Here's a brief study (more like a white paper) from 1968-- "Saturn V Derivatives". Much of what it discusses has been covered in other studies, such as the INT 20 and 21 vehicles, and the uprated Saturn V with 4 SRM boosters strapped on the first stage... BUT there is ONE concept that I've not seen anywhere else before... The "Saturn S-ID".

This concept vehicle would have taken a standard S-IC Saturn V first stage and totally reworked the thrust structure, to turn it into a 3 or 5 F-1 powered "MEGA-ATLAS" of sorts... The rocket would lift off under the power of all it's F-1 engines (3-5 depending on the payload) and fly normally until 70% of the propellants were gone. The outer 2 or 4 engines would shut down, their fuel valves would close, and then the outer skirt and thrust structure, with the fins and fairings, would jettison. The center engine, attached to a conical thrust structure at the base of the S-ID stage, would keep thrusting and push the entire S-ID stage with it's payload to LEO. The payload capacity would have been 50,000 lbs with the five engine variant. Basically, shuttle size payloads, with no shuttle-- only a single S-ID stage! The outer ring of booster engines could have theoretically been made recoverable (though no discussion was made of this in this study, but it mentioned a Boeing study that fleshed out the concept). The payload would have been even greater had the stage fuel tanks been enlarged.

Another "what if" that never happened but should have...

Here's the summary, and the pics to follow...

More to come! OL JR

Attached Files

NASA STUDY SUMMARY- SATURN V DERIVATIVES.txt (11.1 KB, 359 views)

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Ok... the first pic is the Saturn V derivative family... the first vehicle is the regular Saturn V, capable of orbiting 275,000 lbs. The second vehicle is the "A" vehicle (S-IC/S-IVB) capable of orbiting 132,000 lbs. The third vehicle is S-ID stage and a half to orbit concept, a modified S-IC with the new thrust structure, capable of orbiting 50,000 lbs (about 2/3 more than Saturn IB). The fourth vehicle is the "C" derivative, which takes the S-ID stage and a half and adds an S-IVB stage on top, capable of orbiting 180,000 lbs. The fifth vehicle is a beefed up S-IC or S-ID based vehicle with beefed up S-II and S-IVB stages and perhaps a propellant tank stretch, to handle 4 SRMs, in this case, 120 inch Titan III-C SRMs, capable of orbiting 400,000 lbs. The sixth vehicle is the same vehicle as the last one, but strengthened and fitted with 156 inch SRMs, capable of orbiting 500,000 lbs. The last pic is the same vehicle strengthened to handle 260 inch SRMs capable of launching 700,000 lbs. to orbit...

The second pic is the "A" vehicle... pop the center F-1 off the S-C, plug the lines, slap the S-IVB on top, presto there ya go. Instant 132,000 lbs to LEO or 32,000 lbs to the moon. "SEO" is geosynchronous orbit.

The third pic is the "B" vehicle, or S-ID. Basically rework the thrust structure by mounting the center engine on a cylinder attached to a new conical thrust structure on the back of the stage, to transfer the thrust to the vehicle skin. Rework the outboard engine thrust structure cross beams with a cylinder in the center large enough to clear the center engine, by removing the cruciform where the center engine USED to be mounted. Make the aft structure seperable from the fuel tank/new thrust structure joint where the outboard engines transfer their thrust to the vehicle structure, install seperation devices into the propellant lines so they can sever at staging and fall free, install gimbals on the center engine and rework the IU in a 33 foot ring to fit the top of the stage, and to handle the vehicle modes for proper control, and presto- instant 1.5 stage to orbit "mega-Atlas" capable of orbiting 50,000 pounds without an engine upgrade or tank stretch. Do the tank stretch and you up the payload. Uprate the F-1's and you REALLY up the payload!

The fourth pic is the "C" derivative-- put the S-IVB on top of your new S-ID stage, and presto-- 180,000 lbs to LEO, or 45,000 lbs to the moon.

The fifth pic is the "D" derivative, the actual "upgrade" beyond Saturn V. This is pretty much what was discussed in the other uprating studies in more detail. Strengthen everything quite a bit, stretch the propellant tanks, and slap on 4 SRMs of your favorite flavor-- off the shelf 120 inch Titan III-C boosters, 156 inch SRMs, or the 260 inch SRMs tested by Aerojet as possible first stage replacement for Saturn IB.

