Re: Flyback boosters

On Sep 4, 2:25 pm, "Jeff Findley" <jeff.find...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Jim in Houston" <nospamjamesgoo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in messagenews:1fmnd3t1jucnva5tofioaprnob2euc2b3j@xxxxxxxxxx

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:26:40 -0000, Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

A dozen fully resusable vehicles fully interoperable ranging in
payloads from 1/2 ton to 1000 tons - ranging in speeds from suborbital
to solar system escape-
.
Way above my level of understanding, but thank you for trying.

Don't worry. Everything Mookie writes is beyond his level of understanding
as well. This is why he's living in my newsreader's killfile hell.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Jeff has difficulty with reality. He likes to project his
inadequacies onto others. lol.

For the record, I am formally trained in Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering, I'm a memberr of The American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and here's a paper on a modular
approach using Shuttle infrastructure, to creating a low-cost flyback
booster system;

http://www.starbooster.com/AIAA-2001-3960.pdf

Check out the 650 Heavy launcher depicted on page 9.

Jim, the flyback booster concept has a long history.

When the Titan was being used to launch Gemini capsules into space,
engineers proposed the flyback Winged Titan. .

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/wintitan.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/t/titnwing.gif

Before that, von Braun, who built the V2 rocket for Germany in World
War 2 - and was captured by the Americans and worked on the US rocket
program from the 1940s through the 1960s - and developed rockets at
Redstone Arsenal such as the Redstone, the Atlas, the Jupiter,and the
Saturn rockets - many of which are still in use today (the Jupiter
evoled into Delta, the Atlas is still flying)

Check out this 1956 plan by vonBraun -

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/vonn1956.htm

Very much like the winged rockets described above..

Check out the wings on the first stage. I can't find the images I'm
looking for online, but back in the 1950s, there was a magazine
article that appeared in McCall's, and Walt Disney was inspired to
make a series of movies depicting them, which are not shown much these
days.

Anyway, I remember when these came out - very exciting. They showed
parachutes being deployed to recover all 3 stages - for reuse - to
lower costs.

Of course this was never done- again I don't know why. It makes a lot
of sense - if the engineering is done appropriately.

Here's a more complete run down of von Braun designs

http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/vonbraun.htm

Von Braun was the principal author of the New Horizons study done
after World War 2. Von Kaman, von Braun, and other captured rocket
scientists wrote it. It was immediately classified, but was
declassified years later. Even so, I cannot find a pointer to it
anywhere...

Here he called on the US to mount an expedition to the moon and
construct a missile base there - to provide assured response in case
the US suffered a nuclear attack. Since it takes 4 days for a rocket
to get to the moon, an attacker would have to launch first against the
base signalling an attack on the US by 4 days - or suffer retaliation
from the moon after an attack against the US.

Just putting an object in orbit, would establish the US as the
preiminent scientific power of the age - and add depth to our mastery
of nuclear power. Putting a man in space would inspire global
cooperation with our goals and put us geopolitically leagues above
anyone else.

http://www.ascho.wpafb.af.mil/START/CHAP7.HTM

This idea languished until Sputnik, and even then, Eisenhower dragged
his feet. The idea of a bunch of former NAZI scientists with nuclear
weapons at an unassailable base on the moon may have frightened him!
lol.

Von Braun wanted to go to Mars, and saw his reusable launchers and a
space station as a stepping stone toward this end.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/pre95/0-252-06227-2.html

He caught JFKs attention and imagination back in 1961, when Gagarin
beat Shepherd into space - which resulted in JFKs Rice speech where he
put the US on course to the moon, and to the other things - nuclear
space propulsion to support a moon base and mars expedition - until he
was killed in November 1963.

http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/ricetalk.htm

So, as far back as 1945 the US leadership was being urged by their
best and brightest to develop reusable space launch capacity -
centered around a flyback booster - either recoverable downrange,or
flyback to the launch center by some means
..
A well designed system has the potential to reduce costs
dramatically. A poorly designed system does not. The details of what
it takes to design a workable rocket to put things precisely into
orbit and bring them back safely, are classified. In fact the US is
dedicated to containing this knowledge - and so, unlike designing
processor chips, or bridges, or aircraft, this knowledge is not
generally appreciated or widely known.

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7242628

And when anyone speaks knowledgeably on this subject in public, they
are marginalized by a variety of means.

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/infowarfare.htm

And if they operate outside the confines of strict US control, they
may even be targeted for assasination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

Eisenhower worried about the costs and intelligence risks of a large
civilian program in the context of the late 1950s. He felt it would
allow the Russians to steal our missile secrets, as they had stolen
with the help of the Rosenbergs, our nuclear secrets, while we spent
billions on useless space faring infrastructure, the Russians would
use our research results to build wmds that with which to destroy the
United States. So, even while bowing to public enthusiasm for space
travel, he had grave reservations about the wisdom of going down this
path - driven by unwarranted public enthusiasm and greedy aerospace
contractors.

http://space.au.af.mil/histpol.htm
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm

In the end, the United States in particular, and humanity in general,
has not achieved what it might have this past half century in space
not due to any technical difficulties of achieving wonderous results,
but rather as von Braun described it to Kennedy during his meetings
with him at the White House - we lack the will and the imagination to
do it - and prefer instead to languish in the backwater of history
worried about the difficulties we cannot know,while ignoring the
benefits we will never see.








.

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