Aug 232011
Artwork of Ugmo, the Ugliest Little Rocket.
It’s great art, but a just plain distressing-looking launch vehicle.
1962 JPL concept for an all-solid Moon rocket for the Apollo program.
11 Responses to “The Ugliest Rocket EVAR”
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I’ll grant it’s ugly, and I agree that the UR-700 or UR-900 families could have given it a run for its money had any of them ever been built, but my nominee for the ugliest rocket that flew would have to be the good ol’ “Space Transportation System”, especially after they went to the orange external tank after the first two flights.
That thing looks like something a 12-year-old would build out of Estes motors. Hmmm……
Assuming it’s supposing it’s to be in scale with the people in the painting, it looks way too small to get a crew to the Moon and back.
Overall height is around 170 feet (about 1/2 that of the Saturn V) and diameter at the base of the first stage nozzles is around 48 feet.
Given the lower ISP of the solid fuel, plus the fact that its made up of several sub-units, which will add a lot of engine casing weight, it may be able to get the payload shown into Earth orbit, but that’s about it.
And the spacecraft shown atop it looks too small to go from Earth orbit to the Moon and back.
However, the people may be way out of scale.
If you look at the launch assembly tower behind it, the guardrails on the platform halfway up it would only come up to the people’s knees.
So you can probably double the size, and that makes this thing a real monster, around the height of a Saturn V and over twice its diameter… which is about what you would need to do a all-solid Moon rocket. God knows that its overall weight would be, but it’s probably about as heavy as a small skyscraper.
> Overall height is around 170 feet…
Wrong. 279 feet.
> diameter at the base of the first stage nozzles is around 48 feet.
Wrong. 77 feet.
Gross weight of 25,000,000 pounds.
All this data was presented previously.
I was going by the height of the people in the painting; specifically, the guy who is standing under the A-frame behind the vehicle. As I said, they appear to be way too big in comparison to the vehicle.
My double-size guess wasn’t far off.
Whether that’s due to poor artwork, or if the artist was purposely trying to make it look smaller than it actually would be for propaganda in its favor is a good question.
The use of the multiple solids in each stage is odd from a efficiency viewpoint.
Was that as large as they thought they could build them, or was as large as they thought they could move them around due to weight?
They all look like single piece units, as opposed to the Shuttles multi-segment SRB’s.
You’re paying a big penalty in stage weight and size versus performance in doing it this way, as well as upping the odds one will fail catastrophically or fail to ignite.
Still, it’s nowhere near as crazy as the original BIS Moon rocket design with its thousands of solid-fueled rockets, and hilarious Freudian appearance:
http://davidszondy.com/future/space/bis.htm
The virgin goddess Luna wasn’t go to be virgin for long if the BIS had anything to say about it. 😀
Looks like something straight out of Kerbal Space Program game. Interesting to see a real design so close to a game one.
I can’t help but love the aesthetics of this beast. It’s so ugly I’m quite fond of it.
It’s a silly reaction, I know.
Well, it’s certainly different, you can say hat about it. 🙂
As Chris Jones has pointed out, it looks something like the Soviet UR-700/900 designs, although those were going to be liquid fueled:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ur700.htm
In their case, the reason they were made up of propulsion modules is that Baikonur wasn’t on a seacoast like Cape Canaveral, so you either had to build the rocket at the launch site, or ship it in in small enough parts to move by railway.
The UR-700 used the latter approach, which is also why the Proton first stage has its central core tank and the six strap-on engine/tank modules; assembled, the the thing would be too large to get through railway tunnels.
This thing looks like something made out of giant RATO bottles.
I wonder how roll, pitch, and yaw control were going to be dealt with? Fluid injection inside of the nozzles like the Titan III SRB’s? They don’t look like they can gimbal.
I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I rather like the apparent fractal approach in the design. It almost looks like those enormous JATO bottles on the first and second stages could be stacked in different configurations for different missions.
I wonder if it might be feasible to recover and reuse the lower stages. Build it to split into its modules with each bottle splashing down on its own parachute. It would probably be much easier to build seven “small” descent systems than one that has to support a mass seven times as big.
And yeah, control’s the thing. I’d guess that there might be vernier packs not in the illustration, or water injection as you suggested. At any rate, it would have to be thrust based and not gimbal-based, Maybe update it to a hybrid rocket.
Yeah, if you could get it to work, you certainly could stack different numbers of the three differnt size engines in different combos to do several missions.
And once they were empty of fuel, you probably could parachute them into the sea for reuse as they would weigh a lot less then and be fairly tough, so could survive the impact.
You would still face the problem of the low specific impulse of solid fuel for use as upper stage motors, so it would be a lot heavier at launch than something using the modules as a first stage and LH2/LOX in the upper stages to do the same job.
The giant solid fuel motor that was designed as a alternate Saturn-V first stage if they couldn’t get the F-1 engines to work actually looked like one of the first stage modules on this booster, with four fins added to its base
I just found the JPL report where this thing came from:
“The Applicability of Solid Propellants for a Nova-Class Injection Vehicle and a
Comparison with a Liquid Vehicle of Comparable Capability”
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19740074221_1974074221.pdf
109 pages, 13.7 MB.
It has lots of details about this booster in it, including how the stages were to be steered, which indeed was by fluid injection in the engine nozzles.
Also some details on the Agena engine for no obvious reason.
This plan got as far as figuring out where it was going to be assembled and launched from in relation to Cape Canaveral, with maps.