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