Earliest Plausible Manned Moon Landing
- Thread starter M79
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The other way around imo. Taking off from the moon is very easy and not much fuel or provisions are needed to make it back to earth. But to actually get there you need a huge rocket, only 3 which could have done it were ever build with only one achieving it, you need detailed maps in high resolution to not land in a rocky region or the side of a crater, you need to spend a lot of time testing the entire equipment as many times as needed to make sure nothing fails at any step of the way etc.
Getting back is only the last part of a decade long project. If only one thing during the project fails, no matter how small it might seem, there will be no situation where you can ask yourself how hard or easy it is to get them back from the moon.
Megaroc, though risky, was a cheap option. Admittedly it could only able to manage sub-orbital flight but it would have been a huge boost for the UK. and a needle vigorously applied to the USA and USSR stimulating an earlier start to space exploration. Though probably one with more accidents and fatalities.
In my EDC it's Poland who achieved a similar feat in the aftermath of the Eastern War and stimulated German interest in space.
1901 if H G Wells is to be believed!
I cant see how without major diversions form the real timeline an earlier landing could be achieved. Perhaps a year or two without the Apollo 1 fire but not drastically earlier than that without the removal of some pretty big world happenings in the 1940's!
Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one returned in his footsteps..............................
I like this - very Dan Dare / Spitfires in space!
I cant see how without major diversions form the real timeline an earlier landing could be achieved. Perhaps a year or two without the Apollo 1 fire but not drastically earlier than that without the removal of some pretty big world happenings in the 1940's!
Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one returned in his footsteps..............................
I like this - very Dan Dare / Spitfires in space!
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it is indeed - and sadly true. We went to the moon and gave up. That is like sailing round the Serpentine against crossing the Atlantic! Harsh as this may be to the people (all better than me) who flew (and died) on the Shuttle.
At work.
How much of a change is some one thinking up/testing/developing something like the 'Sea Dragon'?
Basically a really big, really simple vehicle.
Some British naval engineer works at up scaling various sounding rockets. Coupled with naval steel construction?
How much of a change is some one thinking up/testing/developing something like the 'Sea Dragon'?
Basically a really big, really simple vehicle.
Some British naval engineer works at up scaling various sounding rockets. Coupled with naval steel construction?
RightHoJeeves
Banned
Well it's a new century. I certainly hope to see commercial space ventures mine asteroids and establish a permanent lunar base in my lifetime. I would love to see a future like in that Sam Rockwell movie "Moon" (minus a certain plot twist that I won't spoil).
It is the concept and execution of exploration that is being compared not the destination.
Looking back at a possible POD that might get the Megaroc funding is perhaps for Churchill and the conservatives surviving the 1945 election and putting in money that would have gone into Labour's OTL welfare state.
By coincidence there is a new Dan Dare series on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Digby is played by the Geoffrey McGivern who was Ford Prefect in the radio Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Dr Who's done that!
I suspect that the descendants of the Carib Indians, Aztecs and Incas imagine that frequently.
Aztecs might not last another two generations. Incas faced an altitude problem and would have to expand into the jungle, plains, or coastline to get the resources needed to expand. There is evidence they may have explored much further than originally thought, perhaps as far as modern Asuncion and western Brazil according to some (the 'ends' of their road network is elusive and what we know comes from the surviving *quarter* of it). Caribs are interesting, I've always been curious if they or some of their bretheren might not have Visigothic genes.
Maybe Halley's Comet and Tunguska. Halley's Comet in 1910 provoked a fear that the cyanogen in the tail would cause a mass extinction on Earth. Perhaps combined this with something involving the 1910 Great Daylight Comet. Tunguska of course destroyed a huge amount of remote Siberian forest--you'd need someone investigating what happened to be able to convince the world that a major city like Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, or New York was hours away from utter destruction. Perhaps throw in the Carrington Event of 1859 which causes chaos to the "Victorian internet" of the telegraph systems.
Unfortunately, 1906 or 1910 tech wouldn't be enough to spur on increased research in space science, but maybe starting at the Carrington Event, the right people could be around to encourage research in space science, with Tunguska and Halley's Comet provoking new impetus in that field. More R&D (and this would need further research in many fields) might lead to a man on the moon by the middle of the 20th century. And with geopolitics in the 19th/early 20th century the way they were, you might have a "satellite war" portion of a Great War where each side needs to continually launch new satellites to replace the ones being shot down, spurring development and use of large rockets.
This might be a great way to have a space wank, since all that investment spent launching satellites might end up in private hands so we might have a ton of post-war space industries which would likely include relatively cheap space tourism (not much more expensive than a trip to Antarctica, say) and it might spiral from there to include a launch loop and/or orbital ring by the early 21st century. At that point, we could have a permanent base on the moon by 1969, and maybe even a full-on lunar colony by 2000 (no doubt there to mine and process material for something like a Stanford torus).
