Alternate "Saturns" from 1960

[Skybolt]

1963, like rightly Scott says on his blog (http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=2640 showing gorgeous COLOR graphics of early Martin post-Saturns), was a great year for space and future. But what we'd say of 1960 ? The companies were not only working with great plans for a rather far-off future, after Moon-landing, but they were proposing short-term big boosters, without NASA even asking.. . This is one of those beasts, alternate Saturn, from a different genetics than the well-established ABMA-origin lineage. Behold an unnamed "Saturn" and more from Rocketdyne. As it is natural, they thought of using F-1s, but in clustered configuration. Second stage (the staging time and altitude were different from the Saturn V one, judging from the tanks size) uses a different engine slightly smaller (any idea ?). Different configuration comprised 6 or 8 F-1, for a total first-stage thrust of 9 to 12 million lbs. Rocketdyne was advertising a capability of 200 tons in LEO and 45 tons in Martian orbit (!). Notice the winged manned vehicle on the left one: am I wrong or I've already seen it ?
This is a first since 1960, AFAIK. Source is Aviation Week, December 19th 1960. Any more info out there ? And, any more alternate Saturns ? F-1 based or not, clustered or not ? Liquids, solid, mixed ? From this timeframe. This http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,4604.msg36400.html#msg36400, Arcturus, this http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3768.0 and this http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3722.0 are naturally excluded.

 

[Orionblamblam]

1963, like rightly Scott says on his blog (http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=2640 ...

Of course it's a good idea!

showing gorgeous COLOR graphics of early Martin post-Saturns), was a great year for space and future. But what we'd say of 1960 ? The companies were not only working with great plans for a rather far-off future, after Moon-landing, but they were proposing short-term big boosters, without NASA even asking..

The interesting thing to me is that in 1960, the aerospace industry was, from an engineering standpoint, kinda floundering. Didn't really have a good grasp of how to design a really big booster. But by 1963, they'd nailed it across the board. There are literally *hundreds* of designs from the '63 era that would look wonderfully modern and proper *today.* From '63 to about '68, when Apollo died (7/31/68 to be exact... see page 3 of APR issue V2N3 for evidence), the US aerospace industry cranked out the most amazing variety of well-thought-out, incredibly capable launch vehicles, the like of which was only approached again, and then only weakly, in the SPS-days of the mid/late 1970's.

I've got a truckload of "alternate Saturn" concepts on my backup hard drive. I just procured another... 1 terabyte, which will hopefully serve me for another year or two. And with luck, I'll be able to transfer everything over to it without loosign it all. So, ina day or two hopefully I'll got digging through the old files on the new hard drive, and I'll post some stuff.

 

[Triton]

The interesting thing to me is that in 1960, the aerospace industry was, from an engineering standpoint, kinda floundering. Didn't really have a good grasp of how to design a really big booster. But by 1963, they'd nailed it across the board. There are literally *hundreds* of designs from the '63 era that would look wonderfully modern and proper *today.* From '63 to about '68, when Apollo died (7/31/68 to be exact... see page 3 of APR issue V2N3 for evidence), the US aerospace industry cranked out the most amazing variety of well-thought-out, incredibly capable launch vehicles, the like of which was only approached again, and then only weakly, in the SPS-days of the mid/late 1970's.

I've got a truckload of "alternate Saturn" concepts on my backup hard drive. I just procured another... 1 terabyte, which will hopefully serve me for another year or two. And with luck, I'll be able to transfer everything over to it without loosign it all. So, ina day or two hopefully I'll got digging through the old files on the new hard drive, and I'll post some stuff.

I would love to see your truckload of "alternate Saturn" concepts.

Best wishes to you in the data transfer.

 

[Proponent]

I've got a truckload of "alternate Saturn" concepts on my backup hard drive. I just procured another... 1 terabyte, which will hopefully serve me for another year or two. And with luck, I'll be able to transfer everything over to it without loosign it all. So, ina day or two hopefully I'll got digging through the old files on the new hard drive, and I'll post some stuff.

