Goddard's 1930 Manned Moonship

On Sep 1, 9:30*am, " wrote:
On Aug 31, 1:40*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Looks a bit like a Apollo CSM; looks even more like a flying dildo
:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/...g-to-the-moon/
I imagine that unfortunate resemblance was one of the things that turned
Goddard off on the press.

Did the average person know what a dildo looked like, in 1930? *How
old are dildos in the public arena? *(The great thing about human
history is how things connect.)

I had serious doubts that he ever built a rocket that reached a speed of
8,000 feet per second, so I checked up on that...the _exhaust velocity_
was 8,000 FPS.

David Clary's biography of Goddard ("Rocket Man") doesn't seem to
report exhaust velocity of any of Goddard's rockets.

I'm always fascinated by this era's approach to cockpit design. *My
guess is that the artist was using as a model the Army's balloon
experiments.

Mike

8,000 ft/sec is about 250 sec Isp.

A propellant weight of 63.21% total vehicle weight would allow rocket
speed to equal exhaust speed.

Goddard's first flight was in 1926 and lasted only 2.5 seconds and
flew 41 feet. It was mostly a frame 4 meters long and had a 0.5 meter
by 0.1 meter diameter fuel tank and oxidizer tank - looks like high
pressure piping sawed off and capped. Don't know thickness or
weight. Not likely a 63.21% propellant fraction.

By 1929 Goddard got Lindbergh's support and then the Guggenheim's.
That's when he moved to New Mexico.

By 1931 he built a gyro guided rocket and more modern looking casings
and tail fins. He broke the sound barrier the next year. He not only
built the gyroscope guided rocket, but also developed regenerative
cooling, thin walled propellant tanks, and turbopump delivery of
liquid oxygen and fuel to the engine.

In 1937 - 11 years after his first flight at his Aunt's farm in
Massachusetts, Goddard launched an L-series, Section-B rocket that
fired for 22.3 seconds and achieved an altitude of 9,000 feet. The
highest achieved by Goddard, and far outclassed by the Germans who
were building rockets by that time.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/...in_goddard.jpg
http://rlv.zcache.com/robert_goddard...31t5wm_400.jpg

It seems to me that the L series rockets could have attained 63.21%
propellant weight and achieved their exhaust speed.

After Goddard's death in 1942 the United States government paid Mrs.
Goddard $1 million for all of her husband's patents according to
Arthur Clarke.

To fly from Earth to Moon and land there requires that we impart 12.6
km/sec to the speed of a vehicle and then slow the vehicle by about
2.4 km/sec - a total of 15.0 km/sec. The vehicle must then impart
another 2.4 km/sec to return to Earth. 17.4 km/sec total.

A three stage vehicle that had an exhaust speed of 4.5 km/sec and a
structural fraction of 12.5% would have to attain 5.8 km/sec per
stage. This requires that 72.5% of each stage be propellant. This
leaves 20.4% for the payload. Thus, each stage is 6.7x its payload.

A 300 kg payload is enough to carry an astronaut in a long-duration
spacesuit for ten days - enough for a journey to the moon and back.

The 'lunar stage' masses 2,000 kg. The inter-stage masses 13,333
kg. The booster masses 88,889 kg.

The three stages, propelled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, are
the following sizes

Lunar Stage
A sphere 1.977 m in diameter within which is a sphere, offset to one
side, where the two drain into a pump system, that is 1.277 m in
diameter - the outer sphere contains 206.9 kg of hydrogen, the inner
one 1,241.8 kg of oxygen. They are propelled by a MEMS based wafer
that is 270 mm in diameter that produces up to 2,000 kgf of thrust at
450 seconds.

Interstage
A sphere 3.721 m in diameter containing a sphere, 2.403 m in diameter,
the larger sphere containing 1,379.9 kg of hydrogen and the smaller
sphere containing 8,279.2 kg of oxygen. This is propelled by 7 MEMS
wafers each 270 mm in diameter - assembled in a hexagonal close packed
array.

Booster Stage
A sphere 7.003 m in diameter containing sphere 4.522 m in diameter,
with the larger sphere containing 9,199 kg of hydrogen and the
smaller sphere containing 55,193 kg of oxygen. This is propelled by
61 MEMS wafers each 270 mm in diameter consisting of 4 rings - 9
wafers across - assembled in a hexagonal close packed array.

Stacked atop one another the stack is 12.7 m tall and 7.003 m across
at the base.

The booster has a terminal velocity of 4 km/sec - and the interstage
takes the vehicle to 9.8 km/sec along a direct ascent trajectory. The
interstage falls back to Earth. The lunar stage boosts until a speed
of 10.8 km/sec is reached. It then makes a direct descent to the
lunar surface - using up to 2.4 km/sec delta vee. Then, it blasts
back to Earth directly, accelerating to 2.4 km/sec - along a
trajectory opposite the incoming one - taking the vehicle back to
Earth.

At $10,000 per kg construction costs, the lunar stage costs $3
million, the interstage $17 million and the booster $112 million. A
total of $132 million.

Reusing the vehicle 10x reduces the cost to less than $14 million per
flight.

This is about 10x what the Guggenheim's paid out to Goddard, in
inflation adjusted dollars, to develop the rockets in the first place.

Here's another version
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20053585/M...space-Overview

On Sep 2, 3:11*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

Or maybe there's a way to go under the instrument panel to get to the
nose. *Where's the toilet?

I know the details of the Apollo one, but how was that problem addressed
on the longer Gemini flights?

I just looked it up in SP-121 (Gemini Midprogram Conference including
experiment results). On page 68, we are told that fecal matter was
handled with "individual plasti bags with adhesive-lined circular
tops." There was a disinfectant in the bag. "Use required
considerable care and effort," and there was training.

