WI: The HL-10 reaches for the sky

I think you've got to be misunderstanding! I would never believe a 6 ton vehicle of this type could possibly hold 8 people.

Yeah, HL-10, HL-20 and HL-42 all seem VERY light for their purported capability.

It is interesting to say the least.

Then you cite the volume in cubic feet. If Gemini was 90 cf, I would flatly state that at least 45 cf must be allotted each crewman. You can't go lower than Gemini on crew volume! Everyone agrees it was very compact--many dispute this was a bad thing, since they say Apollo crew got space sick because of the vast boundless space afforded them but the tight-packed Gemini crews were fine. But I don't think anyone suggests that they could have got along fine with even less volume!

Well, assuming both pictures are of the same vehicle, I'd say that the habitable volume of the D/3 was somewhere around 250 ft3 +/- 100 ft3 or so...

So maybe it could just about fit 8 men...

You've probably heard me talk about my uncle, right? He was commanding officer of a SAC team sent into the silo of the Titan missile that blew up in 1980 Arkansas.

I've heard the story - I hadn't remembered it was in 1980!

I've always gotten the sense that the level of pollution caused by the American strategic military complex (particularly the bomb making, the hypergolic missiles, the solid fuel missiles and the underlying R&D and production efforts) are far, far worse than is generally spoken of. It makes me wonder if, had the US collapsed in 1991 and the Soviet Union survived, Florida would be spoken of in the same way as we speak about Kazakhstan now...

fasquardon
 

Archibald

Banned
I feel sorry for your uncle, Shevek. At least storable propellants have been removed from most rockets - besides the Russian launchers. Ariane 1 - 4 is gone, so is Titan.
 
There are other reasons I have that I am glad we did not in fact standardize all our launch capability around Titan. I gather that when e of pi and Workable Goblin started to write Eyes Turned Skyward they were expecting to tell the story of an EELV based ATL space program with OTL budget but superior outcomes due to avoiding the money pit of the Shuttle on the assumption that the Titan family so many people lavish so much love on would indeed be star of the show, and wrote their opening post with a preview of the sort of program that could be launched on these. But they found themselves diverting over to the cryogenic "Saturn 1C" and "Saturn Multibody" program instead, and later remarked that the greater throw weight and greater stage diameters of these ATL systems left them considerably better off at certain junctures of the evolution of the program. Had we gone into the 1970s committed to Titan derivatives, we would at some point have had to break with them, or live with certain tight limits we'd regret.
The actual full story is that we developed Eyes around Multibody, but then were looking for alternatives for the contract proposal and came up with Titan 3L2/4 (the larger-core Titan variants). That gave more interesting payloads for the USAF, who were supposed to be half the impetus behind the contract, so there was a period of a few months where we were trying to rewrite around Titan 3L. We then realized we could simply use Titan solids on the Multibody core to give intermediate sizes of Saturn Medium, just as Atlas/Delta use solids shy of Heavy configurations, and switched back to our original Multibody concept. The opening thus preserved a really short period of time in the TL's development.
 

Archibald

Banned
There are other reasons I have that I am glad we did not in fact standardize all our launch capability around Titan

I've toyed with this very idea for Explorers. ITTL Martin Marietta is all-out for it, obviously, but NASA and the military aren't very enthusiastic. After the shuttle gets cancelled late 1971 Martin Marietta tries to place its Titan everywhere - to replace Delta, Atlas-Centaur, Saturn.
I thought it might be fun to have a TL where Titan pulls a shuttle, that is, the Titan family kills Saturn, Delta and Atlas and replace them with Titan variants. Then it all goes down the drain when Titan proves to be as temperamental as the shuttle (solid and storables - oops)

Titan > Delta II
Titan > Atlas
Titan > Saturn IB
Titan > Ariane 1 - 4

Titan to replace Delta: Titan II, obviously (alternative: a 7-seg Titan SRM topped with Titan stage 2 and possibly a Centaur or a Transtage as stage 3)
Titan to replace Atlas-Centaur and compete with Ariane 1 - 4: a Titan IIIE without the large solids.
Titan vs Saturn: Titan III-M and eventually, Titan III-L.
 
I thought it might be fun to have a TL where Titan pulls a shuttle, that is, the Titan family kills Saturn, Delta and Atlas and replace them with Titan variants. Then it all goes down the drain when Titan proves to be as temperamental as the shuttle (solid and storables - oops)

Well... That would be a complete NASA-screw. The costs would be brutal!

fasquardon
 
Going from the Delta III program of the '90s, it looks like the Delta-Thor system could be stretched to lift 8.3 tonnes to LEO or 3.8 tonnes to GTO. I don't see anything about the Delta III design that couldn't be achieved during the 70s, so an alt-Delta III could be just the ticket for launching an 8 tonne D/3 into orbit.

fasquardon
 
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