Dark Moon Rising: Archibald space TL

[Archibald]

But Challenger doesn't exists in this universe

More seriously - I'm painfully aware than 1*UA1207 = 6*O-rings; two, 12*O-rings, and on... plus Titan 34D-9, April 18, 1986, Vandenberg...
That's the system Achille's heel. The more O-rings and segments, the higher the risk of KABOOOM.

 

[martinbayer]

I meant that as a general remark. It should not have happened in the first place, and in my opinion neither should the risk of a similar "accident" be possible in your alternate history.

 

[Archibald]

Got some fun tweaking @archipeppe stupendous rocket artwork. It certainly looks more balanced with two UA 1207 than one, although Apollo on top doesn't care. Its mass can be tweaked by offloading propellants from the service module, as done for Skylab and Soyuz missions.

Twice 120 inch is twice 3.05 m so 6.1 meters wide. S-IVB was 6.60 m diameter, so they just put 50 cm of space between the two 1207 SRM to get a linear adapter between them.

Rounded numbers: a fully fueled Apollo CSM weighed 29 tons of which 18 was storable props. Empty the tanks and a CSM minimum weight should be 11 tons. The ASTP docking module weighed 2 mt while Saturn throw weight was 17 tons, end result: 4 mt of props. Skylab missions having no docking modules propbably carried a bit more prop.

This vehicle - with only one 1207 SRM - can lift a bit less than a standard Saturn IB : 35 000 pounds rather than 38 000. This however is with suboptimal solid, S-IVB and J-2. Get better mass fractions and a XLR-129 and payload bust a Saturn IB.
And with two SRMs it gets past 50 000 pounds.

9.81*269*ln((320+120+16)/(32+120+16))+9.81*430*ln((120+16)/(12+16)) = 9301 m/s - with 16 tons (a bit more than 35 000 Ibs)

9.81*269*ln((640+120+23)/(64+120+23))+9.81*430*ln((120+23)/(12+23)) = 9448 m/s - with 23 tons (a bit more than 50 000 Ibs)

 

[martinbayer]

I still see sordid squalid solids being pressed into service for manned missions in your utterly dastardly scheme presented above - why do you abhor, despise, detest, disdain, dislike, hate, and loathe the lives of American Astronauts ever so much - have you no shame, Sir? Solids are jolly for fancy fireworks, but not for serious spaceflight.

 

[Archibald]

Presently scratching my head at how I should react to this ?

 

[martinbayer]

Oh, I don't know - perhaps by completely agreeing with me and humbly admitting the error of your ways ? But seriously, in my professional view as an aerospace engineer with more than half of my career having been spent in launch system studies and analyses, other than abort systems, solids have no place whatsoever in human rated launch architectures, like all the horrific abominations in the illustration above.

 

[Archibald]

Résistance is futile. And I, for one, welcome our new @martinbayer overlord.

 

[uk 75]

This is a fascinating thread with lots of information and interesting ideas.
I await the next round with interest.

As I understand real world options, the US put all its eggs in the Space Shuttle basket after the moon landing had been achieved.
No manned US capsule flew after the Apollo/Soyuz rendezvous mission but Skylab was lost after the Space Shuttle first flights were delayed.
As someone who grew up with this stuff, the return to manned capsules on top of rockets like the continuing Russian use of Soyuz seems only to show how little we have achieved since 1969.

 

[Archibald]

That's actually a bit of an issue, as the thing has mushroomed to 2800 pages in 15 years. I have waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much on my plate. It is a bit like a chinese food buffet. A gigantic buffet. You want to taste everything because everything looks tasty and delicious. But your stomach is quickly overwhelmed.

Yeah - ding dong the Shuttle is dead: assassinated by Nixon science advisors (PSAC) and bean counter (OMB) in October 1971. It came very close mid-October 1971.

NASA wanted a peculiar design, around October 10 PSAC told OMB it was bullshit. Around October 20, together they almost canned the whole Shuttle program for Big Gemini. Then Mathematica came seemingly out of nowhere on October 28 - with a solid-boosted Shuttle: the familiar one, 1981-2011.

Mathematica and NASA then closed ranks and for the next two months battled Nixon advisors until January 5, 1972 when Tricky Dick decided enough was enough, election year was coming. He needed California aerospace workers votes to get reelected and so - the Space Shuttle was a GO.

Here history takes a different course and, around October 22 1971 the Shuttle dies for real- Nixon advisors picks Big Gemini and won't budge.
NASA and the Mathematica Institute efforts of OTL only irritates PSAC and OMB until James Fletcher burns his credibility. And so Big Gemini is a go.

One crucial point is that the NRO says "hell, no, KH-9 will stick with Titan III and not move to the Shuttle." Titan III prevails to launch Big Gemini.
Spysats were key in the final Shuttle orbiter design. Length-wise, those 60 ft had KH-9 written all over them.

 

[Archibald]

December 11, 1972

Cape Canaveral

The night launch of Apollo 18 on December 12 will be visible to people on a large portion of the eastern seaboard as the final United States manned lunar landing mission gets underway.

Apollo 18 will be the seventh and final Moon landing in the Apollo program. Two of the three-man Apollo 18 crew will set up the sixth in a network of automatic scientific stations during their three-day stay at the Gassendi landing site.

J-4 Mission Parameters

Gassendi crater Coordinates 17.55°S 39.96°W

Landing Point Coordinates 18.0°S 40.0° W

Mission Events (elapsed time, hrs.)

Liftoff-TLI-----------------------00.00 december 12 1972

Translunar flight time----------87.07 december 15 1972

LOI - CSM Circularization------21.07 december 16 1972

Circularization - LOPC---------65.83 december 19 1972

LOPC - TEI----------------------58.35 december 22 1972

Transearth flight time----------97.63 december 24 1972

Splashdown--------------------329 hours december 28 1972

Total Mission Duration--------13.8 days​

 

[Archibald]

Lot of fun with alternate Apollo landing sites - including the rejected ones.

Apollo 13 was to land at Fra Mauro, but an oxygen tank decided otherwise, hence Apollo 14 planned site ended screwed. It was Taurus Littrow, but not the Apollo 17 one: 40 km away in a much less interesting zone. Apollo 17 own site was handpicked from Apollo 15 PanCam in the SIM bay.

Apollo 12 : H-1
Apollo 13: H-2, Fra Mauro - screwed.
Apollo 14: H-3, Fra Mauro (instead of Taurus-Littrow-not-A17)
Apollo 15: H-4, screwed for J-1. Went to Hadley. This screwed a) Davy Rille for H-4, but also my beloved Marius Hills for J-1 (it kind of made it to the final but lost there)
Apollo 16 was always Descartes and nowhere else.
Apollo 17 rehashed all the H- and remaining J- landing spots.
The H-, we already know: Davy Rille.
The lost J- : here they come.
a) The Marius Hills
b) Alphonsus. That one was the perenial loser, always making it to the final, and always rejected.
c) Gassendi
d) the dark horses, often rejected for tech reasons: Copernicus and Tycho (2001 - yeeeah !)
Note that Aristarchus had been sampled from a distance by Apollo 12 so never was a candidate.