Quite a bit, since despite Sea Dragon's apparent advantages, it was never adopted, since there never was the need. You don't need a Sea Dragon unless you're launching an incredible amount of material into space, and the only way to create that demand I can think of (in the 20th century) is to have a "space war" occur, where satellites are an important element of the war (from communications to weather satellites to spy satellites and even orbital bombardment satellites), and satellites are frequently being shot down. One power might decide to use something like Sea Dragon (or similar "big dumb rocket") to be able to more quickly replenish their satellites, assuming the Kessler effect doesn't completely wreck everything (the only solution in that era would be armouring your launch vehicles/satellites, thus meaning they have to lift far more, or using nuclear weapons to clear out launch space even though these nukes might be better spent on destroying enemy cities). Eventually they might want to put a satellite in lunar orbit, reasoning how difficult it would be to shoot down such a satellite. Or even erect a simple facility on the Moon, which would require actual astronaut-engineers to do so.
As suggested above, a non-nuclear WWIII might have this happen, or maybe some alt-WWII, which would probably require a POD before the Great War.
At work.
I must admit to finding the comment, "You don't need Sea Dragon because there's nothing that big to lift..." seeming as rather putting the cart before the horse.
The limits of the Moon landings were, in part, because the Saturn could only lift so much in one go.
Yet the Sea Dragon would seem to lift more, with less launch facility investment (Dockyards were already 'A thing') hence more launchers and orbital gear hence Moon vehicles and landers for the job.
Plus, if we use a modern transport trucking system as an admittedly poor analogy, if you build the 'container truck/ship/passenger packer plane' the stuff inside will come.
I find such things puzzling.
What I was trying to suggest is "How early can people go big, go dumb and hence go Moon?"
Since, really, there's nothing terribly exotic about Sea Dragon. No 'Turbo-pumps', No fine/delicate 'Swiss Watch' engineering. Plus I can envisage a maritime country seeing the production benifits side of the idea/design.
Build Sea Dragons with some yards that would/could otherwise build freighters etc.
Was just highlighting an alternate point.
I must admit to finding the comment, "You don't need Sea Dragon because there's nothing that big to lift..." seeming as rather putting the cart before the horse.
The limits of the Moon landings were, in part, because the Saturn could only lift so much in one go.
Yet the Sea Dragon would seem to lift more, with less launch facility investment (Dockyards were already 'A thing') hence more launchers and orbital gear hence Moon vehicles and landers for the job.
Plus, if we use a modern transport trucking system as an admittedly poor analogy, if you build the 'container truck/ship/passenger packer plane' the stuff inside will come.
I find such things puzzling.
What I was trying to suggest is "How early can people go big, go dumb and hence go Moon?"
Since, really, there's nothing terribly exotic about Sea Dragon. No 'Turbo-pumps', No fine/delicate 'Swiss Watch' engineering. Plus I can envisage a maritime country seeing the production benifits side of the idea/design.
Build Sea Dragons with some yards that would/could otherwise build freighters etc.
Was just highlighting an alternate point.
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There were further proposals to upgrade the Saturn V since the beginning of the project as well as the competing, stronger Nova rocket but no one could sell a realistic payload to the budget guys so after the photo shooting on the moon ended the need for super heavy lift vehicles disappeared until the Soviet space shuttle project where Glushko, still dreaming of a moon base, smuggled an SHLV into it. The dream quickly evaporated into steam at the launch pad. There have been more proposals since then and nothing came out of it.
And today they're once again spending billions building a SHLV with no mission... At least Musk has a vision.
Since, really, there's nothing terribly exotic about Sea Dragon. No 'Turbo-pumps', No fine/delicate 'Swiss Watch' engineering. Plus I can envisage a maritime country seeing the production benifits side of the idea/design.
Build Sea Dragons with some yards that would/could otherwise build freighters etc.
Was just highlighting an alternate point.
On the subject of pressure fed designs to make a simple launcher there was an interesting publication called
Leo on the Cheap: Methods for Achieving Drastic Reductions in Space Launch Costs by John R. London
Its on Amazon but you may find PDF's of it floating around the net, quite a lot of simple designs of varying capacity have been suggested but the publication suggests that they were not high tech enough to get support.
But the destination has always been an important part of the concept and execution of exploration.
The constant comparisons of the Lunar missions to the voyages of Columbus is in my view misleading propaganda.
A more accurate comparison would be the very first canoe built in Africa that held together long enough to reach an offshore island. Or if you are being very charitable, comparable to the Viking expeditions to North America. In both cases, significant R&D was required before reliable transatlantic travel could be established.
It is still quite astounding to me that the US allowed itself to become so dependant on the Russians.
I am not so sure such a vehicle would really be very simple. For example:
*The noise of the rocket taking off would cause enormous damage underwater - at the very least, whale populations become virtually extinct in the ocean you are launching in, there's a chance that commercially valuable fishing grounds might be disrupted as well.
*Is there combustion instability inside that giant rocket nozzle? Generally, combustion instability grows more difficult a problem as you scale the engine up, so it could be an issue.
*Are there any unforeseen issues with a rocket engine that huge? The Sea Dragon was operating far, far beyond what was known. I suspect development would have eaten more money than expected.