More to come... OL JR

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Ok... the first pic is a chart from the study... I know, doesn't have much to do with modeling the thing, but it does shed some insight into some of the conclusions and thinking... this one has a lot going on... The solid curved areas at the top of the chart are the performance envelopes of the various SRM equipped Saturn V's. Moving DOWN the chart, toward the curved line at the bottom of the 'wedges' created by the lower line, the lower line shows the maximum core propellant tank stretches beyond which no further increase in performance occurs. The left edge of the chart shows the maximum payload envelope size for the vehicle, which of course gets shorter as the fuel tanks get longer, with the 410 foot height limit being fixed. As you move from left to right, you can see the increase in payload capability to LEO, as shown at the bottom of the chart. The width of the 'wedge' for each vehicle shows the increase in payload capability starting on the left with a basic unchanged (but beefed up) Saturn V with the SRM's, to the full tank-stretched beefed up Saturn V with the same SRM's at the lower right, or "point" of the wedge. Each step to the right is going up to the next largest size SRM, from the 120 inch, to the 156 inch, to the 260 inch. The dotted line defines the same fields and values for the vehicles, if they ALSO incorporated the uprated liquid engines in the stages, the F-1A and J-2S.
As I said, a LOT going on in this chart, but you can also "pick-n-choose" your favorite variant and favorite options and see what the performance would be... quite interesting graph and a TON of information in it! Even shows how much you can stretch the tanks before you hit diminishing returns.

The second pic is the development cost picture for all the variants... if done piecemeal one at a time, versus a combined project doing all the work at once and qualifying all the vehicles at once, which was actually cheaper...

The third pic is an artist concept of the S-ID at staging. It reproduced with almost UNUSABLE quality, so I sent it over to Paint and reworked it into something actually viewable. Not perfect but 'good enough'...

Well, that's it for this one...

Later! OL JR

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The S-1D embodied what I had wondered about ever since I first saw the original (five-engine) Atlas ICBM design proposal, in which the outer four engines were dropped and the center engine was the sustainer. It also reminded me of something I once asked my uncle Dan (who developed a gaseous hydrogen leak detector for the Saturn V's interstage areas while at Boeing): Could the S-IC by itself achieve SSTO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) with a smaller payload? He answered that it very likely could, but that the payload would be small and the acceleration (going from the pad to low Earth orbit in just 2-1/2 minutes!) would be quite high.

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The encyclopedia astronautica page on the S-ID has some interesting information... there's on sentence that sorta makes the point better than anything else... "At very minimal cost (36 months leadtime and $ 150 million) the United States could have attained a payload capability and level of reusability similar to that of the space shuttle."

Now you figure the costs on THAT compared to the costs and nearly a decade of shuttle development from "go" to first flight, with only 4 missions flown during that time with leftover Apollo hardware, and it's easy to see how much further along we'd be now. Looking at it from the cost of operations standpoint, the costs for S-ID would have been a HUGE savings over shuttle-- Basically it's a 33 foot ET (yeah, WAY worse mass fraction, but that could have been improved over time, just as the ET's was with the LWT and SLWT programs) with 5 F-1's (which were kinda expensive, but that too could have been rectified with an "F-1S" type program to make them cheaper while incorporating the F-1A 1.8 m lb smaller turbine upgrade without breaking the bank) and even tossing the outer 4 might have been cheaper in the long run, as shuttle refurb costs and SSME refurb costs have proven that reusability is practically a wash cost-wise with a cost-efficient throwaway design, perhaps more expensive than a cheap throw-away engine. Sure you'd have had the extra costs of an Apollo or "Apollo II" spacecraft on every MANNED flight, but then again, you could have launched the thing unmanned on quite a few missions and foregone that expense and the danger to do menial stuff like Challenger was doing, which ultimately led to the "light coming on" to the folly of using a MANNED vehicle to perform simple satellite launches better done by UNMANNED vehicles (which incidentally also improved the schedule for satellite launches since the constraints are much lower for unmanned rockets than a manned vehicle, and the satellite design didn't have to be altered for the manned vehicle like it did with shuttle. Then there's the SRB costs, which have proven to be VERY expensive (as the Columbia stand-down proved-- IIRC over a half-billion a year just to keep the lights on and the infrastructure in place whether you're actually making and flying anything or not!) Just saving that added element of the program would have freed up a lot of cash to do interesting stuff. Then there's the 'downmass' issue, which many 'shuttle huggers' decry as the biggest loss to US spaceflight capabilities since we quit going to the moon... Ok, perhaps; S-ID would have been a disposable core vehicle (likely completely expendable as it's questionable whether recovering the outboard F-1's would have been worth the effort and cost) and would have carried a capsule of some sort in manned mode, either further production of Apollo, or a redesigned follow on "Apollo II" of some sort (which could have been made reusable had the desire been there (like the early CEV/Orion proposals were to be). Heck a manned spaceplane wasn't out of the question, either, as something Dyna-Soar like could have been built, or the HL-20 or something like it, or for that matter something akin to the shuttle, or even the early shuttle proposals like Faget's short wing "fluffy" shuttle (which was quite similar to the X-37B if you really look at it) if you figure mankind would have really missed something had it not had runway landings for our spacecraft for the last 30 years... (no matter how much it's set back exploration). Had a successor to Apollo been designed with affordability in mind, or perhaps reuse if a sharp pencil could show it was ACTUALLY going to be a good investment, program costs could have been cut quite a bit. If the same 'cost cutting/production streamlining" type program been applied to the S-ID and S-IVB, costs could have been cut there too. Downmass could have been addressed, had it been needed, by either building a dedicated 'payload return module' based on the Apollo/II capsule, or having an 'experimental' program to create a winged spaceplane for cargo return or even develop large heat shields in the 10 meter range for payload return (which would have been VERY handy for a Mars mission whenever it was undertaken!) or even a biconic heat shield that could double as a payload fairing (nose cone) on the S-ID itself... another technology that would have been VERY handy to have at Mars, even for unmanned missions, which is something NASA's talked about and produced lots of pretty pictures of but never done...