So OTL
-the sites that never got a chance
- the ones that ranked high on the list for Apollo 17 (but Taurus decided otherwise)
- hence the ones for the famous "lost Apollos" 18 - 19 -20
- in the most logical order of interest
- a) Gassendi
- b) Copernicus
- c) Alphonsus (but nobody like Alphonsus, so you can bet it would been screwed for another one)
- d) Tycho (hair-raising landing at the edge of Apollo safety zone)

 

[Michel Van]

You need minimum FOUR UA1205 or UA1207 under S-IVB to get that payload in Low orbit

although Two UA1207 with S-IVB and Centaur would give nice Ariane 5 analog for GEO Sat and Space probes.

 

[Archibald]

My basic calculations say 40 000 pounds for 1*UA1207 + 1*S-IVB and from there each additional SRM adds 10 000 pounds to orbit. Three SRMs gets the Shuttle payload of 60 000 pound to orbit. This was the laucher considered for the Interim Earth orbit program of April 1971 and Portree mentions 28.7 mt to orbit which is very close.

 

[Michel Van]

My calculations for this Aries 1 version with Apollo CSM into low orbit

1x UA1207 = mass 319330 kg - Empty 51230 kg - ISP 272 sec
interstage 1500 kg (1% of mass above)
1x S-IVB = mass 118800 kg - Empty 12.900 kg - ISP 421
Adapter for payload =1700 kg
payload = 15.200 kg Apollo CSM
LES = 4000 kg

We get launch mass of 460530 kg vs thrust 1451496 kg, means its take off
after UA1207 operations V1= 2328,497 meter/s
jettison UA1207 & interstage and LES
after S-IVB operation V2= 6260,839 meter/s
Total deltaV (V1+V2) = 8589,33 meter/sec

But now too ugly part, aerodynamic (128 meter/s) and Gravity (1308 meter/s) Losses and needed Orbital speed.
into a 200 km orbit give 9277 meter/sec means it missing 687,67 meter/sec, what the payload has to correct it self.

 

[Archibald]

I knew something was wrong, either with acceleration levels or ascent losses. The more UA1207 below the S-IVB, the more field joints / O-rings... six per 1207, so 12, 18, 24... thinking not only about Challenger, but also about the Titan 34-D-9 cataclysm at Vandeberg, April 18, 1986...

Fun fact: at some point in 2007-2008 NASA contracted some Ares 1 / Orion failure mode studies to the Air Force... because of the 1990's Titan IV miserable failures.
Titan IV with its two solids of 300 tons each and liquid core was not that much dissimilar to Ares 1 with a 700 tons 5-seg Shuttle SRB in case of KABOOM.

So they picked one of the 1998-99 Titan IV mishaps data - and wondered whether Orion LAS could have pulled out the capsule safely away from an expanding cloud of burning SRM flaming chunks falling ballistically.

The results were chilling: while Orion would be safely pulled away from the explosion, the flaming bits of SRMs falling ballistically would catch back with the parachutes, pepper them, and ruin the escape...

It is pretty dumb, when you realize it. Capsule under chute slowly floats toward the ground, but flaming chunks of solids are like a meteorit shower... on the chutes. Which is definitively undesirable !

I was so impressed with that study, I recycled it for ITTL Challenger - yes, such things can happen to Big Gemini too. Long story short: OTL 1985-86 and 1998-99 Titan mishaps merge and fuse into such a disaster. Between January 28 and April 18 1986, I had a hard time picking a mishap date...
- one SRM leaks and explodes
- Big Gemini crew module seemingly gets away from it, thanks to its LAS
- it deploys its chute for a landing, alas...
- flaming bits of Titan solids catch back and ruin the chutes, leading to a crash and LOC.

Air Force report: Ares I crew couldn't survive blast in first minute

The crew of NASA's newest spacecraft "will not survive" an explosion of the Ares I rocket within the first minute of launch because blazing chunks of solid-rocket fuel would melt the parachutes on the crew-escape system, according to a new Air Force report.

phys.org

The explosion created a cone of red-hot debris that spread across nearly three miles. If a similar safety decision was made to blow up an Ares I, the report said, no escape system could blast the Orion capsule and its crew away from the flaming debris quickly enough to keep its parachutes from being incinerated.

Dang. 3 miles ? almost 5 km ? no surprise a capsule hanging below chutes can't escape the flaming shower !

 

[publiusr]

Saturn V-B might be best for an alt-history.

 

[Archibald]

January 1968

"Surveyor VI concluded the required direct support to the Apollo Program. Consequently, the prime objective of Surveyor VII was to obtain data at a site offering the greatest chemical diversity from the maria sites of all previous landings. Selection of the landing site which would be compatible with this objective, while providing an acceptable probability of soft landing, was a difficult and lengthy process. The selection had not yet been made at the time the launch vehicle targeting had to commence.

Therefore, targeting was generated for landing sites in Hipparchus and Copernicus craters because these sites were prime candidates and also provided for reaching almost any other site within the communication and incidence angle constraints with a midcourse maneuver of less than 15 m/sec.

The landing site eventually selected for Surveyor VII was on the Tycho ejecta or flow blanket at 40.87°S latitude and 11.37°W longitude, north of the crater itself. Since Hipparchus was the closer of the targeted sites, the Hipparchus targeting was selected for the mission, resulting in a nominal midcourse requirement of about 13 m/sec."

"...the current best estimate of Surveyor VII uncorrected, unbraked impact point is in the central area of Hipparchus at selenographic coordinates of 6.05°S latitude and 5.39°E longitude. The target point is 4.95°S latitude and 3.88°E longitude. The two points are approximately 77 km (48 miles) apart on the surface of the moon."
...

Yeah, darlin' gonna make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space (Steppenwolf - Born to be wild)

...

June 1, 1969
- NASA headquarters, Washington

Donald "Don" E. Wihelms

"Alternates we frequently considered for an early mission were Hipparchus, another extensive and even smoother tract, and Censorinus, a small "drill hole" in the terra. But Fra Mauro was superior scientifically and seemed ideal in all respects. Houston however wanted Surveyor landing sites – because engineering.

"At the same meeting Masursky proposed the Fra Mauro Formation or the upland plains in the ancient crater Hipparchus for Apollo 12. General Phillips did not reject this leap into the terrae, but it was too bold for MSC. Worried about low N-numbers and Lunar Orbiter inadequate photographic coverage (which was not true for Hipparchus), they rejected Fra Mauro and Hipparchus. This seemed to be the final words on the question, but it wasn't. Indeed preliminary results from the first PERSEUS mission however were flowing."

It had flown ahead of Apollo 10 (and along it) for 28 days the previous month. Stupendous high-resolution imaging of future Apollo landing sites threatened to overwhelm GLEP, ASSB and Houston scientists and engineers looking for landing spots. It was a quantum leap compared to Lunar Orbiter plus Apollo 8 & 10 hand-held Hasselblads imagery.

Things came to a head at the June 3, 1969 meeting of the Apollo Site Selection Board; when it turned to the question of a site for the second landing. Scientists reiterated their preference for a western (younger) mare if the first mission landed safely at an eastern (older) site. Two western sites were on the short list of preferred sites compiled in 1968: one just below the equator some 450 kilometers (280 miles) south and slightly east of crater Kepler and the other about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of the first.

Benjamin Milwitzky of the Lunar Exploration Office however suggested that Apollo 12 land near a Surveyor spacecraft. As early as January 1969 Milwitzky, formerly the Headquarters program manager for Surveyor, had suggested visiting a landed Surveyor and returning some spacecraft parts and nearby surface samples to earth for study. This could yield valuable engineering information on the effects of the space environment on materials, besides allowing postmission verification of Surveyor's scientific results.

