentality, I suspect it has a leg up, now that Crossland's flight is accomplished.

As for avoiding disasters comparable to Challenger and Columbia--well, it doesn't seem reasonable to suppose that rockets in an alt-timeline will lead a charmed life and never go wrong. Both the STS disasters, going up and coming down, were foreshadowed by evidence of problems with the systems, in both cases actually going back to the first Shuttle mission.

The solid fuel boosters from Columbia's first launch in 1981, I've just recently read, showed the second-worst evidence of getting out of joint--the worst being of course the ones recovered from the Challenger crash. And while I believe it was the extreme cold that sealed Challenger's doom, if that mission were not scrubbed, many many missions before it the boosters were coming back with their joints much looser than they were supposed to be. Meanwhile, while none of of the crucial lower tiles came loose on any STS mission until the loss of Columbia, the upper white tiles certainly did--including on the first mission.

Also the first Columbia launch involved a hydrogen explosion doing damage to the elevators--hydrogen boiling off the fuel tank (as it was designed to do, since heat leakage and hence evaporation of fuel was inevitable) apparently pooled below the vehicle on the pad and ignition of the engines detonated it. This is amazing to me because hydrogen is so very light and liable to diffuse; I guess having just evaporated from cryogenic temperatures it didn't pick up heat nearly as fast as I'd guess and was so cold it actually sank in air, and failed to pick up heat very fast (until it was set on fire!) Well, that problem was readily solved, by igniting the venting gas on its way out of the tank on subsequent missions, pre-emptively burning it immediately so it could not accumulate.

But it's awful lucky the explosion on mission one neither damaged the flaps so severely they malfunctioned on landing, nor dislodged or shattered any of the lower tiles.

Anyway--if this timeline follows the light-spaceplane model, first of all the plane is not likely to need the tiles; the X-15 was designed around a philosophy of using high-temperature tolerant metals and making the structure heavy enough to absorb heat, long enough to survive a re-entry.

Second, if there is no attempt made to carry lots of cargo and so the plane is overall much lighter, and if it is a payload launched on top of a more or less standard rocket rather than the place the engines are mounted, it seems likely to me the spaceplane as a whole can be the escape system.

I've been thinking of how to make a system not entirely unlike the STS safer; it seems to me that if all the humans aboard crammed into a nose cone on about the scale of Big Gemini, with its own emergency heat shield, and we have an escape tower type rocket on the tip, assuming two major mission failures exactly like Columbia and Challenger's the crew might have survived each. It would in effect be a zero-zero ejection system (meaning one that works even if the plane is on the ground and not moving) that could also remove them from the larger craft at any phase of a launch or landing and bring them in safe. Well, I suppose the ejection rocket would get burned up during reentry if not used already before then, so it might not work if something goes wrong during the subsonic glide. But I'd think then they could exit and parachute much as the limited OTL escape plans allow for.

I don't think the heat shield, which would have a hatch cut in it to be opened in orbit and closed again before deorbiting, would cost all that much in weight. The crew would be hellishly cramped during launch and landing but no worse than Apollo or at worst Gemini astronauts were during missions lasting many days, whereas they'd only have to be packed in during launch and landing. Where I think the big weight penalties come in would be in the parachutes and other braking systems allowing the capsule to come to a survivable landing at a generally unpredictable location.

I believe such a mode was considered during the design of the STS and written off due to being too costly in weight.

But a Shuttle not meant to be a truck but to have some capability of extended on-orbit missions--something like a winged MOL--might be able to afford it.

In fact I wonder what sort of ship you get if you put X-15 type wings on the MOL!

 

[neopeius]

Shevek, you are a lot of fun. The Space Shuttle decision does come up in this history, though amidst quite different circumstances from OTL. Stay tuned (for a while--that is maaaaany updates away).

 

[Sausage]

in some ways it amazes me that as many astronauts survived as did. espescially in the early days. i guess the systems weren't as complex then [less to go wrong] but still they were cutting edge for the time.

 

[FDW]

Interesting TL here…

 

[neopeius]

Update #6!

Update #6 Boosters, satellites, spaceplanes and plans for the moon (1961-62)


<Ma Bell in Space>


1962 saw the launching of the first prototype communications satellites, AT&T launchi g a pair of low-orbitals to demonstrate the new technology. In the following year, Hughes followed suit with its geosynchronous Syncoms, and RCA's Relay satellites broadcast the first trans-Pacific programming. There was little doubt that the new frontier could revolutionize the transfer of information and entertainment, but it was still unclear what role, if any, the American government would have in comsats.


