Hazegrayart – A visual comparison of the space age’s unbuilt rocket concepts
An evening pause: None of course were ever built. Most were government concepts that would have cost a fortune and never considered profit as a motive. The last concept is the wildest, and uses exploding nuclear bombs to propel it.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
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Got hooked on Hazegrayart some time ago. They have great animations of both real and imagined rockets and spacecraft that include those in that video.
They didn’t include the elephants on the last one, how are we supposed to know how much it can lift?
John: ALL the Elephants.
And Hazegrayart does indeed do awesome animations, I remember blowing an evening watching a bunch of them about a year ago. So many wonderful concepts. It’s amazing to look at some of the completely over the top ideas people were coming up with in the middle of the cold war for nuclear powered space plane carriers and the like.
The Sea Dragon is on the parade too.
Actually, it was considered to be feasible, if I am not mistaken.
I ran it by the guy on the Space Show, and he called it a dream. So is the Starship. The Starship has a champion, and
that is Musk. The hitch in the get-a-long could be the government. Sometimes I think these people hate the Musks of the
world because the DO succeed at what others thought to be impossible.
The nuke blast powered ships might well work, too. But those have no champion, and the governments are not about to
allow them to be built.
Many of these monster projects were probably technically feasible, as in “sure, that would work if you could actually do the program” but the program itself, from manufacturing, facilities, personnel, land, etc., is not remotely feasible without a Manhattan Project or greater level of effort. It seems that Starship is finding the edge of that territory, there’s nothing technically infeasible about Starship itself, but the program Musk envisions may be beyond what a private corporation can achieve in our current economic, legal and regulatory environment.
I suspect that even an actively hostile government is just icing on the cake, that Musk’s vision for SpaceX will fail without a government that is actively helping to clear hurdles out of the way.
Elephants for scale….
Easier than bananas at that size.
Niven and Pournelle included and Oron class vehicle in the Novel Footfall if I recall.
Called it Michael, after the archangel.
Yep.
What may have been the killing blow was a more modest (but realistic) Orion battleship model said to have disgusted Kennedy.
This kit is a recreation;
https://fantastic-plastic.com/ProjectOrionBattleshipPage.htm
More
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/orion-space-battleships-could-still-be-built-in-a-nuclear-space-race.html
The battleship Michael was an amazing concept as well. A good diagram of it can be found here https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44408.60
The concept of mounting a 16″ Iowa class main gun to a Gemini capsule as a space gunship is just over the top crazy.
But the launch of Michael provided one of the best lines in SF in my opinion: “God was knocking on the hull, and he wanted in, BAD.”
Greg, I agree on the Sea Dragon. Nobody has yet build a pressure-fed rocket on that scale, but apparently it would have used a pintle injector so it should have been pretty easy to get working. Emphasis on the ‘should’.
A pity it never got made, because my inner ten-year-old would LOVE to see them light the candle on that bad boy.
Of course, Orion would have been even more spectacular but there’s no way the powers that be would allow that to be launched from the ground.