Houston representatives then presented a rationale for considering two other western sites. Although these had been eliminated in selecting the final five sites, they met Houston's criteria for operational suitability and offered certain advantages over the first two. Both sites were near Surveyor spacecraft. The Board reacted unfavorably to these suggestions, pointing out that the site where Surveyor III was located was in a younger mare that was not much different from those in the eastern sites, whereas the scientists' first two choices were in typical older regions. Examining the Surveyor would detract from the other objectives of the mission.

Chairman Sam Phillips was reluctant to add any more sites to the list for the second mission. He did not favor either of Houston's choices and instead directed Houston to examine two sites considered highly desirable by the scientists, Hipparchus and Fra Mauro, and report on their suitability.

Houston however had already analyzed the Lunar Orbiter imagery and data available for these two sites - and found them unacceptable for the second landing mission. Hipparchus had only about half as much good landing area as the average Apollo 11 site and Fra Mauro was worse. Lunar Orbiter photographic coverage in both cases was marginal. Houston recommended that the site selection board give no further consideration to these two locations, but that it reexamine the Surveyor III site, which met all the criteria for the first landing and was in some respects better than the two western sites under consideration.

At the same meeting Masursky proposed the Fra Mauro Formation or the upland plains in the ancient crater Hipparchus for Apollo 12. General Phillips did not reject this leap into the terrae, but it was too bold for MSC. Worried about low N-numbers and Lunar Orbiter inadequate photographic coverage (which was not true for Hipparchus), they rejected Fra Mauro and Hipparchus

Preliminary results from the first PERSEUS mission however were flowing.

Because the first PERSEUS results would be so close from Apollo 12 and 13 final landing sites decision, it was decided to restrict the imagery to the strongest present candidates. They were, by order of preference: Surveyor III, Fra Mauro, Hipparchus and Censorinus. The latter was quickly eliminated, while Fra Mauro was picked for Apollo 13. This left Surveyor versus Hipparchus for Apollo 12. That debate was all too typical of the turf war between the scientists and Houston engineers. The former evidently prefered Hipparchus; the later were all excited by picking parts from an old, derelict probe.

The June 3, 1969 meeting was unable to cut that gordian knot, but Sam Philips warned a decision had to be made before mid-June; as targeting information had to be sent to Marshall by June 15; Philips requested that Houston's recommendations be given by telecon no later than June 12. That was the deadline to make a decision. And so the debate raged for a few more days – with more and more PERSEUS stunning imagery piling up. We realized this helped the case of science and Hipparchus, pushed like crazies, and ultimately we made it happen. By June 10 Philips opinion had been made. It could be summarized as: screw the engineers and their dead probe."

And Hipparchus carried the day.

When the decision was made public by NASA later in the year, on the other side of the Atlantic one man was thrilled by the news: cartoonist George Rémi, better known by his initials in reverse, forged into a name: Hergé.

Jules Verne Moon travellers never landed; only rounding Earth satellite, Zond style. Wells First men on the Moon were luckier and actually touched down, but where – Wells didn't told. Half a century later, Tintin giant nuclear V-2 landed right in the middle of Hipparchus: exactly Hipparchus-X ghost crater. Much least known but contemporary from Tintin, Paul Berna nuclear vessels in "Continent in the sky" helped build a base at Copernicus. And within the next decade, Clarke and Kubrick buried their monolith beneath Tycho surface.

Those years Belgian cartoonist Hergé regularly hanged around NASA and Apollo and The Cape and Houston. Just for the fun of it he drew a few Apollo related pictures and comics. It was Tintin way of paying hommage to Armstrong and Aldrin.

One comic had Tintin and his pals welcoming a rather surprised Neil Armstrong. On the lunar surface. With roses from Pr. Calculus garden.

Then Hergé went a step further.

Late 1969 one Belgian newspaper asked Hergé a few comic panels to illustrate the mission. The end result was fascinating: a cross between the world of Tintin and the very real Apollo 12; between the nuclear V-2 and the Saturn V. Hergé had kind of circled the wagons; fifteen years apart he has illustrated one fictional and one very real journey to the Moon.

Alan and Gordon knew all this by heart. As the 1960's dawned, they had realized that, sooner or later Hipparchus, Tycho and Copernicus would become landing sites for real – for Ranger first, then Surveyor, and finally: Apollo. And surely enough, by June 1969 all three of them where among the list of twenty potential Apollo landing sites.

Tycho however was at the edge of Apollo safety zones so it was pushed to Apollo 20 and never happened. As for Copernicus it made it to the top of the J-class but remained an outsider nonetheless, a bit like Tycho. Sites like Alphonsus or Gassendi or the Marius Hills were always ahead of it.

Houston Mission Control
November 1969

"I almost fried the camera, pointing it at the Sun. Silly me !" Alan Bean cheerful voice was heard.

"Would have been a pity. See, we have a special guest here today."

"Fifteen years ago I couldn't even be sure to ever see a lunar expedition in my lifetime. Even less to the peculiar corner of the Moon I had picked for Tintin first steps. And now, looking at that big monitor above I can see the place I dreamed about... and in color with that." The 72 years old Hergé wiped out a tear, then carried on.

"We picked an old Surveyor landing spot out of Lunar Orbiter V frames"

"The one that found the huge hole in the ground ? that opening into a lunar cave ?" Hergé smiled. Another wild prediction coming true. Well done, old George.

"That very one, yes. Mind you, had Surveyor 7 missed its mid-course correction manoeuver and thus Tycho, Plan B was Hipparchus. So we already knew targeting the place, and this came in handy when Apollo 12 went there."

"Wait, you are telling me that Hipparchus was Tycho's Plan B ?"

"Sure."

"Well in this case, this mean that Surveyor 7 had one footpad in Clarke & Kubrick 2001, and the other at Tintin's. Talk about a probe for sci-fi buffs !"

"Amusing coincidence indeed. Go figure: two such iconic lunar landmarks as the pitch black monolith versus Tintin red-and-white checkered rocket. We didn't did that on purpose !" Hergé was elated. One very real lunar mission unknowingly paying hommage to a pair of fictional ones...

"How far are they from my Tintin landing spot ?" Hergé inquired. "Back then I picked a ghost crater called Hipparchus X."

"Ah, we know that one. Hipparchus X coordinates are 3.80° S, 3.40° E. And that former Surveyor spot, now an Apollo site: 4.45°S 4.05° E. With the lunar equator 11000 km long, divide that by 360 degrees; means that 1 lunar degree is 31 km. So the two places are merely 20 km apart."

"Close enough for Tintin landing party to reach it with their electric... armored vehicle."

...​

 

[Archibald]

Inspired by this thread...
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=18261.140

1988

Beale AFB, California.

"The problem I have with airbreathing strategic reconnaissance is the limited ceiling and the need for heavy tanker support. Sure, SR-71s fly as fast as Mach 3.4 and almost 100 000 ft high; so what ? Even before 1962 Soviets Surface to Air Missiles outranged them; even A-12s could barely evade SA-2s but not SA-5s; and even less nuclear tipped SA-5s. Plus they still needed vulnerable KC-135Q tankers. As for ballistic range: when J58s flamed out, it was exactly 9 miles of gliding - or bust.

