In the late 60s and 70s I thought for sure we would’ve been on the moon and mars with human habitats set up by the 90s. What a long time to wait I’ll be lucky if I live long enough to see someone at least put their feet on Mars. We really dropped the ball on this one.
I watched the 1st moon landing as a 12 year old, having a newspaper-route-funded telescope in the backyard, and a constructed Saturn V model in the basement. Yup, same dreams. Same frustration.
Fun fact based on the NASA investment from Apollo they expected to get to mars by 1987. But the Vietnam war and other economic crisis made us stop investing. Probably one of the worst decisions we’ve ever made.
@@cooper1507 I knew about some of that. I think you’re absolutely right. The only thing that’s probably going to help the astronauts of today is. We had a lot of experience in zero gravity . With bone loss and muscle loss Hopefully they’ll be able to do something about that. So our astronauts will not be practically cripple by the time they get there. I always said I’d like to go to Mars myself. Not that I could. But 3 year round-trip is a long time. And that’s not counting the time you stayed on the planet.
You wont be waiting long, nasa drags its feet being a gov funded organization, SpaceX is the future of off planet travel. Im excited for 2024 when we go back to the moon. This time in 4k 😂😂. I can’t imagine the emotion going through you while watching the first ever moon landing. What a feat to be apart of
Most people don't. Truax was the original top gun maverick. His big mouth would get him in trouble a time or two in his life. Truax knew like Musk did that it would take a stupidly simple rocket to lift huge loads and that we had to lift huge loads if we were to ever get off this planet permanently.
Curious what the sea dragon would have done to aquatic wild life. The sound shockwave would be even louder and more intense underwater. Probably make whales goes deaf
@@mortimerschnerd3846 we're introducing the thing into the ocean and sound travels further underwater. Also we rely on the oceans to live. Asking questions like this is a smart thing to do. Don't just throw your hands up in the air and complain about hippies.
@@gerardanderson9665 The sound travels further through water than air. Just because your head isn't submerged in water, doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate what that extreme vibration would do to the environment.
For All Mankind is a great show for helping us visualize what’s actually possible if we invested in ourselves instead of foreign wars and occupation. Imagine if we had the NASA from the show it would be a Renaissance for Americans. Instead, we’re left fighting over dwindling Insulin supplies and overpriced food and gas. Tell me we’re not in the dark timeline 😢
Imagine what the USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, all of the European Union and Britain could achieve if our space agencies effectively united into a single agency.
We aren't. First, the only reason NASA existed was to test ballistic missile technology, and to show that tech off for the entire world. That's why the Fed tends to panic when China puts an object on the moon, it means that the navigation and guidance systems are good enough to seek out targets on Earth. Add to that, if the US hadn't gotten involved in some of those conflicts, things would actually be far worse. Like it or not, US intervention has actually kept many of our enemies at bay, and kept many countries from falling apart. Hard to believe, considering, but its true. Prior to the US intervening in WWII, there has been a major war in Europe every 20-40 years, going back 2,000 years. It didn't stop because the Soviets though that defeating the Nazi's was enough, it stopped because the US opted to stay in Europe and galvanize the European counties together to form a massive united front. Its the same reason why Putin doesn't march into Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia. He's already stated that he wants to, the only thing stopping him is US weapons erasing his army in Ukraine. That being said...the US military could accomplish the same with a lot less. Their budget mainly goes to waist. If NASA had even a $100 billion budget, we would be on Mars. Also to note, Insulin is due to corporate greed. Food is due to gas, and gas is expensive because the US doesn't set the price, OPEC+ does.
I completely agree! Instead of investing in science and technology with NASA leading the way our military industrial complex prioritizes death and destruction. That revolving door between Washington DC and Wall St. needs to be closed for good.
What if solid rocket boosters (SRBs) were strapped to the sides of that Sea Dragon? I'm sure those SRBs themselves would be massive in size, but they could help this gigantic rocket just make it to that 50 mile threshold for first stage separation.
ways to make this work. - section off a part of the ocean with 35 mile radius to reduce the impact on wildlife. - Use a Ram jet engine at high altitude to keep the tanks pressurized into orbit.
I remember reading somewhere that the Sea Dragon would be able to construct the International Space Station in just two launches as opposed to the 30 something (I can’t remember the exact number leave me alone) launches with the Space Shuttle.
An inflatable drag sheet would be a good idea because it could slow the rocket down possibly to the point where it would save ware and tare on the heat shield of the craft.