*"Big dumb simple rockets" have generally been disappointing. For example, the shuttle SRBs, the massive Aerojet AJ-260 and the pressure-fed first stage NASA considered for the Shuttle were all supposed to be simple and cheap - all turned out to be expensive to develop, have a number of serious engineering challenges that in added (or would have added) to the complexity of the overall system. The one example that was developed and flown operationally, the shuttle SRB, probably provided no actual advantage over using a "complex" turbopump fed rocket engine for the same job.
*The logistics for a vehicle like Sea Dragon would have been a massive PITA. It would have taken a long, long time to electrolyse enough water to fuel the rocket (months, if memory serves) and shipping and handling liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in the staggering quantities needed for a launch, while doable, would have rather complex all on their own.
*The sea dragon is also very much unlike anything you want for a military weapon, so you can't share R&D effort with weapons development - and the R&D is by FAR the largest part of the cost in a rocket. The Soyuz rocket is far from an ideal space launch vehicle, but because the Soviet approach with the rocket kept to a minimum the (non-weapons) R&D roubles being spent, it is the most effective and economical means for men to get into space yet devised (though hopefully this will change soon). If Britain were devising their own Sea Dragon vehicle, the R&D on it wouldn't be able to build on any weapons work that was being done which would basically double the cost (at least) of getting access to space for both civilian and military purposes. Which might be worth it if the British were SURE they'd get a massive payoff on such R&D spending, but they really couldn't. In the 1950s, there were still a great many unknowns.
Of course, some of Sea Dragon's ideas could be very useful indeed. For example, one about the size of the Saturn V might have been pretty interesting if you had enough demand for launches to support such a vehicle. Even so, such a design would still be too different from military rockets to be a terribly practical idea in the 20th Century. Truax had some great ideas which, after humanity has played around with military-derived launchers, learned the basics about space and built a fledgeling market for launching things into space, could be useful for developing a next-gen space launch vehicle. I don't see it being a good place to start though. The very, very earliest I could see Truax's ideas coming into play would be in the 80s if one of the superpowers had decided to get serious about building SPSs or space weaponry - but even then, I think it is a very, very low probability.
With a Sea Dragon, you could launch armoured capsules that could laugh at Kessler Syndrome.
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As far as the earliest plausible moon landing... Both the US and the Soviets were really pushing their computer technology and materials technology to the limits during the space race. The Apollo guidance computer is frankly a masterpiece, as is the Soviet mainframe that did the calculations for their early missions (one of the reasons the Soviets got an early lead over the US is because the Soviet space program had one of the top-of-the-line mainframes in the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviets were building better mainframes than the US had the technology for). I have difficulty seeing materials science and computer science being pushed ahead by very much even in a "no WW1" scenario. And though you could try a moonshot with worse materials and worse computers than the US in the 1960s, the chances for failure would have been significantly higher.
My own instinct is that without WW1, we might plausibly have men in orbit by the early 1940s, but rather than going from the first man in space to moon landing in 8 years, it would be more like 20 years, with the first landing on the moon happening in the early 60s.
Perhaps, if there was an extreme nationalist pissing match (worse than the pissing match during our Cold War), someone might try and succeed in a Lunar expedition with worse safety margins than the US tolerated in OTL. However, it's worth noting that even in OTL, the risk of landing men on the moon almost put the US off (and the risks were certainly so high that NASA management didn't want to try their luck too many times). The Soviets, who had much slimmer safety margins in their 60s manned Lunar plans, never tried to send men that way, and wouldn't have even seriously considered it if the US wasn't making a bid for the moon. I just don't see anyone even trying to start the race if they don't have technology equal to that the US possessed in 1960.
And if whatever drivers are less than those that drove the humiliated US of OTL's 1961... Well, the moon can wait until the world has 1970s-equivalent technology when computers, materials and aerospace technology (all fields that were advancing extremely rapidly at the time, and indeed still are) makes things much easier.
As people have already mentioned, the OTL events were not the most likely. The USSR was behind the US in almost every field of technology, was far, far less wealthy (for example, while the Soviets had better mainframe designs in the 50s and early 60s, they sure as shooting couldn't crank out computers in the numbers US companies could) and really lucked out when Korolev built an ICBM that was so awful that it made a great launch vehicle and then further lucked out because Korolev was basically able to game the Soviet system to allow him to score a whole bunch of space firsts. Had he been a US rocket scientist, the efficient US government probably would have kept him on-mission designing weapons.
That said, it is plausible for either the US or the USSR to get a man on the moon (and back home) in 1967 with a PoD at the start of the decade. The US could manage a landing in 1968 with a later PoD (for example, if they decide to do less testing and try to get a man down on the Lunar surface as fast as they can manage).
A Soviet Union that didn't suffer so badly from Barborossa could have given the US a much more serious race, though even then I have trouble seeing either side being able to pull the thing off before 1965 at the absolute earliest. Even with a PoD in 1941, R&D for a new rocket takes on the order of 7-11 years and both sides have to scale up through a few rockets...
fasquardon