The only time a SR-71 would ever be allowed to overfly the Soviet Union would be post SIOP, that is: after we carpet-bombed the commies with nukes, air defenses included. Remember that the B-52 fleet had SRAM cruise missiles to do exactly that: punch enormous holes into the SAM belts surrounding the country, notably the big and powerful SA-5s. Once those reduced to radioactive dust, SR-71s could waltz in and watch for whatever weapons left standing in the nuclear wasteland. Up to Albert Einstein proverbial sticks and stones.

But in time of peace ? Forget that.

So what would it take to restore that capability ? Spysats ? They carried the day for sure, and they are doing an impeccable job. Except their fixed orbits and film return capsules make them rather unuseful if not utterly vulnerable in case of crisis. Plus the lack of human brain at the controls has the silly things wasting film on cloud covers. MOL tried to bring back human brains peering through a space station periscope at targets of opportunity; but Vandenberg and Titan III pads made giant targets; and damn expensive with that. Nice try, but not really worth the expense. We brought it back only because NASA paid the Big Gemini bill in the first place; also because we had – the irony – a few tons of MOL hardware gathering dust in storage since June 1969. The KH-11 has corrected most of these flaws, but not all of them.

So, asking the question again: what would it take to get some kind of spaceborne "super SR-71" ? Dynasoar wasn't the answer. Neither was Aerospaceplane, at least because technology wouldn't allow it to happen. Next try was ISINGLASS and its loosely related spinoff: RHEINBERRY.

During the ISINGLASS studies the RAND Corp – to Convair great dismay - was pretty blunt: 110 000 ft and Mach 4.5 ain't enough. Beyond such speed and height however there is no lift anymore : so what's the point ? Better to go ballistic: but, orbital or suborbital ? It is a difficult choice if not an impossible one: between a single-pass and a fixed orbit. With RHEINBERRY we thought about the former; with spysats, obviously it was the latter. Then came Air Launched Agena and at least we could explore both options on the cheap. B-52 flight hours, Minuteman boost stages, Agena, Lunar Orbiter's Bimat, spysat cameras: every single piece of the whole thing had already been paid by someone else inside the military. Hence we could quietly work our way at flying both profiles: suborbital single pass, orbital multipass... or both in the same mission, actually. Not only did it worked, it filled a gap between a SR-71 flexibility and an untouchable spysat: since space, unlike airspace, is kind of sacred: peaceful uses, remember.

Well - maybe the time has come to bring all of the above together with a brand new paradigm. Some kind of super SR-71 that can go suborbital or orbital or plane change or higher; all this to screw whatever defenses the Soviets throw against it. This, thanks to tankers that are much less vulnerable than KC-135Qs - because they are spaceborne propellant depots or because they are twin rocketplanes."​

 

[Archibald]

1992

"NASA Congressional politics are all important if we ever want to suceed. You know that story: the Congressmen with big NASA or Aerospace jobs providers in their states have control of the space agency budget purses in Congress... so that the money flows in their states for their voters to be employed. That's very ugly politics called pork barrel - but that's how it works, unfortunately. In that regard, the worst lobby is perhaps the solid-fuel one, centered on Utah: because Thiokol. Also Houston and Marshall, in Alabama and Texas; plus Florida of course, because Cape Canaveral.

"And that's the reason why we need ARES / SATAN more than ever, because it keeps all those assholes happy. It takes cares of Marshall and Thiokol politicians, really. So better to keep using it even with the suborbital refueling rocketplanes stealing its thunder. It can be used to lift propellants or deliver its XLR-129 upper stage to the Moon: one way trip as cargo vehicle later to be turned in a wet workshop habitat.

"As for Houston, as long as ROLS is manned and going to the Moon or a space station, they are fine with it."

(Personal note to @martinbayer : this is SATAN / ARES most useful role in the whole new lunar architecture implemented in the early 1990's. The bloody thing acts as a miniature SLS or - even more ironically ! - a more successfull and useful Ares 1.)​

 

[Archibald]

Lockheed space division – Sunnyvale, California.

August 1962

"So that's project TOWN HALL ?

"Yes. We want to bolt a spysat camera package to a Polaris missile and drop that from a SR-71 at Mach 3. What do you think about it ?"

Owen Gordon took a deep breath and decided to go into full frankness mode.

"The idea is interesting for sure, but you are doing it like shit."

He heard muffled swearing and knew he had hit the nail on the head.

"Sorry for the crude words, but that's my gut feeling.

"All right, we appreciate your frankness. But you told us the idea has potential. Explain yourself: how would you improve it ?

"You won't gonna like it." he smiled. "Because, first, even as a Lockheed worker, sorry to tell you Convair's B-58 Hustler would make a much better carrier even if slower and... not Lockheed. Scoop: TOWN HALL might be CIA, but the Air Force nowadays has the exact same concept of an air launch Polaris spysat package, except from a B-58. The difference in top speed, mach 2 vs mach 3, by orbital velocity standard is insignificant: 400 m/s over 9000 m/s. B-58 boost is 1600 m/s, SR-71 would remove 2000 m/s: not worth the additional complication related to the carrier. Hustler is almost perfect for that job, because the big pod and tall undercarriage."

"Ok, we can live with that. In HIGH VIRGO we did exactly that: a Lockheed rocket dropped from a Hustler. You worked on that, did you ?"

Owen smirked. "Was my ticket entry into Sunnyvale: the land of Agena spysats, in 1959. Now let's talk about the rocket and the spysat package at the tip. You confirm this would be either a SAMOS or CORONA, with the Agena removed ?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is pure idiocy; they are shooting themselves in the foot. Since we Lockheed build both Agena and Polaris, we know that Agena has far better performance overall: because it is a liquid fuel orbital upper stage, rather than a suborbital nuclear ballistic missile. Plus solid-fuel performance really sucks. Now imagine you keep the Polaris as booster, but reinstate the Agena between it and the camera package: not only as the spysat bus but also as a propulsive stage."

"So it becomes a four parts vehicle ?"

"My point exactly: Hustler-Polaris-Agena-camera, let's put it that way. My preliminary calculation shows that if we grew and optimized such booster to max out B-58 belly pylon capability – calculated at 65 000 pounds by the Air Force – we could throw a very respectable payload to orbit: straight out of a runway. Just like a Hound Dog or a Skybolt, it could be just one more SAC bomber ammunition or missile, packaged and sealed like a Bullpup missile. Unlike present spysats launching from Vandenberg rocket pads, it could be launched on demand if a major crisis broke out. It would have the inner flexibility of a U-2 or A-12 manned spyplane... except it would be an almost invulnerable or untouchable spysat.

"Excellent, so you want to sell that as a flexible crisis reconnaissance system ?"

"Yeah. Because present spysats takes one week to drop their film into capsules."

"Well, all good, but you just have shot your own system, right now."

"What ?"

"You are complaining about film recovery capsules not being responsive enough during crisis: taking a week to send back the pictures, against a few hours for, say, an A-12. But if your system uses the same capsules, it won't be much more responsive. What's the point in launching in a hurry if we still wait for the pictures at the other end, for days or weeks ?"

Silent fell on the small assembly. Everybody was holding their breath to see how Gordon was to get himself out of that dead end. But he wasn't trapped: he had thought about that issue.

"Samos E-1 and E-2: Bimat. Film readout. That's the answer."

"Except it doesn't work at all."

"Not true. Technically, it works. The matter is, it is waaaay too slow to compete with CORONA massive amount of imagery coming back in film capsules. That's the huge bottleneck. Scanning the film into electronic pictures is presently agonizing slow. Then the beaming to a ground station is equally slow, so slow the satellite zooms past the ground station too quickly, a few minutes. NASA however seems to be confident that if much slowed down around the Moon, Bimat could be make to work decently. It is just that the damn thing would take two weeks to send back a couple hundred pictures. By CORONA standards, that's pathetic: within the same two weeks it would snap a few thousands if not ten thousands, pictures: ten or even twenty times more."