I'd love to see that too. And if I could mention my own pet interest: improved Saturn IB models not involving strap-on SRMs.

 

[OM]

I'd love to see that too. And if I could mention my own pet interest: improved Saturn IB models not involving strap-on SRMs.

...You're referring to the ones where they talked about replacing the H-1's with either a set of J-2s or a pair of F-1's, right? Doesn't Mark Wade's site have info on those?

 

[Orionblamblam]

Best wishes to you in the data transfer.

It's not going well. Two freakin' days I've had the new hard drive hooked up to the laptop, copying files over using the software that came with the drive. In that time it's copied over somethignng like 8000 files, at 15 and some gigs... with about 24,000 files to go at about 36 gig. And then after that I have to copy over the old, small 150-gig "passport" drive. At this rate, it'll take *months.*

 

[Orionblamblam]

And if I could mention my own pet interest: improved Saturn IB models not involving strap-on SRMs.

Offhand, I know of:
1) stretching the S-I stage
2) Stretching the S-IVb stage
3) Adding a Centaur third stage
4) Replacing the first stage with a large solid
5) Replacing the first stage with a large single-engine hypergolic/storable stage
6) Recovery of the first stage with a Rogallo wing
7) Recovery of the first stage with a large balloon
8) Replacing the first stage with a semi-recoverable glideback stage
9) Replacing the LOX with FLOX
10) Replacing the S-IVb with a SASSTO
11) Replacing the S-IVb with a nuclear stage
12) Replacing the first stage with a cluster of solids
13) Recovery of the first stage with a parafoil (Dyna Soar mission)

Then there are a bunch of "variants" that replace the Apollo CSM with various spaceplanes, lifting bodies, etc.

Thisis off the top of my head, so I'm sure there's more.

 

[CFE]

Were there any studies performed on replacing the Saturn I/IB first stage with a LOX-Kerosene stage of more conventional design? It wouldn't really increase the vehicle performance, but it would make it cheaper and faster to produce more Saturns if a need for further Saturn production was necessary. If such a stage was proposed, I assume it would resemble a scaled-down S-IC with eight H-1B engines and Saturn IB-style fins.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Were there any studies performed on replacing the Saturn I/IB first stage with a LOX-Kerosene stage of more conventional design?

Early in the design process, yes. But once the clustered tanks were being produced, it seems that there was relatively little interest in replacing it with a conventional stage with the same engines/propellant. It'd be a lot of development effort for minimal advantage.

 

[Michel Van]

so far i know
were proposal for replace the 8xH-1 by one F-1

Boeing made new Saturn IB proposal to use also as Booster for Heavy Saturn V
large solid Booster or new first stage with 2xF-1

or replace S-Ib by a cheap stage with pressure-fed engine
fuel from LOX/Rp-1 to insane Nitrogen tetroxide/Alumizine

Alumizine?
that a mixture of 43% aluminum powder suspended in anhydrous hydrazine with a gelling agent.
this give higher combustion heat due to the high enthalpy of formation of aluminum oxide as a combustion product
and higher trust

Not new Idea Eugene Sänger tested Kerosene with aluminum powder aka "Kerosol" in 1930's

but Alumizine has a big disadvantage: It explodes at the smallest disturbance !

 

[Proponent]

I'd love to see that too. And if I could mention my own pet interest: improved Saturn IB models not involving strap-on SRMs.

...You're referring to the ones where they talked about replacing the H-1's with either a set of J-2s or a pair of F-1's, right? Doesn't Mark Wade's site have info on those?

No, I hadn't even heard about those proposals. What I had in mind in particular were the Saturns IB-A, -B and -CE about which Mark Wade's site has some information. These vehicles involved options 1), 2) and 3) mentioned by Scott, above.

