One of the most overlooked fortuitous circumstances that favored Apollo was a failed replacement for the U-2 spy plane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan

This plane was canceled in 1958 but the infrastructure to manufacture, store, and transfer the liquid hydrogen fuel contributed to adoption for Apollo. Another fortunate success was the F-1 engine which took a couple years to troubleshoot out the combustion instability problems. One of the better books on the space race describes the biggest engineering problem as the liquid hydrogen second stage. Our ability to friction stir weld rocket stages is extremely advanced compared to the 60s.

I think we have some assets left in our submarine construction industry. This has always been a major failure by not using our shipyards for construction of monolithic SRBs. The prototype firing and studies done on 260 inch and 325 inch SRB’s reveal this failure to double or more the lift-off thrust of our launch vehicles as the stop light ending the space age.

The Sherman tank never had a powerful enough gun. It was a pretty horrible mistake to make with a tank and Ike was angry when he found out.

Bombers did not end the war like everyone thought they would and submarines never had a torpedo in world war two that was more likely to hit than miss. If Germany or Japan had an acoustic, wire-guided, or other form of precision torpedo guidance system then the submarine could possibly have won the war for them. I will believe anything after 911. And after all, submarines were the reason the money was spent on the spruce goose.

I was impressed by a stat I came across the other day;

Soyuz-U holds the world record of highest launch rate in a year in 1979 with 47 flights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-U

In the 70’s the Soviets were actually flying close to fifty times a year. Launching an HLV once a week is really the only way human beings are going to get any infrastructure going in a timely way.

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1. Can a large enough stage be placed in lunar orbit for easy conversion into a fully shielded spaceship compartment?

The second requirement is the magical mystery machine that everyone is waiting for; a lunar drone that can land on top of ice deposits and make water and rocket fuel. These drones will refuel themselves and continue to fly between the surface and lunar orbit carrying water shielding for long careers until finally they are lost through attrition hopefully some decades in the future. So the second item is the robot:

2. Can a lunar drone processing surface ice have a useful life as a robotic fuel tanker?

The last step for a successful space program is simply to choose a long term goal of GEO space stations to begin the migration of human beings into space. These pseudo-space ships can use the lunar drones to boost themselves between GEO and lunar orbit but nowhere else. They can certainly replace the existing satellite junkyard with a vastly superior network. In this model, there are no human operations on the surface of the Moon. Space stations are constructed out of wet workshops and use drones to fill the stations and push them around to different locations. But as noted, their mobility will necessarily be limited to slipping between GEO and lunar orbit. The third item that becomes required for a planetary protection mission is a nuclear engine.

3. Is there a practical nuclear propulsion system for massively shielded spinning spaceships?

Once all the slots are filled in GEO and all the space junk is cleaned up then the time will come to build engines. There may be a way to build a large engine out of sections but it would take…..I have no idea how many missions. Perhaps 30, maybe three years of a well-funded flight schedule. There are methods for building extremely small and energetic devices like neutron bombs that may be superior sources of energy in the smallest practical nuclear fission driven design.

In this incremental architecture, the SLS missions just keep flying, year after year. The space stations will slowly move into GEO orbit and after all the slots are filled the SLS missions will start deliver sections of pulse engine. At some point the spaceships will start flying and refueling from icy bodies in the outer solar system. These will be long missions of several years depending on how efficient the pulse system is.

Marcel

For us whining on the forums this is obvious but for those on top of the food chain who make the key decisions of our space program seem to not get this. Unless it is all about priorities. Though we’ve regressed in manned spaceflight capability, and getting new manned aircraft i.e. F35 takes decades, there have been huge advances in unmanned spacecraft (i.e. Mars rovers, Kepler, IRIS, etc) and UAVs. Watching 60 Minutes last night talking about UAVs, I was thinking that’s the priority and the future whether you or I like it or not.

http://archive.thespaceshow.com/shows/2266-BWB-2014-06-20.mp3

Marcel