President Kennedy was bombarded with lobbyists, both from private enterprise and government organizations (foreign and domestic). There were ultimately three solutions to choose from. The President could do nothing and let capitalism reign supreme in space. AT&T had the clear advantage in resources (due to their near-monopoly on the ground). At the other end of the spectrum was the choice to nationalize the entire industry. A middle path involved the creation of an international consortium with the big communications firms holding large stakes.


The President opted for laissez faire. Private enterprise had always led innovation before, and there was no reason to muck it up with governmental interference. Of course, history has now shown that his conclusion was entirely incorrect. Though America was first in this aspect of the Space Race, the Soviets had a working commsat network years before the Americans, as the systems simply weren't profitable without a helping hand in their early development. The Soviets enjoyed programming "Live via Satellite" a full decade before the first regular American satellite broadcasts in the late 1970s.

<Unmanned probes>


NASA's ambitious Odin program, designed to explore the moon and Venus, was a mixed success. Early in development, OSS abandoned the orbiter mission in favor of a simpler flight mode which would have the spacecraft impact the lunar surface, taking pictures all the way. OSS then had to balance engineering concerns against the demands of the scientific community. The agency has already been plagued with lunar failures (i.e. Valkyrie), and thus OSS favored a simple design whose focus was mapping potential manned landing sites. The scientists wanted every possible experiment crammed on the Odin. OSS chose a middle road, trying to accommodate research while keeping costs low. The result was a disaster.


The program started well-enough. Odin 1, a Block 1 sky science version went into a high, eccentric Earth orbit on August 23, 1961and returned fine data. Its sister, Odin 2, failed on launch. The two Block 1 Odin-Venus probes were launched in July and August of 1962, arriving in December. They returned the first in situ observations of the hellish second planet.


The Block 2 Odins, 3, 4 and 5, however, were all failures. While Odin 5 suffered from a booster malfunction, the other two had electronics problems in flight as result of the imperfectly integrated experiments conflicting with one another. OSS had apparently put too many eggs in one basket; the spacecraft was flawed. The decision now was to 1) press doggedly on with a broken spacecraft, 2) completely redesign the Odin, or 3) spend some time fixing the faults. NASA chose the final option.

The Musplheim orbital science and the TIROS weather satellites continued to be successes, the latter looking as if it might become a money-maker for the bureau. NASA also scored a coup with its Orbital Solar Observatory. More large science satellites, direct competition with the big Soviet observatories, were soon to be developed.


The American Department of Defense, having divested itself of its reconnaissance satellite programs, focused on a few specific areas of expertise. A competing weather sat, the Aeolius, began development. DoD also started work on the Icarus series of medium orbit communications satellites. Hermes doppler satellites were launched and proved the providing navigational ability from orbit. Their successors ultimately became the GPS system so vital to military and civilian navigation.


The NRO continued the successful capsule-recovery Discoverer program as well as the missile-detection satellite, Ares, and the lackluster real-time satellite, Athena. Ares was, itself, a qualified success. Shortly after launch, American forces were brought to full alert on signals from the satellite that indicated a massive Soviet first-strike launch. It was later found to be a false alarm caused by sunlight reflected from cloud tops.


New NRO programs included the Hebe, developed to enforce the upcoming Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Creon next-generation ELINT probe.

Mother Russia may have secured headlines with its manned missions, but their unmanned scientific efforts were highly underwhelming. Not one of the Big 3 bureaux created a rocket capable of launching anything more than the small Lunastrelas, and no new lunar/interplanetary probes were developed. In a desultory effort, Korolev made a series of six small satellites dubbed "Karlik" for launch on Yangel's boosters. Three of them were successes.


Yangel kept the Soviets in the military satellite game with his series of advanced technology test satellites for launch on his little R-12 boosters. Chelomei could waste his time on winged pipe dreams and Korolev could spend years developing his boondoggle boosters., but Yangel was carving a niche out for himself, a sort of insurance after the R-16 disaster (which was partly responsible for his failure to sell his R-36 follow-on booster to the Soviet government). The Yangel sats included prototype communications probes, ABM targets and ELINT radio sniffers. OKB-586 also won the contract to develop an anti-satellite spacecraft. First flights were expected by 1964.