The thing of it is, the potential for craft like this is that it is still something that may be built and used. Methods to mitigate some, if not all, of the damage that this Monster could unleash could be researched and implemented using modern techniques.The Starship 2.0 will be close, but still no where near this Beast.
I wonder if that could be mitigated by building an enclosure for the rocket to launch from. It could be built, reinforced to the Nth degree, in a Matryoshka style, with baffles ready to lessen the resonance when the Mother of all Bass waves hits it.
The unsolved problem with the Sea Dragon concept is combustion instability. On a much smaller scale this almost destroyed the Saturn V F-1 first stage engines. Rocket engines simply don’t scale up very well. Combustion processes occur at a fixed reaction time and a relatively low velocity - which limits the reaction chamber size in a chemical rocket. Too big and you get acoustic resonance.
NASA NTRS report no. LRS 297 went into detail about possible combustion instability and they ruled the engine was at low risk because the pressure fed engine meant combustion was at much lower pressure than the F-1, the injectior area was a larger size relative to the combustion chamber, and the nozzles' throat had a different geometry because of the lower pressure, all of which reduced the risk of developing a resonance. I've also heard a theory that the engine would have been so large that any potential resonance would have been such a long wavelength they could simply let it happen, but I couldn't find anything to substansiate that claim.
@@BuffMyRadius The fix for the F-1 was combustion chamber baffles to prevent longitudinal propagation of combustion oscillations and thus raise the frequency above structural resonance points.
@@nathanielbugg7355 Pogo oscillation is the result where combustion instability leads to resonance in the reactant feed lines leading to the fuel and oxidiser bouncing in the worst case. Organic pipe resonance is a similar effect that occurs in gas fired equipment.
@@jessepollard7132 I'm sure there would have been some type of way thought up to create a barrier for the most of them some kind of way. Besides we've killed and are killing them off anyway and recovering or receiving no knowledge no benefits.
@@jessepollard7132 I don't believe it would have required the whole dozen. It wouldn't have taken the use of the entire ocean. Just the proposed lagoon spoke of. Moreover while we're worrying about the aquatic life with is necessary and our responsibility as caretakers of the planet. What about the human beings and the land habits that are destroyed every day of every year. It would have been a much smaller infraction than the one's back then and definitely now a days. There's also a strong possibility that we have created other opportunities and acquired other knowledge that would have helped to solve many of earths problems.
I am thinking the new concept of make materials on the plant or moon would do away with mass to space. If we sent up autonomous lite equipment to build housing, bases, then the big stuff could be produced on site and not packed there. I like your previous video on the electrolysis system to create 3d printed building material on the moon
While I am concerned for the sea life, im not fully certain why the sea dragon HAD to launch from the sea, couldnt you use take an existing hole in the ground, fill it with water, and build it there? Like a quarry with no previously existing ecosystems? Plus you could launch from freshwater which would help against corrosion
@@seanegli7118 sound travels much further in water than on land, whales already make noises loud enough to cross the ocean. I think the necessary “dead radius” you need is probably more than is reasonable
The second stage probably could have used the Vernier thrusters to deorbit and, if there's enough fuel left, slow down to a safe speed for parachutes or another large inflatable drag chute (or both, it _is_ quite large after all) to deploy in order to land softly, most likely in the ocean.
Main issue is combustion instability in this one humongous engine... But the idea itself is amazing. And there is no need to think about reusability. You can use the hull as a space station. Or as material for space industry. With 500 tons of cargo capacity you can bring materials and tools to rebuild the fuel tank into something else. Fly it unmanned and use the "ferrari" aka SpaceX for crew related stuff only.
On an presure fed rocket engine, if you put a bulk head half way down the tank with a 1 way valve ( Not allow fuel up) then when the fuel is below the bulkhead level you could switch to pressurising the second (lower part of the tank?.
There was another big advantage to using sea dragon, because you launched from out to sea, you could keep spectators away and conduct your missions in secret, I wonder if the military thought of that.???
love it. Fill it with helium on the way down and it turns into a zeppelin. It can come down and not even touch ground, just hover. Someone needs to do the math on this. I've tried the math with Starship's specs but it's not voluminous enough. This one might work. I don't recommend hydrogen instead of helium but hot air like a hot air balloon would at least lighten the landing impact and give the thing more rigidity for strength so it doesn't collapse. There's plenty of heat from reentry. This thing would be good for getting tons of methane up to refuel Starship in orbit. Other than that, research Roton.
