Search Results for “shuttle” – Page 42

As might be expected, one thing that grates on me is when aerospace data, experience and history vanishes. This happens entirely too often… mostly in the form of documentation being fed into shredders, incinerators or landfill. But it also happens with events. Events that should have been documented, but appear not to have been. One such event was the 4th Conference on Planetology and Space Mission Planning.

The first three of these conferences were held in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and are documented in densely packed proceedings published by the New York Academy of Science. The 4th Conference was different. Instead of being held in a hotel or a conference center, the 4th Conference was held on the Holland America cruise ship S.S. Statendam. The cruise was from December 4 through 13, 1972, left from New York, and lurked seven miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral… where the lucky passengers got to watch the launch of Apollo 17.

The list of presenters/speakers at the conference is fairly spectacular. I’ve got a list of who was supposed to speak on what topic… and nothing else. Unlike the first three Conferences, no proceedings seems to have been published. According to one source, a book was put together… but never released. There was some sort of problem between the Conference organizers and the cruise line, but exactly what, and what happened with the proceedings, I’ve not yet been able to determine. The closest I’ve come to a possible hypothesis: as a financial enterprise, the conference was apparently a disaster of epic proportions. From Time magazine, December 25, 1972:

The problem: only about 40 people bought the premium tickets; the remainder were various “guests,” including travel agents, some Philadelphia clothing-store executives and 15 fashion editors. Estimated loss on the great idea: $250,000.

According to the book Katherine Anne Porter: the life of an artist by Darlene Harbour Unrue (found in fragments on Google Books), only 100 people in total paid for the cruise, and those 40 “premium tickets” were the tickets to the conference itself. It seems that staggeringly few people wanted to pay the $400 for the conference on top of the $400-$900 for the cruise itself.

I don’t know who ate those losses. I expect that there were probably lawsuits… there’s always a lawsuit when a business venture tanks. Lawsuits might have interfered with any planned Proceedings. Or the financial disaster might have drained whatever budget there may have been for such a thing. Additionally, the brochure advertising the cruise listed as speakers Arthur C. Clarke and Werner von Braun, both of whom failed to appear (cause unknown to me).

Here’s what I know about the conference, how it was broken down into seminars and who was to speak on what (and, yes, I’ll probably make some spelling errors). I got this years ago from one of the presenters; I have been unable to determine if the pages these lists came from were just a brochure themselves, or part of the full Proceedings. Note that while the first three Conferences were pretty dry, technical stuff, the bulk of these presentations seem to have been highly steeped in the philosophical:

CORNUCOPIA OF SPACE (1st seminar 6th December)

Bruce Hunt: Co-Chairman

Donald Banks: Co-Chairman

Isaac Asimov: What is a Cornucopia

Norman Mailer: Is there a Cornucopia out there?

Pandora Duncan: Planetary rover designs

Robert D Enzmann: Out of the Cornucopia

Richard Hoagland: The Space Shuttle

Ben Bova: Expanding the Cornucopia

Berguet Roberts: Last Lunar Flight Dreams

ECOLOGICAL NICHES

Krafft Ehricke: Co-Chairman Extraterrestrial Industries

Kenneth Franklin: Co-Chairman

Eric Burgess: Emerging Conscience of Man

Roger Caras: Earth the Teacher, Lessons learned from out 1st planet

Isaac Asimov: A heirarchy of niches from comets to Earthlike planets

Neil Ruzic: Development of the moon as a niche

Richard Sternbach: Experiment that failed

Don Davis: Paintings: Clones

PROPULSION INTELLIGENT MACHINES AND SOCIO-GENETIC CHANGE

Roger Caras: Co-chairman

Harry Stine: Co-chairman The Third industrial Revolution

Robert Heinlein: Genetic fitness, Social fitness, training & technology and communications
Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence

Sarah Meltzoff: Universals, Cultural viability, economic specialization

Janet Jepperson: Psychological barriers to full realization

Linda Sagan: Comment: Ultimate Machines

Krafft Ehricke: Comment: Ultimate Machines

ENERGY AND PROPULSION

Donald Banks: Co-Chairman Energy

Ben Bova: Co-Chairman

Werner Rambauske: Observation of the Universe

Brude hunt: Propulsion

Robin Anderson: Plowshare: Big guns for the benefit of the people

Fred Pohl: The shape of shadows from the future

Carl Sagan: Interstellar probes and Pioneer 10

Neil Ruzic: Human acquisition of Moon and its effects on war and peace

THE GRAND DESIGN

Gillet Griffin: Co-chairman

Eric Burgess: of Mankind but no longer Men

Cassandra Boell: Space states and the howling of beasts

Harry Stine: Comment: Ultimate Machine

Robert D. Enzmann: Statement of grand design, & galactic fertile crescent

Robert Heinlein: The grand design

Theodore Sturgeon: Communications, The Cold Equations, and the grand design

Fred Pohl: Star flight and relativistic twins “lost in space”

Fred Ordway: Use of satellite systems for education

Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence and the grand design, have we nurtured “The Descent of Machines?”