<Russian booster wars continued>


The charismatic Chelomei went head to head with Yangel and Korolev for the role of chief builder of ICBMs for the military. The junior of the three had two advantages: Sergei Korolev and Antonin Glushko. With the resources of his three new bureaux (see update #3), Chelomei was done with his next-generation ICBM, the UR-200, by the end of 1962. Yangel's R-16 derivative, the R-36, was shelved. This was the break Chelomei needed. He was now assured a pet booster for his true passion, the winged spacecraft called the Raketoplan. The powers-that-be might have sidelined such an ambitious project, but the American X-15b flight made it clear that the Soviets needed an answer to American spaceplane capabilities.

In the meantime, Korolev's falling out with Glushko turned out to be the break he needed to blaze forward on his R-9 (and its natural successor, the N-1 lunar rocket). Nikolai Kuznetsov's OKB-276 was contracted to make the engines for these boosters, and the new engineer proved more the up to the task. By the end of 1962, the R-9 was ready for flight trials.

<Competing spaceplanes>


1962 saw DoD pushing the X-20 spaceplane concept in earnest, and Congress was happy to pay. These were heady times, where any project remotely connected with the space race could expect a fully-funded budget. America did not know what to expect from the other side of the pole, and so it was trying every avenue. Military and civilian agencies raced to beat each other to success with an energy sometimes surpassing their zeal to beat the Russians. The big question was whether or not the momentum derived from Crossfield's X-15b flight would be sufficient to sustain the X-20's development in the face of NASA's Magellan successes (and those of its follow-up).


The Soviet Raketoplan program also continued apace. The unmanned and undersized M-12 was not ready by the end of 1962, which pushed the program back some. Moreover, orbital missions of the full-sized spacecraft would have to wait on development of the UR-200's outsized descendant, the UR-500. Still, it was even money which superpower's rocket plane would take to the skies first. First flights were expected as early as 1964, operational missions beginning in 1965.

<Methods to the Moon>


By 1961, both superpowers were developing huge rockets to launch their national lunar missions, but neither side had chosen a configuration for the spacecraft. President Kennedy had a number of options open to him. DoD presented a moon-traveling spaceplane, the Lunex, as well as a modular booster family with which to launch it. In retrospect, the proposal was not unlike Chelomei's Universal Rocket (UR) system, a scalable series of boosters designed to replace Korolev's R-7 at the low end and surpass Korolev's lunar N-1 at the high end.


DoD's was a losing battle, however. Von Braun was too entrenched, and his goldplated "Artemis" mission, named for the Greek goddess of the moon in a conscious break with the Nordic scheme adopted for NASA's unmanned craft, was the favorite from the outset. Another loser was General Electric, which did not have the political acumen to successfully sell its modular, cheaper design.


For a while, the Direct Ascent, Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) mission modes were in heated competition. The first ultimately lost out as the eight-engine behemoth booster (called Nova) looked to be too expensive and too inflexible to develop. LOR, with its myriad untried techniques and required technologies, seemed too risky. After a pitched battle, EOR emerged the winner.


In the Soviet Union, owing to the comparative weakness of the N-1 versus the American Nova/Saturn, a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was the default choice. Development of the Soviet lunar rocket and spacecraft began later than that of their American counterparts.

 

[The Oncoming Storm]

Another great update!

I guess Kennedy ITTL will be getting panned mercilessly for killing INTELSAT at birth, Soviet propaganda would have made a big play that they were first, also there would be a lot of cultural impacts, IIRC the 1968 Olympics and the 1970 World Cup were the first time those events could be seen live across the globe, outside the Eastern Bloc that wouldn't have happened until later.

I like the contrasting moon mission modes, going to be an interesting race!

 

[neopeius]

Another great update!

I guess Kennedy ITTL will be getting panned mercilessly for killing INTELSAT at birth

Kennedy will be more remembered for other events in his life...

Thanks for watching!

 

[Shevek23]

...but it was still unclear what role, if any, the American government would have in comsats....
The President opted for laissez faire. Private enterprise had always led innovation before, and there was no reason to muck it up with governmental interference.

I wonder what exactly the President meant by that. Did he mean, private enterprises should negotiate with NASA for leasing/renting launch and ground support facilities, or that they should not only purchase rockets and build their own satellites, but also construct their own parallel infrastructure--pads, tracking, the whole thing--wherever they felt like, out of pocket?