Well I guess the thing uses Nitrogen to pressurize it's tanks so hot Nitrogen would count as it's version of hot air if that's the best route. ... checking... Molecular weight of N2 is 28. Molecular weight of H2O is 18 so fill it with steam? Helium would be best (molecular weight 4) but maybe setup a way to recover the He once the ship is down. OR deploy balloons instead of parachutes? That's too crazy, right?
Actually, this could easily be built today. You could 3D print the entire structure, that would save tons of weight and complexity. And now, you could hybridize the pressure fed system, basically using the pressure tank to initially start the flow of fuel, then switch to a passive pump system similar to that used in aircraft and yes, the fuel pumps in aircraft engines are passive with an electric backup. The electric motors are used to star fuel flow, but then once the engines are sped up, that act of suction from the engines is enough to pull the fuel from the system. From that point, fuel flow is managed by valves. The electric pumps are turned on and off in critical phases of flight, but overall, no longer needed and are off for most of the flight. Also, recovery wouldn't be impossible for both the first and second states. The first stage would probably land about a hundred miles out. A special retro rocket system similar to dragon could fire a few hundred feet above the ocean, but a system similar to that of that inflatable drag shoot could be used initially, but you would need to be careful about that adding too much weight to the craft. The second stage's only problem would be were it would touch down. You may have to aim it for the Indian ocean, but as long as it could survive entry, then it could use similar techniques to slow itself down for touchdown. All in all, I say this is more than doable.
How is a Turbofan or Turbojet supposed to suck fuel from a tank when the pressure in the Combustion Chamber is a dozen Bar at nearly all times? Aircraft engines do have fuel pumps. Driven over gearboxes get their power from the rotorshaft. There is no electric backup either. Pneumatic starters getting fed from a small auxiliary power unit to spin up to ~50% max RPM until there is enough pressure in the combustion chamber for stable combustion. All you wrote is just dumb. The engine is gonna need tons of fuel per second and moving that much mass so quickly needs a huge amount of energy. Look up Electrons electrical powerhead and the kWs needed from electric motors for their pumps.
@Typ Typien You know what. People who call other people dumb show their lack of intelligence. The E175, B1900, Dash-8 and even the Cessna 172 all have electric booster pumps. But my zero minded fella, since I happen to have my old B1900 training manuel handy, let me give you a quote "In addition to serving as a backup unit in the event of an engine driven boost pump malfunction, the ELECTRIC STANDBY PUMP provides the additional pressure required for cross-transfer of fuel from one side of the aircraft to the other." So...how would you get one to work with the pressure of this rocket? YOU WOULD ENGINEER IT YOU MORON! So next time, watch your language and admit that other may know more than you.
The second stage is mostly empty tank mass which is really light compared to the propellant load so it would be relatively "light" so it's reentry thermal protection needs are less as well. Truax simply planned to deploy another inflatable aerodynamic decelerator with possibly some solid propellant retro-rockets to cushion the final impact. In context it would have been as "rapidly reusable" as Starship is supposed to be with far less effort and funding (in relation) needed to make it happen. Starship suffers from being tasked with doing multiple things which Sea Dragon was very much not. You make the mistake of saying it could land people on Mars which is false it was only and specifically designed to get large payloads into orbit and those payloads were specifically and directly ONLY inanimate cargo. What most people miss in the videos made for the concept that little "bump" at the top is a full sized Apollo Command and Service Module with a full sized (actually would be larger and more brutal due to the Sea Dragon flight profile) launch escape tower with the only three "people" the vehicle could carry. The other downside was the needed payload requirements that were required for Sea Dragon to make any economical or operational sense and those were clearly shown to be very few and very far between even with a massive space program. It turns out that making a smaller vehicle that flies more often is both more cost effective and a better fit to an expanding transportation system than a few larger but less usable vehicles. Musk likely knows this but as Starship is not designed around an actual requirement but a self-imposed "need" for landing 100 metric tons on Mars it is very out of touch with the actual likely or foreseen payload requirements.
Getting the upper stage back down might not have been as challenging as it seems. With most of the fuel used up and the payload detached, it would mass a fraction of what it did at launch. Orient it side-on to the incoming air, like SpaceX plans to do with Starship, and it would probably slow down pretty quickly - quite possibly even quickly enough that the heat pulse wouldn't melt it. Then you just have to figure out how to slow it down enough that it doesn't turn into a giant metal pancake when it hits the ground. I suspect gigantic parachutes would be involved.
Why wouldn’t the first stage not use some of the pressure of the exhaust to keep pressure pushing out of the pressure tank? I would imagine the tank could be way smaller and have to be less reinforced.