Richard Sternbach: Paintings: Mankinds’ grand design

SCIENCE, ART, COMMUNICATION, AND COSMOLOGY

Neil Ruzic: Co-chairman

Eric Burgess: Co-chairman

Donald Burgy: Order theory: an art exhibit in the clipper room

Gillett Griffin: Migrations of men and their art

Isaac Asimov: stellar types and organic evolution

Robert D Enzmann: Force= dp/dt (F=/ma) and e=hv(1-d/D) That is an intellectual revolution

Ben Bova: galaxies and quasars

Norman Mailer: Revolutionaries of science and technology

Donald Davis: Paintings: Cupules and stick charts

POST SYMPOSIUM COLLOQUIUM

REVOLUTIONARY

POST SYMPOSIUM

COLLOQUIUM

GRAND DESIGN

AND

PHYSICS

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Now, a lot of the topics… I don’t even know what they hell they’re talking about. Presumably the “Grand Design” was some agreed-upon concept prior to the conference, but I’ve no idea what it is other than a hundh it was something about interstellar colonization.

There were a great many events in history that I’d like to have a time machine and a video camera for (along with body armor, adequate weaponry and a complete series of vacinations). This is one of those. Not so much because we can look back on this event as one of those “and this is when it all began” moments… because it’s not. It seems to have quite effectively vanished down the memory hole, with little to no historical impact (although some references I found online suggest that this gathering was the start of the modern pro-space movement). No, I want to go back and record this… just to find out what the hell actually happened.

If you happen to know one of the speakers listed here, I’d certainly be interested in anything they have to say on this topic. I’d be thrilled if they say somethign like “Yeah, I got a copy of the Proceedings, let me dig it up.”

Now under development for the Army is a modular suborbital/orbital launch vehicle known as MNMS (Multipurpose Nano Missile System). In its basic form, it will be composed of 24-inch diameter cylindrical rockets using pressure fed ethane/nitrous oxide engines. Stack two of these stages together, and a third, smaller stage and cluster six more stages around the first, and you can put 10 kilograms into orbit. At a vehicle cost of $1,000,000 it’s about the cheapest way to put something into orbit… but it works out to a hundred grand a kilo, ten times more expensive per kilo than the Space Shuttle. It can also use surplus ATACMS solid rocket boosters and surplus MLRS rockets.

A video of the concept can be seen here.

It can be used to lob small satellites into orbit, conventional munitions, experimental payladds, and almost certainly things like tactical hypersonic boost-glide recon bots.

(Sadly, the report that I snagged these from is currently stuck on the external hard drive with “issues.” Hopefully it’ll all work out fine and I’ll be able to dig up the details and post ’em in anyone’s interested. If it doesn’t work out fine… I blame you, dear blog reader, for not emptying out your bank account and sending me the funds to have a double-redundant backup system prior to this. Anyway, what I recall is this…)

Two North American concepts (circa 1972, plus or minus) for “rescue Apollo” capsules. The six-seater could be carried by a Shuttle , attached to a space station, and used as a re-entry life boat for up to six crew. The eight-seater would be an orbit-only life boat… pretty much the uncomfortablest Apollo ever, with eight unshowered schmoes crammed in it, waiting for resuce that might be a week or three away. Bleah.

Along with the two-stage “Saturn v derived” design previously shown, in 2002 NASA also looked at a vehicle composed of “Magnum” core vehicle (essentially a Shuttle external tank heavily modified into an in-line launch vehicle) with four Shuttle RSRMs strapped around it for increased performance. The payload shroud was also increased in diameter.

The core vehicle was equipped with two RS-83 hydrogen/oxygen engines on the first stage. The solid rocket boosters were the planned five-segment versions of the standard Shuttle RSRMs. Payload to a 150 nautical mile circular orbit was 106.6 metric tons, notably better than the performance of the two-stage vehicle.

