The Unwanted Blog

In 1964, NASA and numerous contractors studied “Post Saturn” launch vehicles. A common design element was a payload of one million pounds to low Earth orbit. Designs such as the Douglas ROMBUS, the Aerojet Sea Dragon, the Boeing MLLV and the Convair Nexus were all a part of this.

I have done some digging into the Post Saturn projects, and in some cases (Sea Dragon, MLLV) turned up nicely detailed reports; in the case of ROMBUS, I got about halfway to the good stuff, and in the case of Nexus I was only able to get some surface details. I tried several times to get the actual final reports from NASA through FOIA, but was shot down every time; it took a while, but I was finally able to get an answer as to why the reports were unreleasable: “They have drawings of rockets in them.” Grrrrr.

While the final Nexus reports have continued to elude me, I’ve picked up bits and pieces over the years. Below is a derivative of the Nexus, equipped with gasc core nuclear rocket engines. The nukes were to have an Isp of 2220 seconds, giving the vehicle a payload delivery to the Moon (likely lunar orbit, not surface) of one million pounds. I’ve found no further data on this design so far. Gas core nukes showed high promise in the early sixties, but unfortunately the practical problems of building such an engine were not overcome. Not that the anti-nuke movement would have allowed them to be built anyway…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under drawings, nukes, projects, spacecraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.