If the latter, the upshot might be nothing, for a long time, considering these considerable costs, and eventually a bunch of rival launch sites around the world, presumably not even on US soil for the most part, the most equatorial US owned sites, Hawaii and Puerto Rico and still worse some very small islands in the Pacific and Caribbean being, well, isolated and expensive to operate from, whereas third world nations in the tropics might also lack infrastructure but be relatively cheap to operate in. In fact private space enterprise might cease to have any particular connection to the USA at all, except insofar as revenue was coming in from American markets and to the extent that US industry might be building the hardware. But that latter is also dubious, the longer it takes private initiative to get around to offering the product--the logic offshoring the operations would probably prevail, especially if the whole complex of rocket construction and payload assembly and so on could be built up next to the launch sites.

Frankly I'd think JFK would want to encourage the industry to remain firmly based in the USA, for security reasons as well as economic ones and considerations of prestige, therefore he'd at least be offering American investors the option of leasing NASA services. But that logic points toward a consortium, which I suppose was the OTL path taken, for good reasons it would seem.

Why would Kennedy have a case of the dumbs on this subject? You're not on too shaky ground--when FDR came into office, he found a consortium system of airlines in place, with links between the manufacturers and the airlines formalized in the cartels, and sought to trust-bust them and force more "natural" competition. (Boeing, for instance, had its own airline under the Hoover administration, and got out of the airline biz because the Federals ordered it). At the same time, he also briefly ordered airmail carried not by private contractors (airmail being the means whereby the US government had de facto subsidized the airlines--it wasn't until the DC-3 started operating that it was even possible for an airline to operate in the black on the basis of passenger revenue alone, prior to that every airline owed its profits to airmail contracts) but by the Army Air Corps. (There was a rash of crashes as the AAC, unfamiliar with the operation and flying inappropriate aircraft, ran into a learning curve, and FDR was forced to restore the contract system).

The point being, American political ideology can be amazingly eclectic, with the Republicans of the 1920s being the ones to champion a certain amount of governmental involvement in "private" business to create the industry, and a Democrat, in fact a Democrat elected in the midst of an epic failure of the private market, championing laissez-faire--and at the same time nationalizing a service that logically speaking, perhaps always should have been national, but in fact had been the main taproot of the whole "private" aeronautical industry.

So JFK could well have been more devoted to the notion that private enterprise should rise or fall on its own merits without government interference than Eisenhower was or Nixon might have been.

But frankly the notion that advanced projects should be undertaken by a partnership of government and industrial leaders was pretty well ensconed in American practice by this late date, between the New Deal, the manner in which WWII was fought and won by the USA, and the "military/industrial complex" Eisenhower made so infamous with his belated denunciation--and Kennedy, I believe, was favored to a great extent precisely because he was quite comfortable with this very establishment. In the 1960 campaign it was the Democrats who were the hawks, denouncing the alleged "missile gap" for instance and in general accusing the Republicans of a lazy immobility in the face of urgent challenges.

Well so it was OTL; from the fact that you assume Kennedy would be the President at this point I suppose you've carried over those same basic political dynamics.

Not that the Kennedy administration simply carried over the practices of the Eisenhower years; they did indeed try to change the dynamics a bit, but the direction of the change was neither a hands-off laissez faire nor nationalization, but rather cartelization under the technocratic management of the "best and the brightest," beginning with Robert McNamara in the Department of Defense, who nowadays is roundly cursed by both left and right (left for Vietnam, right for being an allegedly heartless, soulless micromanager whose schemes for rationalization fell between stools and undercut many glorious projects, in their view).

So cartelization as OTL would seem right up JFK's alley and OTL they could quickly answer any critics by pointing out it works.

So it seems to me you hand Kennedy the Idiot Ball here and I wonder if you can show that actually he almost did go this way OTL.

And clarify--does laissez faire for comsats mean private companies have to do it all privately, from blueprints to launch from someplace they've built themselves, or renting out Cape Canaveral, or what?

-----

Meanwhile, if the Soviets do take the lead in comsat applications, presumably they will use a Molniya orbit (quite likely to have a different name ITTL since OTL it's named after the first Soviet satellite series to use it). But the ground track of such an orbit, centered on the middle of the USSR, has its other node centered squarely on North America!

We thus have the intriguing (and embarrassing, to JFK!) possibility that the Soviets might take up Kennedy's offer of free enterprise and offer to lease out the use of their satellites to US and Canadian consortia! Heaven knows the Russians would need the hard currency!