SP-121 is 186 megs. There's also "Gemini Summary conference" the
final report, SP-138, which looks like the final report. It's 398
megs; I haven't looked in it.


Mike

On Sep 2, 9:18*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

I may be being too harsh about Goddard's turbo-rocket plane; it is a
clever solution using rocket power to drive the props at low speed, but
what to make those turbine blades out of that go into the rocket exhaust
is a good question given the materials of the time...graphite could take
the heat, but would it take the structural stress of being spun that
fast?

That was one of the plot devices in Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo."
Cargraves was trying to create an atomic turbine, but the blades kept
being sliced off. Then one day it hit him that he has a rocket.

It would make on very wild looking model, I'll say that for it. :-)

The mind boggles at the thought of Goddard with an unlimited budget.


Mike

On 9/2/2010 4:13 AM, wrote:
On Sep 2, 2:54 am, Pat wrote:

Did the average person know what a dildo looked like, in 1930? How
old are dildos in the public arena? (The great thing about human
history is how things connect.)

Clean back to the stone age:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dildo#History

Well, that certainly adds to my store of conversation. (American
Science& Surplus used to sell the penis-molding kit but under another
designation.)

The big prop spaceship that was originally built for the 1930 musical
comedy "Just Imagine" that later showed up in the Flash Gordon serials
probably inspired a lot of copies as to its cockpit layout:http://i.ytimg.com/vi/OUbGkSfaKrs/0.jpg

Is "Just Imagine" a lost movie? I keep seeing stills from it, but
never anything about a copy of it. I bet a dozen could be sold
through this list alone.

It showed up on Turner Classic Movies at least once.
It's a very strange thing, a very big budget musical comedy that's
partly Vaudeville, partly slapstick.
Here's the incredibly involved dirigible crew's drinking song from it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL7JJ4rsLR8
Here's some more info on the movie:
http://www.shebloggedbynight.com/200...gine-1930.html
That airplane the girl is riding in and on has extensible VTOL
lift/hover fans in its wings. The people in the strange clothes are
Martians,
Traffic control in the future looks like something straight out of "The
Fifth Element":
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...stimagine1.jpg
....with traffic officers in flying platforms.
The whole "Space" section of "Modern Mechanix" is a ball to go through
for the old spaceship designs:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/category/space/
Even Goddard had his off days:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/...e-outer-space/


Pat

On 9/2/2010 4:15 AM, wrote:
On Sep 2, 3:11 am, Pat wrote:

Or maybe there's a way to go under the instrument panel to get to the
nose. Where's the toilet?

I know the details of the Apollo one, but how was that problem addressed
on the longer Gemini flights?

I have no idea, and I've not seen that references in any of the Gemini
documents I have. To be honest, I admit I've never looked for it.

On the long duration Gemini 7 flight, the astronauts were given special
pressure suits they could take off once in orbit, but that cabin still
looks awfully small to try to defecate and wipe yourself in.

I had a girl friend who commented once that submarines were phallic.
I pointed out to her that anything that needs to penetrate a fluid or
a very flexible solid would be shaped that way. That would have been
a good start had I not been thinking like an engineer and had her
parents not been listening.

Dr. Helen Caldicott made that resemblence one of the main points in her
book "Missile Envy".

Women are fascinated by the penis. This is, of course, a Very Good
Thing.

My old girlfriend called mine "The Gobbler" as she thought it resembled
a male turkey head and neck.

Pat

On 9/2/2010 3:29 PM, Pat Flannery wrote:

Even Goddard had his off days:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/...e-outer-space/

BTW, he wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of driving
propellers by shooting rocket exhaust onto a turbine to drive them.
Meet the Berdan torpedo of the 1880's:
http://www.btinternet.com/~philipr/images/torp12.jpg
I may be being too harsh about Goddard's turbo-rocket plane; it is a
clever solution using rocket power to drive the props at low speed, but
what to make those turbine blades out of that go into the rocket exhaust
is a good question given the materials of the time...graphite could take
the heat, but would it take the structural stress of being spun that
fast? Maybe they were supposed to be some highly conductive metal like
copper and the idea being that they would cool down during their
rotation outside of the exhaust stream as they spun?
It would make on very wild looking model, I'll say that for it. :-)

Pat

On 9/2/2010 2:48 PM, wrote:
On Sep 2, 3:11 am, Pat wrote:

Or maybe there's a way to go under the instrument panel to get to the
nose. Where's the toilet?

I know the details of the Apollo one, but how was that problem addressed
on the longer Gemini flights?

I just looked it up in SP-121 (Gemini Midprogram Conference including
experiment results). On page 68, we are told that fecal matter was
handled with "individual plasti bags with adhesive-lined circular
tops." There was a disinfectant in the bag. "Use required
considerable care and effort," and there was training.

Sounds like a good way to be shy a few short hairs by the time you are done.

SP-121 is 186 megs. There's also "Gemini Summary conference" the
final report, SP-138, which looks like the final report. It's 398
megs; I haven't looked in it.

I'll bet that Gemini-7 capsule was pretty ripe smelling by the time they
landed.
Astronauts who visited it said Mir smelled like a mildewy old locker
room at a gymnasium.

Pat

On 9/2/2010 2:52 PM, wrote:

It would make on very wild looking model, I'll say that for it. :-)

The mind boggles at the thought of Goddard with an unlimited budget.

Those first ballistic missiles might have been traveling towards the
Nazis from Britain rather than the other way around.
He would have been better funded if he had been more open with the press
about what he was doing; some of those later rocket experiments would
have made great newsreel material.

Pat