I suspect that the most relevant documents are the reports on Phases 1 and 3 of the Saturn IB Improvement Study (Scott already sells Phase 2, which covers solid-boosted upgrades). It seems that the all-liquid designs lost out to solid-boosted versions, and I'd be interested in knowing how that decision was made. I suspect that it came down to cost: dollars spent on upgrades versus payload gain. But I wonder if anybody ever considered the additional complexity engendered by the strap-on approach.

 

[OM]

Best wishes to you in the data transfer.

It's not going well. Two freakin' days I've had the new hard drive hooked up to the laptop, copying files over using the software that came with the drive. In that time it's copied over somethignng like 8000 files, at 15 and some gigs... with about 24,000 files to go at about 36 gig. And then after that I have to copy over the old, small 150-gig "passport" drive. At this rate, it'll take *months.*

...Jeez! What did you hook up to, the parallel port? Not even USB 1.0 goes that slow. Something's amiss here, Scott.

 

[Orionblamblam]

...Jeez! What did you hook up to, the parallel port? Not even USB 1.0 goes that slow. Something's amiss here, Scott.

I finally gave up on it. I was using the "automatic backup" process that's supposed to be able to keep the external hard drive up-to-date on changes on the laptop hard drive; it had to scan each and every file for something or other, and it took forever to do it. And the program, which was supposed to run invisibly in the background, consumed damend near all the computing power of the laptop, slowing everyhting else to a crawl. After some fun times tryign to convince the system to uninstall a program that was runnign in the background and refused to stop, I scraped all that "Memeo" crap off the drive, and am now just using the external hard drive like any other drive, using the file explorer to copy stuff over. I've got everything off the laptop drive I need to, and am now copying over everythign from the previous, 200-gig hard drive, so I can use *that* drive as the backup travel hard drive. Since I'll be leaving here in a week or two for another series of archive raids, I wanted to clean off both the laptop and the small external drive for the trip... and the automatic backup crap just wasn't cutting it.

The automatic backup idea is a neat one, as it would automatically save changed files, and if this laptop melts down, bursts into flames or takes a bullet (I'm going into the gun-free peaceful utopia that is California, so getting caught in a crossfire of poorly-aimed AK-47 rounds is not an impossibility), it'd be nice to simply get a new laptop and turn it into a clone of the old one. But taking weeks to do it just ain't practical.

 

[OM]

I finally gave up on it. I was using the "automatic backup" process that's supposed to be able to keep the external hard drive up-to-date on changes on the laptop hard drive; it had to scan each and every file for something or other, and it took forever to do it.

...Yeah, that's Memeo alright. It has a notorious problem with initially setting up and backing up large hard drives with file counts over about 5,000. That's because it was written back when the largest HDs you could affordably buy were about 100GB in size, and files were expected to be MP3s and not documents. It makes a database of what you have on the hard drive and analyzes the file for some unspecified internal signature. Works fine if all you've got are MP3s and files larger than 3MB or so, but if you've got a lot of image or PDF files, it chokes.

...Me, I just start a bulk dump from a full drive to a larger empty one each time I get the urge to back everything up, and let it run while I'm asleep. Usually after I've either pruned and purged stuff I won't need for a few years onto DVD backup.

 

[Orionblamblam]

...Yeah, that's Memeo alright. It has a notorious problem with initially setting up and backing up large hard drives with file counts over about 5,000. That's because it was written back when the largest HDs you could affordably buy were about 100GB in size, and files were expected to be MP3s and not documents. It makes a database of what you have on the hard drive and analyzes the file for some unspecified internal signature. Works fine if all you've got are MP3s and files larger than 3MB or so, but if you've got a lot of image or PDF files, it chokes.

Well, add my experince to the database. I'm nearing completion on copying over the smaller external drive. The Memo thing would still be working on this long after the sun had exploded.

I suspect some day there'll be some sort of quantum storage system that can dump a quadrillion terabtyes of data onto a B-5 datacrystal in a femtosecond. This ain't that day, though.