"So, what's your point ?"

"My point is – let's Bimat do its best. Okay, so, a few hundred pictures over a few weeks ? All right, we will make that lemon into lemonade. Then, who said my air launch system should compete with CORONA or GAMBIT ? What if it was just a niche capability, complementary from them ?"

"I see. You want to adapt your air launch system to the Bimat own limitations just to get its most formidable capability: near real time imaging."

"Spot on. We air launch the Bimat spysat, and then for example it makes one suborbital pass over the target. You guess there won't be a lot of pictures taken before it speeds away. Well, good for Bimat since it is so slow to process the imagery."

"Wait, what happens next ?"

"There are two scenarios. Either it is just one pass suborbital, so the spysats reenter and burns after circling the Earth less than once. Of course the silly thing has to bimat beam the few pictures to a ground station before reentry and burning up."

"Ha, sure. Otherwise the whole damn thing is pointless. But why not ? We fire the spysat from the B-58, say, over the East coast or the Atlantic: then it hops suborbital over the commies, USSR 6000 miles length, East Germany to Sakhalin, snapping pictures along the wild ride. Once over Japan or the Pacific, we gets a ground station below its flight path to recover the Bimat pictures: we only need five minutes before the satellite gets out of range and... burns up. Won't be easy, but could be done for perhaps a couple dozen pictures..."

"Brilliant. Exactly what I had in mind. But there might be a more relaxed way of recovering the pictures... and a few more. Give poor Bimat more time before it dies a fiery death."

"How ? Suborbital can't wait... it is just one incomplete orbit, destination atmospheric reentry or Earth solid ground."

Owen smiled. "Suborbital can't wait... but an orbit could. What if, once over the Pacific, we restarted the Agena Bell rocket, and went into orbit ?"

"Holly cow ! Hell of a good idea, didn't thought about it. Surely once planted in a stable orbit the damn Bimat thing would have time aplenty to beam the few pictures taken."

"And a few more."

"What ?"

"Since we send the thing in orbit, why not extend its mission a little further ? While orbits are fixed and it would take a few days to watch the target again, we could snap a few more pictures – staying of course within Bimat pathetic downrates limits. I mean – not even trying to compete with CORONA or GAMBIT colossal volume of imagery. Targets of opportunity, folks: just like the MOL with its periscope and astronauts. Since we have now a near real time spysat in orbit, even with severe limits; let's use it intelligently, that luxury."

"Okay, I think we have covered that topic whole. Let me tell you one thing, Gordon: you have one hell of a brilliant concept between your hands. That's combo of air-launch and film-readout spysat for crisis reconnaissance; it could be a big thing. A very big business. As disruptive as WS-117L post Gary Power shotdown; or those Ryan Firebee drones we are starting to fly over south west Asia. Congrats, you may have created a fourth venue for aerospace strategic reconnaissance: besides SR-71, Firebee and CORONA: manned aircraft, drone and spysat. How should we call that, I have no idea. Space drone ? Flying spysat ?

Owen was elated. "I tought about ALA. The spanish word for wing. Stands for Air Launch Agena. Because, you see, spysat camera packages are merely one orbital payload among many others. As you said, we gonna launch satellites out of runways... which was the very objective of the now cancelled Aerospaceplane. Bottom line: runway-to-orbit, that's paramount and a baby step toward astronautics elusive holy grail: RLV, TSTO, SSTO."

"Sweet geez, that's amazing." Owen's Lockheed boss said. "We're gonna make a fortune with this thing." Owen had been elated, but when he heard those final words, he had a bad omen. He could see the engineers in the room, unlike the corporate guys, were a bit uneasy.

Well, they were right. Cold War had just taken a whole new, dangerous direction.Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro had decided to play a very dangerous business with its new Soviet ally...​

 

[Archibald]

I've just found this on the NRO archive, and was pretty elated by it. Lockheed, B-52, air launching spysats ? electronic readout ?
Yeeeepeeee !

 

[Archibald]

And now, for a little laugh... AH.com, for all its flaws, made me laugh when they discussed Richard Milhouse Nixon. They had a few TLs back in the day that were hilarious (I remember his breakfast: cottage cheese with ketchup, the horror, the horror).

On August 9, 1974 Nixon leaves the White House in disgrace, putting an end to 15 to 20 years of dirty political tricks from both sides - LBJ was hardly better.
And then the Church Committee starts looking for all the skeletons in the CIA, NSA, IRS and FBI closets. They found a lot of them. Lots of ugly things, and also some weird, insane, if not hilarious plans.

And so... I had to dicuss, if only briefly, my top three favorite CIA dumbarse plans to get ride of commies dictators.

-------------------

1975

After the Watergate shook America to its core, the year 1975 promised to be the one of the dirty laundry. The Church Committe and a few others got many skeletons out of closets. Just in case they went looking into CIA cuban operatives that were supposed to try and kill Castro but may have assassinated Kennedy and put the blame on Castro. Providing a golden pretext to finish the 1961 aborted job. In the process they only found plans to kill Castro – lots of them: colorfoul and imaginative, if not completely idiotic.

"Some of the CIA plans they found are so tragically insane, they must have laughed their arses off.

"Plan A to get ride of Fidel Castro: put some explosives into his beloved cigar to blow his head. Smells like Looney Tunes or Tom & Jerry, but they tried it.

"Plan B to get ride of Fidel Castro: give him some kind of cancer treatment so that his beard falls hence he is no longer a barbudo and lose respect from his guerillos.

"Plan C to get ride of Fidel Castro. Since he loves to speak so much and endlessly to crowds, then just before one big speech in La Havana, slip some LSD into his tortilla so that he starts babbling like a stoned wreck.

Can you believe that ? Shame they didn't suceeded, imagine the evening news. Live from La Havana: Castro starts a rambling, seemingly endless speech as usual. After an hour, he loses his beard. After two hours, he is stoned and start talking nonense. The crowd is aghast, the barbudos are baffled. As they evacuate him, he protests in anger, then pulls out a cigar to clear his mind and relax with a good smoke; KABOOOOM, there goes his head."​

 

[Archibald]

And so my fictional character, Owen Gordon, gets hired by Lockheed circa 1959 to work on project HIGH VIRGO, a B-58A air launching a rocket.

High Virgo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

But also...

Project Town Hall

www.globalsecurity.org

He is instantly thrown in the middle of all this (since Lockheed is almost everywhere on that poster: from U-2 to KH-9 !)



But he finds another way: yet another different strategic reconnaissance system, essentially a smart mix of a few ones above. TOWN HALL and HIGH VIRGO dropped Lockheed rockets (X-17 and Polaris, respectively) from Hustlers. Gordon pushes the idea a little further, adding an Agena-spysat (think of GAMBIT and CORONA) and the result is this.

Fun fact: the Agena very engine (Bell LR81) was created for a B-58 powered-fuel-bomb-pod called MA-1C. It was canned early 1957 hence the LR81 and Hustler divorced and lived separate lives afterwards.

What Owen Gordon do is to bring back the pair together: LR81 and Hustler meet again.

 

[uk 75]

Archibald

As you know I am an avid reader of graphic novels from both France/Belgium/Netherlands (Love Franka!) and Japan with alt history or real world tech themes however loose.