With S-ID we could have launched roughly the equivalent of TWO ISS modules at once, or one larger module, so building up a sizeable space station in short order wouldn't have been too difficult. Those modules COULD have been 33 feet in diameter if desired, as a study I need to summarize soon will show. Even sticking to a smaller diameter, perhaps, like Skylab (which was 3.5 times too heavy for S-ID to be launched all at once), based on 260 inch diameter, or even going 'clean sheet' as with ISS, any kind of station we wanted was possible. Keeping the S-IVB, or even the S-II around, would have really opened the doors to a lot of possibilities.

It's really a shame... the wasted possibilities... even had there been a long 'lean time' in the 70's when the budget wouldn't support a lot of missions or deep-space exploration, just keeping the technology alive, improving it, and sustaining it for better days would have been an EXCELLENT investment. Now we find ourselves having come full circle... 30 years after the space shuttle, we're trying to re-create Apollo/Saturn, only cheaper and better, but doing it with shuttle components that have proven themselves to be very costly... (in a few years after the last shuttles flown the program is wound down and 'in the can' to use a filmmaking term, the ultimate costs of the shuttle program will be known (as much as they can ever be- on a program this huge, there are SO many different accounting methods and how the money was allocated to intrinsically linked programs like ISS that 'share expenses' we will NEVER know the EXACT cost of the shuttle program) but by what's known already, shuttle costs, from the metric of TOTAL PROGRAM COSTS from day one to today, divided out over the number of shuttle flights, puts the cost per shuttle flight at around a BILLION DOLLARS... MUCH more expensive than Apollo/Saturn! Heck, Saturn V would have been quite a bargain at that price, even considering it's "expensive" nature (that could have been corrected through a cost-cutting/manufacturing streamlining/improvement program). So I don't buy the 'We could never have afforded it" paradigm... SSME development alone cost more than S-ID would have...

True, F-1 is outdated NOW, but it's needed-- a 1.5-2 m lb thrust kerosene first stage engine would solve a LOT of problems! (which is why I hope SpaceX can build their Merlin 2). We COULD have replaced F-1/F-1A with a large pintle-injected regenerative-cooled ~2 m lb class rocket engine (Merlin 2) in the 80's and had we applied it to a cost-streamlined S-ID we could have cut costs to a FRACTION of shuttle costs, reusable or not! Part of shuttle's huge costs is the SRB line-- basically 2 kinds of rocket engines (SSME and SRB) and the infrastructure to make and support both. The new program is talking about THREE systems-- 5-seg SRB's, SSME (or other large first stage engine), and J-2X-- that alone should prove it's going to be A LOT more expensive than shuttle. S-ID would have had F-1 (or successor) and J-2 (or successor), and J-2 COULD have been mothballed in the short term during the lean times of the 70's if necessary (without the huge costs of shuttle development I think it could have been kept alive-- it's cheaper to keep mfg. what you already are tooled up to make and have the blueprints for than to design, test, completely retool, and build something entirely new). Just really sad...

Later! OL JR

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The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

This is some really cool stuff, JR - I've always loved the Saturn V (probably even more than I like the Shuttle) and this stuff just makes me want to model some of these - maybe in paper! Thanks for posting these!

Greg