And here’s the CAD drawing:

4banger.dwg

Before the Constellation program began, NASA had looked at the requirement sof a manned Mars program. In 2007 NASA-Johnson released an “Exploration Blueprint Data Book” documenting the results of a 90-day study conducted from September to November 2002.

The report was fairly substantial, insofar as 600 pages of Powerpoint presentations can be considered “substantial.” A fair portion of it dealt with launch vehicles that could support the effort. Along with the usual Shuttle-derived designs, there was also a Saturn V-derived concept. Apart from being a two-stage vehicle with RP-1 fuel for the first stage and hydrogen for the second, it actually had little in common with the Saturn V. Propulsion for Stage 1 was provided by eight Russian RD-180 rocket engines (the type used on the Atlas V), and Stage 2 was powered either by SSME’s modified for air start or J-2S’s. Payload delivered to a 30 by 150 nautical mile orbit (clearly circularization was required) was a substantial 102 metric tons.

The design seems to have been fairly rudimentary.

Here’s the DWG file of the layout drawing, if’n you’re into that sort of thing…

saturn-v-class.dwg

Artwork by Leo Skubic of Marquardt illustrating the “Spaceliner” SSTO concept. This used the Supercharged Recycled Scram LACE (“Synerjet”) concept for propulsion, and was intended as a Space Shuttle concept. The payload compartment was not in the nose, or in the middle, but instead was firmly in the rear of the vehicle… the central “plug” of the aerospike engine was the primarily payload compartment.

The 1970’s saw the first major “oil crisis.” The prospect of a world without cheap oil led NASA to seriously contemplate solar power satellites… satellites the size of Manhattan in geosynchronous orbit; covered in solar cells, these satellites would beam hundreds of megawatts of power down to Earth via microwaves.

Something the size of a city could not be conveniently launched atop small launch vehicles. Instead, the cargo launchers would need to be vast… hearkening back to the Post-Nova/Post-Saturn desgins from the early 1960’s.

One such design was Boeing’s “Space Freighter,” a two stage manned and winged vehicle. The first stage was powered by rocket engines burning liquid oxygen with methane; the second stage used LOX and hydrogen. The first stage was equipped with turbojets to allow it to fly back to the launch site; the second stage was a glider, but had the advantage of being able to return at will from low Earth orbit like the Shuttle, and thus was able to glide to the chosen landing site.

Vast as this vehicle was, it still only managed roughly the same payload as the Post-Saturn vehicles from 15 years earlier, with less ability to grow more capable versions.

Scale comparison of the Space Freighter with the Shuttle, Saturn V and a smaller heavy lifter.

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Heavy Lifter options and evolution

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Here’s the last of ’em! From APR original print issue V5N5 comes a 13-page article on the “Spacejet” concept. One of the problems with single stage ot orbit spaceplanes that use turbojets to get up to speed is that you then have to drag the weight of the turbojets and their associated fuel tanks all the way to orbit. Spacejet did away with that, by putting the turbojets and their fuel tanks in ejectable pods. What’s more, the ejectable pods were themselves small unmanned vehicles; after separation, they would fly themselves back to the launch site for a convenient runway landing.

This article presents a multitude of designs for variations on the Spacejet theme, including a spaceplane that was a greatly stretched mutant Space Shuttle.

Download for only $2.40.

Order it (and all the other currently available APR articles) here: http://www.up-ship.com/blog/eAPR/articles.htm

It may be hard to believe, but there once was at time when the United States not only had a thriving automotive industry but ALSO a thriving aerospace industry. And perhaps shockingly, the automotive industry sometimes got into the aerospace business, and sometimes quite successfully. One case of that was Chrysler, which built, among other things, the first stage of the Saturn I and Ib. They also wanted to build the Space Shuttle… and their design for it was the Single-stage Earth orbital Reusable Vehicle (SERV).

From APR original print issue V5N3 comes a 13-page article on the Chrysler SERV, loaded with diagrams showing the SERV both inside and out as well as the MURP (Manned Upper-stage Reusable Payload) spaceplane that was to go with the SERV.

Download for only $2.40.

Order it (and all the other currently available APR articles) here: http://www.up-ship.com/blog/eAPR/articles.htm

From APR original print issue V4N5 comes a 10-page article on the British “MUSTARD” concept for a “triamese” space shuttle from the 1960’s. Includes diagrams for numerous versions.Download for only $1.80.

Order it (and all the other currently available APR articles) here: http://www.up-ship.com/blog/eAPR/articles.htm