Super Spacex collector Paul Vreede continues his journey into its origins, tonight he looks at the Booster Rocket:
Here's a picture of my Spacex Booster Rocket - missing two of
its fuel tanks unfortunately. It's another Spacex craft with a real "scientist
inspired" origin, although the SWORD Booster Rocket is its direct ancestor of
course.
The scientists in this case I believe worked for the Missile and
Space Division of General Electric. The Booster Rocket was their proposal for a
nuclear-powered spacecraft intended for a Mars mission in the early 1970s.
Nyrath, one of your Project Sword forum members, has a series of photographs
of a model demonstrating the various mission stages.
He tells me the book
those pictures are from was written by Dandridge Cole, who I found was a space
engineer at General Electric amongst other things. This tallies with another
reference I found for those pictures stemming from GE.
I have a book called
Man and Space, published 1962 by Arthur C Clarke and the editors of Life , and
in that is this fine painting by Ed Valigursky as well as a sequence of
illustrations also describing the mission.FAB Paul!
Actually, that von Braun ship on the Eagle Transporter forum had two scenarios attached - in the Disney "Man in Space" show, it was intended to circumnavigate the moon, sort of an Apollo 8 mission. But in the von Braun/Willy Ley/Chesley Bonestell book "The Exploration of Mars", it was intended as a recovery vehicle to get returning Mars astronauts home from a fuel-saving high Earth orbit, into which they would have braked after their return from Mars. There's some gen on it here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rogersrocketships.com/page_view.cfm?id=36
I agree it could have been in the minds of the engineers who designed the Booster Rocket, though!
Grif
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ReplyDeleteThe photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nyrath/sets/72157612135239606/ were from a book by Dandridge Cole, but the photos were from a study by T.F. Widmer of Advanced Nuclear Systems Engineering (whatever that is).
ReplyDeleteYou can read all the dull scientific details in this PDF file http://www.projectrho.com/misc/AIAA-1963-1507-224.pdf
That illustration by Ed Valigursky is of a freaking open-cycle gas core nuclear rocket!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3c2.html#ntrgasopen
The advantage is that such an engine has very powerful performance.
The disadvantage is that orange plume is vaporized uranium/plutonium undergoing nuclear fission. Which would not ordinarily be a problem except that the uranium is shooting out the exhaust nozzle.
Such a rocket can be safely used on the journey to Mars, but I would hate to have it operating in Earth orbit.