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!