When initially fueling the SpaceX Starship, both stages had thick coatings of frost. fueling the Sea Dragon will take much more time and with it being submerged, how are they planning on dealing with the tons of ice that will be clinging to the rocket?
Wouldn’t it shake off like it does on most rockets? They all have ice that forms on the outside of the tank and the sheer force of the sound alone would shake it loose.
it would be expensive, but you could line one side with inflatable ablative heat shield. whether it would be worth it would depend on the cost of the system vs the cost of building a whole new second stage. likely the most reasonable course would be to plan for it to never return to Earth, and instead use it as a source of materials for future projects.
_"A space launch vehicle so powerful that the ground we stand on would not withstand it's force."_ Oh, that reminds me of something... Something called... *"STARSHIP ITF1!"*
I've never seen such contempt in one person's face when holding a model of the Atlas 5 lol **inner monologue**- What?! This Wimpy thing is why my Dragon never flew??!
Actually it would have to be the opposite. The Sea Dragon would have to be launched by the Orion spaceship. An Orion spacecraft would dwarf the Sea Dragon in size, weight and thrust. An Orion could use Sea Dragons the way a fighter jet uses anti aircraft missiles.
@jamesstepp1925 You must be thinking of a different Orion. I'm talking about the proposal that could be lofted by a Saturn V first stage. Put it on a Sea Dragon and you could make it a bit larger, yes, but not like you're talking about.
Oh ok, I must just be really old and misinterpreting new and old projects with the same name. The Orion I was referring to launched from earth using nuclear explosions as propulsion. It could have a quarter million crew or more, the bigger you built it the more stable its flight would be. Old project from the 60's, before we had electrictronics that would be destroyed by EMP. Fascinating concept, and born out by proof of concept work. Largest potential spacecraft concept we have that could take off from the earth's surface.
@jamesstepp1925 Yeah, I'm thinking of a later iteration of the same design study. They realized that detonating a nuke on the ground would generally be a Bad Thing(tm) so they planned to loft a smaller version above the atmosphere using a Saturn S-IC stage. A Sea Dragon would allow it to be bigger and carry more payload.
When I watch 'For All Mankind', i know watching a 'What If?' show, but to think we could've at least gotten to Mars by our current time.... We thought winning the Space Race was winning for good, but it should've been a jumping off point instead.
To my understanding seawater is extremely detrimental to making rockets reusable. With some companies going so far as to even attempt to prevent fairing sections from coming in to contact with the ocean, and those pieces are largely only structural and not mechanical.
Thick coats of paint. Just like ships. With the pressure fed engines, there are no turbines or pumps to take damage. The valves are the weak point, but those can be protected against the corrosive seawater.
That engine in sea dragon is simply too crazy to be done in real life as even the f-1 blew up multiple times and it’s not like they can make an engine plate that can stand THAT. Not to mention that the chambers would explode anyways considering the cooling methods back then were not as sophisticated. You said that it can literally destroy steel towers so how can the engines survive?
Oh ok, I must just be really old and misinterpreting new and old projects with the same name. The Orion I was referring to launched from earth using nuclear explosions as propulsion. It could have a quarter million crew or more, the bigger you built it the more stable its flight would be. Old project from the 60's, before we had electrictronics that would be destroyed by EMP. Fascinating concept, and born out by proof of concept work. Largest potential spacecraft concept we have that could take off from the earth's surface.
wouldn't it be possible to leave the rocket in orbit at a space station. and not send them down. could be used for making rockets in space or bigger space station. dismantling the rocket up there would give alot of resources?
Given Truax's drive to simplicity, it doesn't even make sense to try to recover the first stage. Materials and even work time to build it and the size are insignificant portions of the cost. He said to make it big and only as complex as you need it to be. What drives cost is parts count, design margins, and innovation. In common rockets before SpaceX, the smaller upper stage is very often more expensive than the booster because of all that. SpaceX was underselling all launch services competition before they had even landed a booster (not just what they were charging customers, but their costs) by management and design philosophy. Steel and simplicity and identical materials and tooling for lower and upper stages. In port, the Sea Dragon would only have "ullage" pressure or pre-chilling. Only after being towed out to sea (possibly as far as the equator) would it be fueled. Truax was a senior engineer & manager for Aerojet, and worked on many successful programs, and worked on many underwater rockets for missiles. Underwater missiles are many and varied, not at all unusual.
Sea Dragon Was The Future Of Space And Spaceflight - It Could Have Been Used To build Space Stations And Even Pre Artemis Habitats On The Moon ! So Why Was It Deemed Useless Because There Was No Use For It At The Time ?
