Saturn Shuttle with Flyback Booster 

Not even close. It was actually a seriously good idea, however.

The most aMeRiCAn rocket

*Heavy kerbal breathing*

That is incredibly Kerbal for a 'real' design.

Actually no, the most kerbal thing he made is a nuclear rocket with boosters on booster on all sides

Indeed, the realism of the first sequence is perfect!

@@ProvVFX 45 second where is the smoke reflected in the water?

It's quite cursed the idea of having a pilot below a rocket staging, but at the same time, awesome

As you are in an ballistic trajectory high up in the atmosphere You will continue pretty far out. Yes you could fly it with jet engines

I think the scariest part for the booster pilot would be the falling interstage that joined the shuttle's external tank to the S-1C stage. But it was still an incredible simulation!

@@modelermark172 the original Saturn-Shuttle concept just saw an S-IC stage with a fixed interstage connected to a modified External Tank. Even if such was used, the interstage would most likely be jettisoned about 10-15 seconds after staging much like on a traditional Saturn V launch.

Actually it was on autopilot the entire time until they reached the HAC. However it would be someone’s greatest nightmare if all the autopilot computers failed

It actually isn’t as cursed as you would think. Unlike the shuttle we got, this would have have abort modes at all stages of flight. Plus, it was possible to make the first stage of Saturn reusable to varying amounts. Some ideas had stage and a half designs like the Atlas, or literally turning the Saturn into gigantic glider that lands on a runway.

@@topsecret1837 Slight correction, the Saturn Shuttle (specifically this design) did NOT have that many abort modes since the Shuttle/ET would not have the thrust-to-weight' to either pad abort or abort at low altitude nor could it generate enough thrust to pull away from a still running C1 stage that was still running. So it still had the same issues as the SRB's but everyone considered a 'liquid' fed booster to be safer. Unfortunately SRB's 'traded' to be cheaper than the needed development costs. (before the political necessity of shipping the SRB's all the way back to Utah and then back to Florida after every flight got tacked on)

It's actually quite cursed, as there is a pilot in the first stage. That poor pilot

@@randycampbell6307 Well they couldn’t simply abort with the ET on. And that is completely unnecessary if the only thing mounting the shuttle onto the Saturn itself was the ET anyway. So then it’s just a matter of detaching the shuttle from the Saturn/ET stack and gliding it to the runway like the Saturn itself. Also note with liquid rockets, particularly Saturn, they had the ability to shut down the engines on it at any time; luckily no flights needed to. Just shut the propellant valves and the engines flame out.

@@davisdf3064 Forgot about that, which is indeed quite cursed; the position of being in a cockpit sat down between the largest two stages ever built at the time, waiting for MECO and stage separation.

Season two is already over

@@Spaceguy-nineteensixtynine season 3..fingers crossed :)

This is certainly more believable than a regular shuttle going to the moon. But they will focus on Mars on season 3, so I guess it's gonna be some sort of nuclear powered spacecraft.

Yeah, they really threw plausibility out the window in season 2. It's a darn shame, because there's a lot of really neat concepts they could have played with. But why have that when we can watch the admiral's wife sleep with a cadet?

@@MateusViccari yes mars would be there..but moon stories still would take place hopefully unless they're completely changing the story..since they have decadal jumps

Well, that's because kids don't have much imagination beyond KSP. Then, they get online thinking they're rocket scientists.

The space shuttle and Buran are like dumb KSP designs. Ha

yop

@@wallissimpson5414 hey leave Buran out of that, its rocket Energia has 100 ton orbital capacity without the optional orbiter, uses hydrox even in the boosters not SRB trash and the orbiter doesn't carry wasted rocket engines or need a chute on landing, basically proving the idea of shuttle is great, ours just sucked. I just learned all that so yay it was a great system and considering Buran the idea in this vid looks pretty good to me.

@@greenbanana311 way to sound incredibly bitter about young people trying to share an interest with you

Here is a cockpit at the nose and heat protection of nose (don't forget about stage separation!). BTW, you can just add ballast on the nose, why not for reusable vehicle?

If you're using a Saturn V first stage for the first stage, the shuttle's external tank wouldn't have to be as big since the shuttle's main engines wouldn't have to ignite until after the first stage was jettisoned. Furthermore, the shuttle's main engines could be optimized for the upper atmosphere thus increasing the fuel efficiency.

