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How are the Japanese doing that?
On 7/5/2010 8:40 AM, Brian Thorn wrote:
On Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:01:58 -0800, Pat wrote: I doubt that would have worked; other than a Moon flight there was no real reason to start building space stations Yet the Russians built eight of them and the United States one. And of course, the moon flight would still have been on the table, it just wouldn't have been part of an enormously expensice race to get the job done by 1970. All those came after the Apollo 11 landing though; and in the case of the Soviets it was to show they had something we didn't have as much as anything else after the N-1 flopped. (and one must remember that the Colliers WvB "donut" station was to serve military recon and nuclear strike missions as much as building Moon and Mars ships*.) Well, that's what Atlas and Titan were built for, too. That doesn't mean we didn't have peaceful missions for them. Pretty much everything the WvB station was designed to do (nuclear strike, military reconnaissance, meteorology from orbit) was done a lot more cheaply by unmanned systems in the years to come. We canceled MOL, but the Soviets built the very similar Almaz version of the Salyuts to do manned military reconnaissance, and it was a flop, soon replaced by advanced unmanned reconnaissance satellites. Skylab also didn't do a hell of a lot when you come right down to it... it took lots of photos of the Sun, but that could also have been done by unmanned spacecraft, as it is today. If we had gone that very expensive and slow route, I don't think it would have been that expensive. I'm talking about a gradual build-up of capability, culminating in an EOR/LOR Apollo-like mission probably after 1975, which is what NASA was working toward in 1960. Certainly not nearly as expensive as Project Apollo, whose mantra was "waste anything but time". the Soviets would have easily had time to perfect the N-1 and flown a manned Moon mission on a budget long before we were ready to do it.... at which point everyone would ask "Why didn't we do it that way also?" I'm talking about if there had never been a moon race, remember. Oh, someone would want to get a man on the Moon for bragging rights. Remember the WvB plan had manned lunar flights as being one of the two missions that would be assembled at and launched from the station (the other being the manned Mars mission). Saturn I and IB were good rockets, if somewhat clunky in basic design concept of the first stage, Yes, but an improved, standard two-tank configuration (instead of multiple Jupiter and Juno tanks) for the first stage would have been a logical upgrade for a second production run, had we ever gotten that far with Saturn. That would give lower manufacturing costs and lower dry mass/higher payload. In fact, that's where S-IC came from, but S-IC grew to be much larger than the S-I/S-IB. In this scenario, S-IB would have been the two-tank replacement for S-I circa 1966 and the much large S-IC first stage would have followed sometime in the 1970s. (Our S-IB was a quick S-I stretch for Saturn IB after the moon race began.) but notice no other use was found for them Except I think Saturns would have replaced Delta, Atlas-Centaur, and Titan III in a non-Moon Race world: They would have had excess lifting ability over what was needed in the years to come...note how many payloads went up on Delta II than on the Atlas-Centaurs and Titan III variants. one family of launch vehicles instead of three. Basically an EELV program in the 1960s. And having those smaller Saturns in constant production would have made building Saturn C-5 in the 1970s much more affordable. And now with ULA pitching Atlas V Phase II and other growth versions, think that we could have had all that already in one family in the 1960s/1970s with Saturn C-1 through C-5. They were playing around with that concept for N-1; various versions of the rocket would use different combinations of the three stages to replace Soyuz and Proton rockets as well as the big version. Unfortunately, that meant you had to us LOX/kerosene in all three main stages so any of them would have the thrust to get off of the pad in a derivative version where it would become the first stage. Which is one reason why it became so heavy compared to Saturn V, because it couldn't use LH2 with its superior isp in the second and third stage. once Apollo/Skylab/ASTP had ended, particularly after the Air Force shifted to Titan III and IV. The Air Force didn't shift, they never used Saturn at all. They wanted their home-grown Titan all along and didn't care much what the numbers showed Titan vs. Saturn. They were thinking of using Saturn I as a booster for Dyna-Soar, as well as making something like a souped-up MOL station using the wetlab concept and the original S-IV stage, to be resupplied by Dyna-Soar cargo/crew transfer ships. I think one thing that made them favor the Titan III was that it at least had the possibility of being kept stacked at the ready for fairly quick launch by its use of hypergolic and solid propellants. I think it is painfully obvious that Saturn would have been their better choice: a little more expensive (with that cost difference dropping in the above-described Saturn first stage upgrade) but with enormously better reliability (Saturn had engine-out capability out the wazoo) and enormously greater growth potential with Saturn C-3 and C-4 (both greater than Titan IV in performance) available to them at relatively low development cost and time. Outside of a manned Moon or Skylab-sized space station launch mission, what exactly would a Saturn V be used for? Those would be pretty useful applications right about now, but since the Saturn C-5 is just a high-end version of rockets we already had in production (principally Saturn C-2 and 3, which I suspect would have been the workhorses) it wouldn't be nearly as expensive as Saturn V was in our world. Even then, we may not have needed Saturn C-5 if we had C-3, a Space Station and a nearby propellant depot. Or all the other intermediate sized Saturn boosters for that matter? The same as Delta II through Delta IV-Heavy today. But we'd have had that capabilty circa 1970. Titan III/Centaur was a pretty clunky thing in its own right And Saturns wouldn't have used solids. How many Titans went kablooey thanks to solids? (particularly from the solid/hypergolic/cryogenic propellant point of view**) but notice it got used for the major NASA planetary missions rather than a Saturn I derivative. That's because Saturn was no longer in production. We only had one or two left, and that wasn't enough for both Helioses, both Vikings, and both Voyagers. Titan III was all we had, so someone put a Centaur on top and we made the most of what we had. Notice with the downsizing of electronics we've been able to put rovers on and orbiters above Mars with Delta II's. Those would be cheaper than any Saturn derivative rocket-for-rocket. Although your concept is that all the Saturns would be similar, outside of them all using the same three types of engines (F-1's, H-1's and J-2's) they would have been different rockets...with all the launchpad design complexity that would imply. Pat |
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