Your mangnum opus would translate into both colourful full page BD format or Japanese Manga black and white.

 

[Archibald]

Thank you.

Presently looking at the best possible way of making something useful out of that enormous thing - I'm open to any tip and advice. Should open a thread in "the bar" section maybe ?

Yes could be a colossal manga, a bit like Dragon Ball Multiverse (DBM - which I have followed over the last decade).

News - Dragon Ball Multiverse

An Online Comic : Dragon Ball Multiverse based on DBZ

www.dragonball-multiverse.com

Or France Fights On (FFO), same story. https://1940lafrancecontinue.org/forum/

Interestingly enough, my project, FFO and DBM all started the same year (or close): 2008. Fifteen years. All three have grown into a few thousand pages monumental projects.

 

[Archibald]

Expanded variant. I have this vision of Owen Gordon walking into the NRO HQ in Washington DC, or the Sunnyvale "Blue cube"...

Have you heard of the “Blue Cube?"

Throughout its almost 50-year existence, few in the nation knew about the “Blue Cube” located in Sunnyvale, California. The Air Force Satellite Control Facility (AFSCF) was once home to a light blue,

www.nro.gov

...and seeing a big mural painting (wallpaper ? flow chart ? diagram ?) with all these birds.



More on this in the next post...

 

[Archibald]

What I have in mind is exactly THIS old comic strip - that peculiar panel. Dan Cooper - Tintin magazine, vintage 1957. My mom (and my uncle) red this as a kids. Fast forward by four decades - in the 1990's I found some remains of Tintin magazine in the attic.

Already an aviation buff aged 10 and at the dawn on the Internet, this story blew my mind.

A decade later I managed to track down the complete albums on the Internet and bought them.

See these many discussions.

"dan cooper" site: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/ - Google Search

www.google.com

Look closely at panels 5 and 6: all the varied missiles on that mural panel at the RCAF air base. They are discussing the rapid evolution of unmanned nuclear vectors: from Snark to Navaho to ICBMs. And how to stop them - that ABM (and ASAT) business...

Long story short (or trying!) : the hero is the pilot of the (sleek) Blue Delta at the bottom, and will have a role to play in solving a Cold War intrigue of mystery and adventure.

Some mysterious agressors are quite literally falling from space, making hit and run attacks that cut the wings (!!) of Tu-104 -like revolutionary jetliners (remember, this was 1957, the year the 707, Caravelle, Comet and a few others were changing air travel forever).

Since the Blue Delta can fly at Mach 4, you guess the hero is on the frontline to chase these enigmatic foes... I consider this to be Albert Weinberg finest Dan Cooper album.

Albert Weinberg — Wikipédia

fr.wikipedia.org

 

[martinbayer]

Oh look, it's a Dassault Mirage on comic steroids.

 

[Archibald]

Nope, too early for Mirage III (1955-57). More akin to a Fairey Delta II with a touch of F-102. Except even sleeker and faster. The picture is a bit low-resolution, but in high-res or... paper, the last panel is pretty glorious.

 

[martinbayer]

Nope, too early for Mirage III (1955-57). More akin to a Fairey Delta II with a touch of F-102. Except even sleeker and faster. The picture is a bit low-resolution, but in high-res or... paper, the last panel is pretty glorious.

I never mentioned Mirage III, but only referred to Dassault Mirage in general. You explicitly state that the comic strip publication year was 1957. Mirage I, aka. MD.550 Delta, flew first on 25 June 1954. Notice that both the MD.550 and the comic design above are missing the characteristic Mirage III/V/2000/4000 shock half cones in the inlets, and that the inlet edges of both the MD.550 and the comic design are in the same forward location as the front windshield/canopy separation frames, which was also not the case for any follow-on Mirage III/V/2000/4000 variants. My "steroid" remark simply referred to the original design being stretched in the longitudinal axis to make it appear sleeker and therefore implicitly faster, and the wings being relocated to a mid body location for artistic license or perceived aesthetics. Now is there any confusion, M'sieur?

 

[Hood]

Don't forget that the Blue Triangle III is a tail-sitter VTOL too (you can see the tip pods with wheels/pads). That explains the mid-wing layout. Ideally this should have a ventral fin too to make a proper 4-axis design but only has three landing points - nothing like making a dodgy VTOL concept even dodgier!

 

[Archibald]

Nope, too early for Mirage III (1955-57). More akin to a Fairey Delta II with a touch of F-102. Except even sleeker and faster. The picture is a bit low-resolution, but in high-res or... paper, the last panel is pretty glorious.

I never mentioned Mirage III, but only referred to Dassault Mirage in general. You explicitly state that the comic strip publication year was 1957. Mirage I, aka. MD.550 Delta, flew first on 25 June 1954. Notice that both the MD.550 and the comic design above are missing the characteristic Mirage III/V/2000/4000 shock half cones in the inlets, and that the inlet edges of both the MD.550 and the comic design are in the same forward location as the front windshield/canopy separation frames, which was also not the case for any follow-on Mirage III/V/2000/4000 variants. My "steroid" remark simply referred to the original design being stretched in the longitudinal axis to make it appear sleeker and therefore implicitly faster, and the wings being relocated to a mid body location for artistic license or perceived aesthetics. Now is there any confusion, M'sieur?

And... you don't need to lecture me like this, oh please. What kind of maniacal nitpicking is that ?

 

[martinbayer]

My rebuttal is based on and motivated by your truly bizarre and easily disproven assertion above that something published in 1957 (i.e. "remember, this was 1957") was "too early" to take the basic Mirage delta design into account .

 

[Archibald]

April 1982

Davis Monthan AFB, Arizona.

The place was one of Story England all time favorite: every time he went there felt like a little kid in a chocolate shop on Christmas day morning.
The peculiar air base quite simply was Uncle Sam vast flying armies dumping grounds. Almost ten thousands of aircraft, helicopters and... rockets were stored there. He could see rows and rows of Vietnam-era survivors: countless Bell UH-1 choppers and Phantoms and many other subtypes: some harcking back to World War II. Arizona dry climate ensured they would not rust, with the help of carefull mothballing. Which was highly desirable, as the retired and grounded flying machines still had a lot of usefulness: even obsoletes and battered. They could be dumped to foreign allies. They could be stripped of tons and tons of spare parts: ten million dollars worth of them. They could be turned into drones: missiles canon fodder. Or finally they would either go to museums or being melted into aluminum razor blades or tin cans.
One of the most spectacular retirement had been the extensive B-47 fleet, back in 1966. A whopping one thousand and a half medium-size Boeing bombers had been retired from the Strategic Air Command squadrons and flown there to be melted; making local scrap dealers very happy men.
Same after Vietnam, when some flying machines had been manufactured in mind-blowing quantities just to replace the losses – until the war ended and created colossal surpluses not even foreign partners could absorb more than a significant fraction of. And so they went to the desert.

The place also happened to be one of the three with the last ballistic missiles not Minuteman: Titan IIs of NASA Gemini fame. After two scary and deadly accidents however the now obsolete ticking bombs were going into accelerated retirement.

TITAN II PLANNED SILOS DEACTIVATION DATE RANGES:​

• Davis–Monthan Air Force Base 10 August 1982 – 28 June 1984​
• McConnell Air Force Base 31 July 1984 – 18 June 1986​
• Little Rock Air Force Base 31 May 1985 – 27 June 1987​

108 Titan II had been build, of which 49 had been expanded in routine testing at Vandenberg. Two more were lost in murderous and scary silo explosions – in 1965 and 1980. Another one had been passed to NASA Marshall for display in their rocket garden.