1962 saw DoD pushing the X-20 spaceplane concept in earnest, and Congress was happy to pay. These were heady times, where any project remotely connected with the space race could expect a fully-funded budget. America did not know what to expect from the other side of the pole, and so it was trying every avenue. Military and civilian agencies raced to beat each other to success with an energy sometimes surpassing their zeal to beat the Russians. The big question was whether or not the momentum derived from Crossfield's X-15b flight would be sufficient to sustain the X-20's development in the face of NASA's Magellan successes (and those of its follow-up).


The Soviet Raketoplan program also continued apace. The unmanned and undersized M-12 was not ready by the end of 1962, which pushed the program back some. Moreover, orbital missions of the full-sized spacecraft would have to wait on development of the UR-200's outsized descendant, the UR-500. Still, it was even money which superpower's rocket plane would take to the skies first. First flights were expected as early as 1964, operational missions beginning in 1965.

The Dynasoar aerospaceraft, in this picture, bears a striking resemblance to the OTL Shuttle orbiter, more than to an X-15. I guess that's for reasons of fundamental hypersonic physics? But I'd think that if Crossfield could survive DoD's stunt, the designers would be influenced more toward building on that design. Would addressing the problems that almost killed Crossfield lead straight to the more Shuttle-like shape?

...Von Braun was too entrenched, and his goldplated "Artemis" mission, named for the Greek goddess of the moon in a conscious break with the Nordic scheme adopted for NASA's unmanned craft, was the favorite from the outset.

I was wondering about the rather Wagnerian tone of TTL's probe names! IIRC the OTL names were rather eclectic, here there seems to have been a memo on themes.

It's deliciously ironic that the person who breaks from the Valhallic theme in favor of Classical--and naming the mission after a goddess instead of a god at that--is none other than the very icon of NASA's Teutonism, Von Braun!

For a while, the Direct Ascent, Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) mission modes were in heated competition. The first ultimately lost out as the eight-engine behemoth booster (called Nova) looked to be too expensive and too inflexible to develop. LOR, with its myriad untried techniques and required technologies, seemed too risky. After a pitched battle, EOR emerged the winner.


In the Soviet Union, owing to the comparative weakness of the N-1 versus the American Nova/Saturn, a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was the default choice. Development of the Soviet lunar rocket and spacecraft began later than that of their American counterparts.

I forget what mode the Soviets settled on OTL, if they can be said to have "settled" at all, given the abortive nature of their Moon landing program here. But our Apollo was LOR!

EOR means that the Moon craft is assembled in Earth orbit from two or more launches from Earth, but the craft that has to be injected into tranlunar orbit is one big piece that lands directly on the Moon, with no Command Module left in orbit to wait for a smaller lander to go down and come back up to join it. The whole moonship lands, then its upper stage takes off and presumably goes directly for a trajectory back to Earth.

I'm trying to remember why this was rejected OTL. It was after all the Collier Magazine program, in ultra-simplified form. I think first of all someone was able to show that the overall launch weight would be lower with LOR, presumably from economizing on the lander, which would in turn permit economies of fuel in the lunar injection phase. And second, there was some concern that a mission that depended on two or more coordinated launches had worse chances of coming to grief. (The upside being that if the second rocket failed on launch, at least the hardware launched on the first one is ready to hand in near Earth orbit. I believe the plan would have been to send up the astronauts on the second launch, so presumably no human beings would be stranded in orbit by such a failure).

How are these caveats answered ITTL?

 

[neopeius]

I wonder what exactly the President meant by that. Did he mean, private enterprises should negotiate with NASA for leasing/renting launch and ground support facilities, or that they should not only purchase rockets and build their own satellites, but also construct their own parallel infrastructure--pads, tracking, the whole thing--wherever they felt like, out of pocket?

So it seems to me you hand Kennedy the Idiot Ball here and I wonder if you can show that actually he almost did go this way OTL.

And clarify--does laissez faire for comsats mean private companies have to do it all privately, from blueprints to launch from someplace they've built themselves, or renting out Cape Canaveral, or what?

One thing you have to remember about this timeline is it was built by collaboration. More specifically, it was a simulation game played out over ten years. The real Kennedy picked the Intelsat option. In this universe, the person playing the president was swayed by a persuasive AT&T lobbyist.

