Jan 192009
A few drawings of the Nexus designed at Convair in 1962-63 for the Post-Saturn program (the vehicle that would obviously replace the Saturn V in the mid 1970’s… at the time, the idea that progress would stop was unthinkable). One million pound payload reusable SSTO, made using straightforward tech. Make it bigger and get 2 million pounds payload. Sad to see what could have been.
7 Responses to “Convair Nexus”
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First time a saw a drawing of that thing I thought “holy $hit”. Of course the Boeing booster with 10 372″ SRBs gets the imagination going as well.
There were at least four “stablemates” back in ’63:
1) The GD Nexus
2) The Aerojet “Sea Dragon”
3) The Boeing MLLV
4) The Douglas ROMBUS
Nexus and ROMBUS were similar in being reusable 1,000,000 lb-payload SSTOs, though ROMBUS shed external tanks. Sea Dragon was a 1,000,000-lb payload reusable TSTO; MLLV was a 1,000,000 lb-payload expendable SSTO. MLLV could have an upper stage added, and a series of increasingly large and numerous solid rockets. Max thrust, IIRC, was about 156 million pounds with 12 260″ solids, with a payload somewhere north of 4Mlbs.
Whenever I hear of the Delta IV or the Atlas V “heavy lift” boosters, I get a pain, right here….
>There were at least four “stablemates” back in ‘63:
1) The GD Nexus
2) The Aerojet “Sea Dragon”
3) The Boeing MLLV
4) The Douglas ROMBUS
i think i detect a future eAPR article here somewhere, how ’bout it??
Any idea if the 300″, 325″, and 372″ boosters ever got anything to paper? I remember when I was a kid there was a book called “Jet & Rocket Engines” or some such and in it there was a picture of them moving a motor segment that was WAY wider than the Shuttle SRB. As I recall it was inert and being used in a mobility test or something. Anyway it took up two lanes of road. It was also the first time I ever heard of the GE4. It was when I was in elementry school (the 70’s) so it may have been the one by Edmond’s but I don’t know.
Several test versions of the 260″ booster were build; Aerojets was tested in Florida, Thiokol’s shattered under hydrotesting (crappy welds). I’m not sure if anything bigger than that ever got any *serious* consideration.
> i think i detect a future eAPR article
The Sea Dragon and the MLLV have already been done (the first run of APR), so they’ll be revisited.
[…] the Saturn V, ending its run as the “Post Saturn” launch vehicle (with designs such as Nexus). This design features eight F-1 engines on the first stage, and has been, probably apocryphally, […]