From 12 March 1982 on, the 56 surviving missiles were being pulled from silos and base stores; to be transferred to Norton Air Force Base, California. Much like the planes at Davis Monthan they would be stored under plastic coverings with helium pumped into their engine components to prevent rust. Norton Air Force Base buildings 942 and 945 would hold the missiles plus extra stage engines and interstages.

Owen Gordon was all too familiar with the place: General Harold Shoemaker had often dragged him there to inspect retired Titan, Atlas and Minuteman missiles they would use as Agena carriers: air launching or not. He had returned there after 1972 when the same missiles were dumped to NASA and a few foreign partners as additional Agena launchers: to assume space station Liberty logistics on the cheap.

Now it was time to do the same with the retired Titan II, and he had a few ideas.

...

"It is a truly unique opportunity: the chance of a lifetime." Owen Gordon told Story England. "Those 56 missiles feature the all time record booster mass fraction, a truly incredible 0.96: 4% of rocket, 96% of propellants. The unrefueled vehicule barely weights 10 000 pounds: everything else up to 260 000 pounds takeoff weight, is propellants.

"Wait, you are thinking about turning these rockets into a spaceplane fleet ?"

"Bingo. Back in 1960 Martin had a plan to strap wings and turbojets to the first stage at a cost of 16 000 pounds; end result is close from a F-5E Tiger II in mass. This was flyback first stage only however: wouldn't go nor return from orbit: the latter would take a lot of additional deadweight, but how much ? One important treshold would be 26 000 pounds: a mass fraction of exactly 0.90; and 39 000 pounds would lower the fraction to 0.85. You guess that by this point SSTO is long gone, even more with old gas generator LR-87 and LR-91 low performance.

"Except if we throw suborbital refueling into the lot." After the best part of two decades working together Story could read Owen fertile mind like an open book.

"My point exactly. Also thinking about a propellant mix of Titan II's hydrazine fuel with Titan I's liquid oxygen. That mixture has very high specific impulse, even in a gas generator cycle.

"I like this. And I'm quite sure Reagan with appreciate it, too, as a Smart Rocks launcher for SDI. You can trust me to pilot this to orbit and beyond."

"Thank you, I was quite sure you would be at the controls." They shook hand, tacitally renewing their 18 years old partnership for the same amount of time.

"It is the next logical thing beyond HIGH TOWN and the rocket powered Starfighters. Much like the Minuteman two decades ago, the plan is to recover the missiles, first. Then we wrap the lightest possible orbital spaceplane structure around them. Our empty weight targets boundaries are 39 000 pounds at the highest and 26 000 pounds - or lower - if possible.
Suborbital refueling works with both numbers, the variables being refueling speed versus propellant transfer mass versus payload delivered to orbit. The worse the mass fraction, the more oxidizer to transfer at lower speed; with the gravity losses waiting around the corner: trying very hard to prevent the SSTO gap from closing. Perhaps an early objective would be to hit the lowest stable orbit with a paltry payload of 1000 pounds - or even zero. And then we iterate: cutting into the empty weight to improve the numbers. We start from 40 000 pounds: direction 30 000 first, and eventually 25 000.
Don't forget we have 56 missiles to work our way toward those objectives: we can go looking for the best turbojets and thermal protection systems. Meanwhile as usual the turbojets remove 1600 m/s out of ascent to orbit, with a transition at Mach 2; and 2000 m/s if we hit Mach 3 before starting the rocket. This is always welcome, and HIGH TOWN extensive flight experience has provided rock-solid numbers and trajectories there.
We have refined our Agenas launches to hit orbit at the lowest possible expense of energy and propellants; nowadays were are pretty good at playing that interesting game. With the help of air launch of course and also finely tuned ascent trajectories we are regularly throwing payloads into orbit for less than 25 000 ft/s. This is my slice of flight experience. And you, Story, is the other part: since you have flown thousands of suborbital parabolas with our Starfighters. Your human brain and pilot skills will help keeping the rocketplane ascent delta-v and gravity losses to manageable levels."

"Brilliant. I'll gladly help, indeed. And I could even carry you as ballast. Still not tempted by a ride in the backseat of my Starfighter ?"
Story already knew the answer: a resounding no. For some obscure reasons Owen had always refused to hitch a suborbital ride. Maybe he awaits retirement ? Or perhaps he has fear of flying, how ironical that would be.​

 

[Archibald]

(Excerpt from: The Skylight Society dedication speech; at the opening of the Marius Hills underground colony.)

"Only a few years ago... we were stuck; stalled; stagnating. Grounded at the bottom of Earth steep gravity well with little hope to ever escape, at least not en masse.

A practical runway-to-orbit spaceliner ? Not possible.

Earth-surface to Moon-surface on the cheap ? Not possible.

A trip to Mars, even on nuclear power ? Not realistic.

Scramjets were a thermal nightmare, and still are. Air collection was a far more realistic prospect, but heat exchangers technology was not up the task; it is only catching up now. All-rocket vehicles suffered from seemingly untractable propellant mass fraction issues.

As for nuclear rocketry: solid-core doubled specific impulse was essentially negated by loosy thrust-to-weight ratios and mass fractions. It didn't made a difference significant enough to justify spaceborne nuclear power social and politicals hassles.

And so we were seemingly stuck with expendable chemical rocketry; which Apollo had already pushed to its practical limits.

The deadlock could have lasted decades, but it was ultimately broken by a string of breakthroughs – counterintuitives ones.

Tripropellant, for a start. Bob Salkeld genial intuition: that three-quarter of the propellants go up in smoke just to reach a quarter of orbital velocity, so hydrogen superior specific impulse is not needed there. What matters is accelerating quickly: lots of thrust, and nothing beats kerosene in that regard. So Salkeld vehicles would gradually shift from kerosene to hydrogen fuel across the ascent to orbit; same liquid oxygen oxidizer, by the way.

All of sudden, Salkeld clever trick made all-rocket spaceliners a reality.

The second breakthrough was the addition of an LOX transfer two-third of the way to orbit, aerial refueling style. Just like tripropellant it had a cascading, positive effect on the vehicule performance. The end result was not only a runway-to-orbit system, single-stage: but one with a very large payload.

Cheap access to space instantly became a reality, and it was soon extended from low earth orbit to the lunar surface: it was just a matter of adding more refuelings along the way.

But even with that couple of brilliant tricks, chemical rocketry could not realistically lead us past the Moon. Not to even to the closest planets; and much less to the stars.

And there came the third counterintuitive breakthrough: which relates to nuclear rocketry; unlocking it immense energy at last.

Who could have in its right mind imagined this would happen through a rather straightforward reshuffling of a NERVA basic elements: the reactor, the hydrogen fuel, and the thermal energy carriers between them ? Fission fragments versus prompt neutrons ?

Heating hydrogen fuel with fission fragments - as done by every single nuclear thermal rocket imagined since the dawn of project ROVER in 1955 – proved in hindsight to be a deadly mistake. So the fission fragments were literally divorced from that job. This led, not to one but actually two breakthroughs that unleashed the true power of nuclear rocketry.