@@DeepDeepSpace Shuttle's engine has an almost maximum vacuum/upper atmosphere performance. And it's BTW, flyback booster have low delta-v, cause if this thing would have hish delta-v, it would be enable to operate without thermal protections/SpaceX's reentry burns/etc.

It has bigger wings though. The shuttle can land with a sat in it and the 747 modified can land with a shuttle on it.

RTLS abort as part of the flight program!

The Saturn shuttle wasn’t fictional. It was a serious design stage of the shuttle that got shut down because Nixon cut, if not outright decimated NASA’s budget to a husk of its former self. Without the money to order more Saturn Vs or F-1 rockets, they needed a cheaper design. Thing is, this wouldn’t have been any more expensive then the design they ultimately chose, since they can reuse the Saturn V stages.

@@vablo7198 Reusable F-1s were seriously studied (the Saturn I-D stage and half proposal comes to mind) even before the Shuttle even got off the drawing board and to my understanding wouldn't have taken as much as you would think to pull off. Obviously, they wouldn't have been the same F1s that flew on the standard Saturn, but a modification to the design in order to be reusable. And considering that NASA figured out how to build the reusable Space Shuttle Main Engine, I don't think it would be a stretch for them to do so with a pre-existing engine design.

@@squirrelguy2195 Yes! I remember Reading this very point being hashed out in the pages of Aviation 'Leak' & Aerospace Weekly.....

@@topsecret1837 NASA"s budget started being cut in 1966 and by the time Nixon got into office there was little public or Congressional support for an expanded space program. A major problem with using anything from the Saturn V was that the production had been shut down in the late 60s and Congress had not authorized funding to keep the production lines open so they were dismantled in 1968 and put into storage. Bringing them back on-line and the subsequent design and testing program would have been way more than Congress was going to allow for the Shuttle budget so this was never going to be possible.

@@vablo7198 I know quite a few people who would argue this is actually 'saner' than Starship actually :)

Yes

Imagine the pain of cleaning those F1 engines after they come back.

I'd say the Jupiter III is more kerbal

@@davisdf3064 A lot of NASA's shuttle-derived rocket concepts were kerbal, you have the srb-x and the shuttle-c for example

@@5000mahmud "The engines of Apollo showed similar life. The F-1 was rated for 20 starts and 2250 seconds in total duration. Yet by replacing the liquid-oxygen pump impeller and the turbine manifold at 3500 seconds, test engines achieved as many as 60 starts and total durations of 5000 to 6000 seconds. The J-2 did even better, with a test engine running for 103 starts and 6.5 hours, without overhaul. "We never wore out an engine of the J-2 type," recalls Rocketdyne's Paul Castenholz, who managed its development. "We could run it repeatedly; there was no erosion of the chamber, no damage to the turbine blades. If you looked at a J-2 after a hot firing, you would not see any difference from before that firing. The injectors always looked new; there was no erosion or corrosion on the injectors. We had extensive numbers of tests on individual engines," which demonstrated their reliability. 6" Space Shuttle Decision, Chapter 6: history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch6.htm

Y

Lemme guess this will have a lot of likes in the near future

Lemme guess this will have a lot of likes in the near future

@@kevinduliesco5468 meh, 33 so far.

I'll admit f&e, I will watch it the second it's available.

Actually it's an S-1C (Saturn V first stage) with delta wings.

There were also designs that would have relit one or more of the F-1s for a propulsive lob-retro trajectory.

Uh, are you talking about Starship? Please don't be talking about Starship.

@@ateslabattery115 I am speaking in the positive about Starship's potential ability. Shuttle-Saturn could've been a game changer, but this design suffered the same flaws as STS (complicated, time-intensive refurbishment of complex engines, TPS, no launch escape). Well, Starship so far hasn't an LES, either, but nothing is perfect.

@@kspencerian sorry, I thought you were saying that Starship had no capacity to leave LEO; I was quite concerned (I suppose a single launch actually can't on its own, so you were right either way).

Stupid? How? For the rest of us it seems extremely intelligent and far more practical and economical than what we really got with STS.

Better looking than the bird on a cooked turkey we got.

@@generalyellor8188 sucka it looks like it would be destroyed at max q

Instead of being manned, however, the RS-1C would likely operate autonomously if we built it today.

