How long to space w/o ICBMs?

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

[very thoughtful responses]

Thank you very much!

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article pip0g

Bear in mind that there are other types of weapons of mass destruction.
The British were immensely relieved when the warheads of the first V-2s
turned out to be just high explosive; they'd been worried about gas or
germs or radioactive isotopes.



They checked out the first V-1 impact site with a Geiger counter for
just that reason.

(And the Germans actually had a good non-nuclear payload for even fairly
inaccurate missiles, since they'd discovered the first nerve gases.)




They got as far as designing a chemical warhead container for the V-1;
this was to be designated the Fi 103 D-1 version.
They were never deployed, whether for Hitler's distaste for using
chemical weapons for warfare, or the fact that a lot of V-1's crashed
almost immediately after coming off their catapults is a good question.
One reason the Germans never used nerve gas during the war is that they
were wrongly convinced that the Allies had such weapons also.

Pat

Henry Spencer wrote:



If no prospect of nuclear warheads, how long for *scientific*
motivations and budgets to push us from something like Aerobee to
orbit, with Vanguard or the like? Or would a first commercial commsat
or first miltary spysat have done the trick?



Spysats would have been a strong driver... once people were persuaded to
take the idea seriously, which would have taken a while.


I don't think that would have taken long at all- the military had
started preliminary work toward them even before Sputnik was launched,
as one of the missions that a satellite could perform.
Even von Braun's Colliers space station had military reconnaissance as
one of its main missions.



I think there would still have been interest... but the initial design
study would probably have concluded that the launcher for it was too
ambitious a project to be ready in time.


I've seen a drawing of a satellite launcher based on the liquid-fueled
booster for the Bomarc ramjet SAM, with Aerobee and solid upper stages
on it that closely resembles Vanguard in concept.
We've been discussing a ICBM-free world here, and in that world the
bomber is king...and as the performance of bombers increases, so will
the performance of the SAMs to intercept them; and that could also lead
to a alternative means of developing a satellite launch vehicle.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:



I've seen a drawing of a satellite launcher based on the liquid-fueled
booster for the Bomarc ramjet SAM, with Aerobee and solid upper stages
on it that closely resembles Vanguard in concept.


I found the drawing of it BTW- it's an Aerojet-General design from 1954
that they did all on their own, independent of the Vanguard program.
It's shorter and larger in diameter than Vanguard in its first stage,
and has four triangular fins on its aft end.
It looks workable though, and was supposed to loft around 50 lbs. to orbit.

Pat

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
If no prospect of nuclear warheads, how long for *scientific*
motivations and budgets to push us from something like Aerobee to
orbit, with Vanguard or the like? ...
Spysats would have been a strong driver... once people were persuaded to
take the idea seriously, which would have taken a while.

I don't think that would have taken long at all- the military had
started preliminary work toward them even before Sputnik was launched...

Yeah, but that was in a world with ICBMs in the pipeline and smaller
ballistic missiles already flying, where such things had considerably
greater credibility to begin with. Take ballistic missiles out of the
picture, and getting rid of the giggle factor is harder. "Sure, it'll be
possible in the 21st or 22nd century, but today, in the middle of the
20th, it's obviously too far beyond today's technology."

as one of the missions that a satellite could perform.
Even von Braun's Colliers space station had military reconnaissance as
one of its main missions.

Nobody would dispute that *if* you had a large, capable satellite up
there, reconnaissance would be an interesting application. It's the
credibility of that initial assumption that suffers.

[IGY satellite]
I think there would still have been interest... but the initial design
study would probably have concluded that the launcher for it was too
ambitious a project to be ready in time.

I've seen a drawing of a satellite launcher based on the liquid-fueled
booster for the Bomarc ramjet SAM, with Aerobee and solid upper stages
on it that closely resembles Vanguard in concept.

Oh, there's no question that you could put something together, given a
major effort. But getting a useful payload up that way would have been
quite a challenge, and an IGY satellite effort -- like Vanguard -- would
have been about science payload, not about stunts. Hence my prediction
that it would have been deemed too ambitious. Vanguard's biggest
development problem was that its Viking-derived first stage was just too
small for the job it was being asked to do... and the Bomarc booster was
even smaller.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
If no prospect of nuclear warheads, how long for *scientific*
motivations and budgets to push us from something like Aerobee to
orbit, with Vanguard or the like? ...
Spysats would have been a strong driver... once people were persuaded to
take the idea seriously, which would have taken a while.

I don't think that would have taken long at all- the military had
started preliminary work toward them even before Sputnik was launched...

Yeah, but that was in a world with ICBMs in the pipeline and smaller
ballistic missiles already flying, where such things had considerably
greater credibility to begin with. Take ballistic missiles out of the
picture, and getting rid of the giggle factor is harder. "Sure, it'll be
possible in the 21st or 22nd century, but today, in the middle of the
20th, it's obviously too far beyond today's technology."


Henry is hinting at it -- but the Air Force was (B52 and still is - B2)
manned winged bomber oriented into 1950s.