The hotter the core of a thermodynamic rocket, the better its fuel economy. But all nuclear thermal rockets generated heat with nuclear fission, then transfered the heat to a working fluid which becomes the reaction mass. The transfer would always be plagued by inefficiency, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. Then Dyson and Taylor, in the vaning days of Project Orion wondered - what if you we used the fission heat directly with no transfer?

The fission fragments would now shoot through a nozzle all by themselves. No need to heat anything; so no more 2nd law of thermodynamics. Removing that limit made specific impulse quite literally explode into space: it leaped from solid-core 1000 seconds to 1 million. This was called a FIssion Fragment Rocket Engine: FIFE.

As for the hydrogen fuel, out of the reactor energy output it had to find itself a new thermal carrier. That carrier would be TRIGA-like pulses of fast neutrons kinetic energy. Unlike fission fragments, their interaction with the fuel would be at atomic level. A place where the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply. So once again, that barrier was removed; and once again, the resulting specific impulse exploded sky-high: 1 million. This was called PUlsed NTR: PUNTER.

Recently the two complementary drives have been combined into one, called PUFFER. It has such astonishing performance, the doors to the planets instantly slammed open.

The entire solar system is now within our reach.

Even the stars seems slightly closer, as FFR could potentially accelerate to ten percent of the speed of light.

We are going, and we are going boldly." ​

 

[Archibald]

July 1998

"To think we have now on the Moon geologists, paleontologists, and astrobiologists. Who are looking for such exciting things as alien bugs, Mars and Venus rock samples, and Chixculub fossiles. Can you believe that ? Plain old boring Moon certainly was hidding a few interesting surprises.
It starts with the civil engineers tasked with the job of turning the Marius Hills lava tubes into a lunar base and colony. The engineers smoothen the interior of the caves, removing tons and tons of rocks in the process. That rubble is of scientific but also commercial interest. Besides bugs, fossils and planetary samples, rare earths and platinum group metals – REE and PGMs – are also of interest.
Hence the lunar underground presently has engineers, scientists and prospectors working side by side. And it is merely beginning."

...​

Norton AFB, California

Once colonization of the Marius Hills was a go, a spacelift to the Moon began. It started from the old school spaceports first; from their runways at least. But The Cape Skid Strip wasn't enough to support lunar colonization all by itself; while Vandenberg and White Sands were strictly military. It was pretty clear that spaceflight needed to break out of the old school launch pads and into airstrips - but which ones ?

All of sudden, any large runway in the United States became a precious asset. But the FAA was reluctant to allow an invasion of classic airports by rocketplanes with deep cryogen oxidizers; even if they took their rocket noise and danger far away in the sky.

And there, somewhat ironically an interim solution came from the late Strategic Air Command: their former bases, BRAC-ed.

"We can thanks the Strategic Air Command and its B-52s, which outriggers mandated extremely wide runways... up to 300 ft. Also the B-47s and early KC-135s being severely underpowered needed runways as long as 13 000 ft !" Story England told Owen Gordon. Always the enthusiastic flyer, he had performed a survey of all the abandonned or reconverted runways; drawing a seemingly endless list of them.

The late Curtis LeMay had build a bit more than a hundred runways like this all across the United States. And then were the foreign allies: fifteen of them, with twenty bases in Great Britain alone. Always the pragmatic man, LeMay had organized the SAC base network in concentric rings focusing on distances from Moscow; the outermost ring being 4,600 nautical miles from the symbolic target. Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Thailand and Japan had countless bases that very much encircled the Soviet Union.

The Air Force programmed 29 bases for the command as of February 1955, planning for another 34 as of April that same year. These programmed SAC installations were in addition to the 38 U.S., and 13 foreign, bases already operational for the command by mid-decade. Yet at some point LeMay requested a total of 329 bases by July 1959 ! In the end SAC installations, inclusive of those overseas and of tenant bases, peaked at 85 in 1962.

And so it began: a massive spacelift to the Moon from former Strategic Air Command runways. The sight was impressive: two million pounds rocketplanes taking off in successive pairs, side by side ... they flew out on jet power and kerosene, circling above until the flock was complete. The formations then threw oxidizer into the jet compressors as coolant; accelerating to Mach 4 and 70 000 feet before launching into space. They ascended on rocket power which fuel gradually shifted from kerosene to hydrogen. The real deal however was the oxidizer; and there, liquid oxygen transfers happened in successive layers. In the largest formations the first layer was pretty spectacular. Four pairs of rocketplanes would make four oxygen transfers between them; the tankers then dropping away and returning to Earth: leaving four vehicle in the formation. Then rinse, repeat until the final vehicle in the flock made it to orbit.

Once perched there, two complete refuelings sent the vehicles to the lunar surface.

Back in the 1950 SAC bases had been integrated in American society as a necessary evil against the Soviet Union and also as local jobs providers. This, despite the risks of crashing bombers, nuclear weapons storage, and Soviet counterstrikes; plus the noise and pollution issues.

What happened in the 1990's was that, after the SAC drawdawn, rocketplanes stepped in the former bomber bases.
Within a few years, an extensive rocketplane launch network was created out of the old bomber bases. The places were neither air bases, spaceports nor airports: as they were civilian in nature, didn't launched vertically from pads and the vehicles flew out of the atmosphere. Soon, public opinion coined a name for them: space runways. Runway-to-orbit became a popular phenomena: just like air transportation in the 1960's.
​

 

[Archibald]

Dinosaur fossils on the Moon ? Mars and Venus rocks ? Yes. I've found a bunch of very serious science papers discussing this.

Long story short: violent impacts like Chicxulub (it also happened to the Moon, Mars and Venus) have the uncanny capability of throwing rocks faster than escape velocities: right into heliocentric orbit. Escape velocities of Earth and Venus are 11 km/s, Mars is 5 km/s and Moon, less than 3 km/s. For Chixculub impactors, that's peanuts.
Bottom line
- Asteroid impacts launched unmanned solar exploration long before NASA and the Soviets (ROTFL)
- Earth, Moon, Venus and Mars have a long running "rock exchange space program."

Every single area of the Moon the size of a city like Paris or New York may have a few hundred kilograms of Mars and Venus samples mixed with lunar regolith.
Also applies to Chixculub: the dinosaurs-killer impact send a few million tons of rocks flying faster than 11 km/s so - escape velocity, inner solar system.
Over the next 65 million years quite inevitably a percentage of those rocks lithobraked on the Moon.

And this, is Gold. Just think about it: Apollo 13 meets Jurassic Park (yes, I grew up in the 1990's).

 

[Archibald]

In a sense, the final rocketplane is the alliance between TAN and FLOCK. Between Mel Bulman and Alan Goff. Between suborbital docking / refueling and Thrust Augmented Nozzle / tripropellant.
Four or eight TAN rocketplanes briefly hooking in suborbital flight to transfer LOX between them.
The alliance of TAN and FLOCK could lift humonguous payload to earth orbit.

This is the alliance of continuous staging (or close) and tripropellant, two ideas that even separately can beat the rocket equation into submission. Now if they join force, the results are awesome.

Also MIPCC for the jets.

RASCAL offers low-cost launches

www.flightglobal.com

 

[martinbayer]

I am sure SpaceX will be beating a path to your door any moment now, bundles of cash in their fists and desperate to invest in your scheme.

 

[Archibald]

Oh sure. My price is $30 billion. Cash accepted of course. A few Tesla Semi Trucks should do the job.
By the way @martinbayer ESA FLPP Hopper will make a cameo. Anything but Ariane 6 ITTL.