NASA rents out its services. The telcoms don't need to make their own parallel infrastructure. Still, with AT&T having the high ground, and without the government sufficiently mitigating the costs, things just don't move as fast as they did OTL.

Comsat development is not my field of expertise (if, indeed, I have any), so in the tradition of Marvel Comics, you get a No-Prize if you can make my take on events plausible.

-----

Meanwhile, if the Soviets do take the lead in comsat applications, presumably they will use a Molniya orbit (quite likely to have a different name ITTL since OTL it's named after the first Soviet satellite series to use it). But the ground track of such an orbit, centered on the middle of the USSR, has its other node centered squarely on North America!

We thus have the intriguing (and embarrassing, to JFK!) possibility that the Soviets might take up Kennedy's offer of free enterprise and offer to lease out the use of their satellites to US and Canadian consortia! Heaven knows the Russians would need the hard currency!

Indeed! Isn't that cute?

The Dynasoar aerospaceraft, in this picture, bears a striking resemblance to the OTL Shuttle orbiter, more than to an X-15. I guess that's for reasons of fundamental hypersonic physics? But I'd think that if Crossfield could survive DoD's stunt, the designers would be influenced more toward building on that design. Would addressing the problems that almost killed Crossfield lead straight to the more Shuttle-like shape?

I think the X-15 platform was a dead end, developmentally. The Air Force already had a number of designs which looked like the X-20 very early on, so it made sense that they would stick with it (factoring in lessons learned from Crossfield's flight and OOC the fact that I have lots of pictures of X-20 and X-20 derivatives and no pictures of this hypothetical X-15c)

I was wondering about the rather Wagnerian tone of TTL's probe names! IIRC the OTL names were rather eclectic, here there seems to have been a memo on themes.

NASA had consistency, too, though it took a while for it to happen. Interestingly enough, ITTL, DoD and NRO favor the Greek, unmanned NASA likes Norse names, but manned NASA is a hodgepodge.

It's deliciously ironic that the person who breaks from the Valhallic theme in favor of Classical--and naming the mission after a goddess instead of a god at that--is none other than the very icon of NASA's Teutonism, Von Braun!

That's what happens when a woman plays the Director of NASA. But Artemis is a fitting name, I think. Moreso than Apollo.

I forget what mode the Soviets settled on OTL, if they can be said to have "settled" at all, given the abortive nature of their Moon landing program here. But our Apollo was LOR!

Soviet Lunar was LOR. It was a lighter LOR because the N1 was less powerful than the Saturn. The circumlunar shots used the Proton rocket (UR-500).

EOR means that the Moon craft is assembled in Earth orbit from two or more launches from Earth, but the craft that has to be injected into tranlunar orbit is one big piece that lands directly on the Moon, with no Command Module left in orbit to wait for a smaller lander to go down and come back up to join it. The whole moonship lands, then its upper stage takes off and presumably goes directly for a trajectory back to Earth.

I'm trying to remember why this was rejected OTL. It was after all the Collier Magazine program, in ultra-simplified form. I think first of all someone was able to show that the overall launch weight would be lower with LOR, presumably from economizing on the lander, which would in turn permit economies of fuel in the lunar injection phase. And second, there was some concern that a mission that depended on two or more coordinated launches had worse chances of coming to grief. (The upside being that if the second rocket failed on launch, at least the hardware launched on the first one is ready to hand in near Earth orbit. I believe the plan would have been to send up the astronauts on the second launch, so presumably no human beings would be stranded in orbit by such a failure).

How are these caveats answered ITTL?

EOR is actually much heavier than LOR. You need to send enough fuel to land the equivalent of the Apollo CSM *and* LEM and then blast the CSM off again.

But it doesn't require tricky rendezvouses around the moon. Before Gemini, we didn't realize such things weren't that hard.

Another advantage of EOR is you get much longer lunar stays since you can carry more provisions with you on the heavier spacecraft.

The way you deal with the possibility of launch failure is to have a fuel-refrigeration station in orbit to keep the fuel stable until a crew can be launched.

 

[neopeius]

On the comsat issue, I think AT&T was willing to trade government subsidy (which is what Intelsat was) for monopoly, and then realized it just wasn't profitable. But they didn't care because as long as no one else could afford it, AT&T could keep doing what it did on Earth and not have to worry about competition from space.

I think this sort of short-sightedness in the pursuit of monopoly is sadly quite plausible.