This was a very late entry into the problem of boosting the Shuttle off the pad and IIRC the actual design had the "Shuttle" hanging off in opposition to what we see here so having the Shuttle wings more 'in-line' with the Flyback Saturn wings. Yes an 'in-line' design was better but the whole point of the ET was that such a design made the Orbiter vastly larger, (and therefore more expensive and complex) due to having to carry the propellant internally.

Everyone Gangsta until you find out the booster is manned It turns out that Soviet Energia II is a much more humanitarian idea as it is unmanned

I legit just now noticed

Maybe he'll get a shot on a future mission, depending on the crew rotation.

NOVA was Von Braun's first heavy-lift design. He wanted NASA to bypass the Moon and go straight to Mars. I don't think that would've ended well.

@@dalethelander3781 Nova was a name for a number of gigantic rocket designs projects. The first one was solely Braun’s brainchild, in the mid-50s. Over time this morphed into what would be concepts for moon rockets, most modular based on a fuel tank with an F-1 engine on the bottom, others an extension of Saturn rockets, like the C-8, also known as the Nova 8L. The rockets I’m talking about were after them. The 1963 Apollo follow on concepts, which was given to General Dynamics and Martin Marietta as they had lost the contracts toward Apollo. They had to develop a rocket system able to put 300 tons or more into LEO. Some even managed 500 tons with partial reusability. Arguably the most powerful rockets ever contemplated, even more powerful than Sea Dragon. The interesting bit is that while General dynamics tried building 2-1/2 stage designs with engines of dramatically increasing size, Martin Marietta went truly exotic. They experimented with configurations that involved Toroidal plug nozzles, full/partial reusability, air augmentation, and so on. As a result their designs were better performing, but the most exotic was not to come online in their proposal until 1980 (this was considered in 1963 mind you). The funding required to construct the entire system of many variants being scaled up continuously and perhaps working concurrently with Saturn MLV designs would have busted the American purse, even without getting directly involved in Vietnam.

@@topsecret1837 Ambition, no political will.

@@dalethelander3781 Agreed completely on that, albeit belated

Yes there should be a set of 'jets' under the belly to provide flyback capability. And I don't think the F1 engine was every capable of being restarted (as Scott Manley pointed out in his latest questions video) due to the design so 'retro-lob' wasn't possible.

@@randycampbell6307 While the *Historic* F-1 engines were incapable of restart, the engines themselves were relatively simple, and modifications for restart would have been possible. Certainly if they program is proceeding with a J-2S powered orbiter as shown here (no SSME program eating budgets).

God I can’t imagine how an F1 in flight relight for the boost back would look.

@@astrosasha It would look like starting an F-1, just like they did on the ground. only flying backwards like the Falcon 9 is when it starts the Merlin for lob-retro.

@@astrosasha It would probably need to be modified so it could airstarted.

Found the AH.commer!

Sea Dragon?

@@koharumi1 Roar

It'd be pretty awesome to see the launch of Space Station Enterprise from Boldly Going!

This is very Right Side Up. Pretty sure this study was referenced for Right Side Up.

Eh, that's an acceptable trade-off.

Ok.

How is it cursed?

@@topsecret1837 each part was taken from a different rocket. See the cursedrockets from Ksp.

To make it even more cursed, there was supposed to be a pilot on the first stage, so it could fly back.

@@davisdf3064 good point

At least it doesn't closely resemble a scaled-up billionaire's penis! 😂

Plus, it builds on the experience that the team already had with the Saturn V's first stage.

m8 this aint starship

@@TheSpaceEngineer I know it's a joke

Thing is, this would've been way safer than Starship. It doesn't need working engines to land, it can glide.

wonder if he's done that video yet?

No this is a game called ksp

And by 2022, the vehicle is automated.

How do we know he wasn’t already responsible for all those designs in “For All Mankind”……if not, why not?!! 😉

какое преимущество? Необходимость тащить крылья, или выдерживать поперечные нагрузки? В чем вообще преимущество перед ступенями с реактивной посадкой (которые вполне исправно работают и даже доставляют людей в космос, в том числе при повторном использовании)? Касательно того, что было показано здесь, мне, например интересно, где они собирались садиться (при старте с мыса), вот вообще не факт, что такая бандура сможет спланировать назад.