The history of space launch is replete with rockets that never left the drawing board. One of the most famous of these unbuilt rockets is the Sea Dragon, a true giant which dwarfed even the mighty Saturn rockets of its day.

The Sea Dragon was the brain child of the US Navy’s rocket pioneer Captain Robert Truax (by then retired), who played a key role in projects such as the Polaris missile, Viking sounding rocket, and Thor IRBM. Working at Aerojet General in the early 1960’s, Truax led a design study of the concept under a NASA contract. A final report was presented in January 1963.

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Pixar’s restaurant critic Anton Ego noted that in many ways, the work of a critic is easy. “We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

The Space Shuttle has been the target of negative criticism for a long while. Some of that criticism is fair and valid. There’s no doubt that the Shuttle failed to live up to many of its original goals. Some of it is not fair or valid: the claim that the Shuttle was more dangerous than capsules like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, for example.

Rational people might have expected the criticism to abate after 2004, when President George W. Bush declared the Shuttle program to be a dead horse. That did not happen. Instead, Shuttle bashing became more vehement as the end of the program drew near. It continues still to this day.

Much of the criticism is politically motivated. Many critics contend that the Shuttle’s record proves the folly of trying to build a reusable launch vehicle in the future. In their view, expendable rockets and capsules are the only way man was meant to go into space. That criticism is unfair for two reasons. First, the Shuttle was not a fully reusable launch vehicle. It was a hybrid of reusable and expendable components, and most of its failures can be linked directly to the expendable parts of the system. Second, the Shuttle accomplished far more in its lifetime than the critics would have us believe.

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50 years of progress in NASA computing systems:

50 Years of progress in NACA/NASA aviation research:

50 years of progress in NASA spaceflight:

It’s sad that there has been so little progress in human spaceflight compared to other fields.

This tragedy will continue as long as Congress forces NASA to continue working on Orion and SLS, instead of building something new like Johnson Space Center’s Nautilus X.

In one of his last public appearances, Neil Armstrong spoke about the X-15 rocketplane at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto last February. It was appropriate that Armstrong, one of the pilots who flew America’s first suborbital spacecraft, got to meet the developers who are building America’s next generation of suborbital spacecraft. RIP, Neil.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the Moon, has passed way.

It’s sad to think that his most notable accomplishment turned out to be a dead end. Armstrong, who was 82, landed on the Moon during the first half of his life. Armstrong was just 38 when he walked on the Moon, and just 42 when the Moon landings ended. For almost half his life, he would never again see a human walk on the Moon.

Let’s hope that the next time humans visit the Moon, it will be done in a sustainable, affordable manner. Please note that won’t be done by government.

Prior to Apollo, Armstrong piloted the X-15 and was one of seven astronauts chosen to fly the US Air Force X-20 DynaSoar. If Apollo had been canceled while DynaSoar and the X-15 were sustained, perhaps we would have humans on the Moon today. Or perhaps not – sustainable economic development is still the key.

In the early 1980’s, NASA pursued parallel space-station studies. Marshall Space Flight Center favored a series of space platforms, initially unmanned but human-tended by regular Shuttle missions, that would evolve toward a permanently manned platform. (The Carter Administration had banned all discussion of space stations, so euphemisms were necessary.) Unmanned platforms would be located in both polar and low-inclination orbits. (This was prior to the Challenger accident, and NASA still expected to operate a West Coast launch site for Shuttle launches to polar orbit.) The manned platform would be located in the low-inclination orbit. The platforms would be devoted to space science, primarily microgravity and astronomy for the low-inclination platforms, Earth observation in polar orbit.

Johnson Space Center, on the other hand, had minimal interest in science. It favored a concept called the Space Operations Center, which would be dedicated to the support of in-space operations.

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All organizations that have enduring for any length of time have embarrassing facts and episodes in their early history. Often times, myths arise to explain these embarrassments.

One of NASA’s embarrassments is the fact that women were excluded from its early space programs. Until the advent of the Space Shuttle, NASA’s human spaceflight program was officially known as the “manned” space program. The name change in the early 80’s was not purely symbolic or a sign of political correctness, as the myth makers often state. The “man” in “manned space program” did not refer to mankind, it might adult human males, specifically.

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The history of Mercury, Apollo, and the early Space Age is so well known that most of us assume that was the way events were fated to happen. So, it’s interesting to go back and look at some of the alternatives that were presented at the time. In our library for example, we have a small book written by the late G. Harry Stine which shows a different path which history might have taken.

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