The mythology has grown since the late 1940’s that the German rocket scientists were the masters of the craft, and the US could not have gotten anywhere without them. While that made for good PR (especially for the German rocket scientists), it’s by no means even close to the truth. While it’s obvious that during WWII the Germans were well ahead of the US, what’s less well known is that in the years immediately after the war, American rocket scientists, engineers, designers and planners had their own advanced concepts. Had the Germans not commanded the attention of the decision makers, it’s entirely possible that the US would have gone to space anyway, and on much the same schedule. If America’s first orbital craft had been based on Douglas’ World Circling Spaceship or North Americans’ High Altitude Test Vehicle, maybe the space program would have been better, maybe worse… but it certainly would have looked different.
One thing post-war Americans had in some abundance were American designers who Thought Big about space travel. For instance, there were the Darryl Romick’s who produced the METEOR city-sized space station concept in the mid 1950’s. But an even bigger example of that was Donald Ritchies space station. In early 1949, Mr. Ritchie published a newspaper article discussing the need for space stations. The article was an abridged version of one he’d originally written in 1946. Who was Mr. Ritchie? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that for several years during the war, Mr. Ritchie was a designer and draftsman at Wright Field (where also worked Alex Tremulis, a designer who came up with a concept for a two-stage rocket-boosted VTOHL interceptor during the war), and after the war had what appears to have been a heck of a career in aerospace.
Ritchie’s space station (poorly reproduced in the 1949 newspaper article), at first glance, looks both conventional and oddly familiar:
It’s ring shaped and set to rotate for artificial gravity… a common design for the 1950’s. And it’s familiar due to its resemblance to “Space Station V” from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But there’s an oddity to the design: it’s a ring with no hub. Typically ring-shaped space station have a central hub; here a spacecraft can dock by simply matching rotation. Docking with the rotating ring itself would be very difficult and would quickly blow through propellant. But this station design had no hub.
Ritchie came up with a solution that is, to say the least, unique: If you look close, there are actually two rings, an inner and an outer. As it turns out, the inner ring is stationary, the outer ring rotates. Any spacecraft that needs to dock can easily dock with the inner ring. How exactly people and cargo get from the inner ring to the outer was left unanswered in the abbreviated article.
There’s one other thing: the space station diameter was to be three MILES. Why? Again, unanswered. My guess would be “because we just kicked Hitler’s ass and are staring down Uncle Joe, that’s why!” I’ve tried to reconstruct the layout of the space station based on the poorly reproduced illustration; while I can’t vouch for it’s precision, I think it’s reasonably close. I have shown the lazily constructed cutaway with decks 10 feet apart… 62 decks. This thing would have been as thick as a very respectable skyscraper, but would have been about 1500 feet wide and, if stretched out, would have been more than nine miles long. The surface area of the decks would probably have exceeded the floorspace of Manhattan. Shown to scale are the Space Shuttle and the Saturn V. The original illustration shows a number of barely visible rocket ships docking with the station; each of them is easily larger than the entire Saturn V.
Does it make any rational sense? Not even a little bit. Would it under any circumstances have stood a chance in hell of being funded, or even studied in any depth? Less likely than me winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Is it All American Awesomeness? You bet!
13 Responses to “American Space Station: 1946”
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Needs a lot of bearings… would make Timken very happy. Don’t forget to put those into the CAD drawings. 🙂
So its not a rib from Galactus. But damn, 3 mile diameter and back in 1946 they really thought big.
OK impressive.
But what kind of transportation system do it needed to be realized and in which orbit?
Apart from dimensions it would be interesting to understand if the author has taken seriously in consideration how to built such monster, whit which materials and with which transports.
Probably Rithcie didn’t made such question or probably he had an idea that wasn’t possible to explain in a tiny paper article.
Anyway, probably, the aswer came after 25 years with the famous Gerard K. O’Neil studies….
Figured it was some kind of space station/habitat. Never heard of this particular concept though. Thanks for posting it!
That is just pure post war american awesomeness
Just how fast would that ring have to be turning in order to create 0.5g? If it’s slow enough, that might leave the possibility that long doors might be added to get persons and things to the “unmoving” ring. It might be no faster than an escalator.
??
Was his next plan to build a “Halo”? Or just go all the way up to a Ringworld?
A = V^2/r
r = 4,828/2 m
A =(set) 5m/s^2
V = sqrt(A*r) = 109.9m/s
Too fast to walk across, or for a sliding atmosphere seal. Not too fast for a car riding rails on one side to match speed and dock to a hatch on the other.
Humm
Using
http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/SpinCalc.htm
If your radius is 2400 M, to get 1 g
your spin is 0.62 rpm (no motion sickness headaches there.)
tangential speed = 153 m/s = 550 kph (Though that seems to fast?)
Assuming the tangential speed is correct, the 330 mph speed difference between the inner and outer ring should be manageable. Some suspension system to separate them (why am I seeing Heinlein’s national rolling road conveyor belt system?. A “taxi” could carry you from a dock on the inner ring to a dock on the outer ring, easily enough.
WOAH!
What the hell did he think we’ld need it for?!!
Well, if a spacecraft were to approach alongside in parallel to the spinning section, then launch a line hook on a trepeze as the docking port rotated sideways and ‘down’ to where the spacecraft parked–maybe.
Then be released on the backwards (we will say “top”) spin to lose speed inlieu of retrofire. It is large enough for several tries, in the same way we saw trains stopped by several ropes across the track in Westerns. I could see this thing in the far future. It would have a hub of spoked tethers as a rotorvator station perhaps?
It might actually be easier to build a hubless station using automated asteroid miners, but they might ‘want’ to build in a spiral form, as in the growth of shells/horns. That might also be of use. A hub could be launched as a single piece on Sea Dragon to mate with station. Also, I could see a future rep-rap machine having no proplem with accelerator coils, in that that is also a repeating shape, with a dedicated stick built target area launched later…
I wonder if a spacecraft could “land” on the inner surface of the ring. Deploy some landing gear, gently set down on the inner surface and hit the brakes. As you slow down, the centripetal force should keep the spacecraft on the inner surface. When you stop, just taxi into a hangar, close the door and pressurize. Taking off is easy: just fly off the edge.
> I wonder if a spacecraft could “land” on the inner surface of the ring…
Well the inner surface is part of the despun section, so you could dock. If their was no despun section…330 mph touch down speed? I’ld think you’ld bounce off before you could brake to a stop given your in freefall until you’ve “stoped”.
Probably wold be better to have a despun docking area – but not nessisarily that big?
This guy makes the O’Niel designs look modest.
Fascinating,
Have you managed to find the original article?