Twin SRB CLV Suggestion

[bad_astra]

wow!

[Jon_Jones]

How many crawlers are there? I remember seeing pictures of KSC when SA 500 and/or 501 or 502 were rolling out that had 3 or 4 Saturn V sized Crawlers. are the other two used for parts or do we only see two at a time because of rotations and refurbrishments?

[Jim]

only 2 crawler transporter were built.  3 LUT's were built and converted into MLP's for shuttle

[publiusr]

gladiator1332 - 16/6/2006  6:38 PM

bad_astra - 28/5/2006  7:51 PM

In liu of qualifying a 5 segment srb, would resurrecting the idea of the side-by-side stack proposed earlier make more sense now for a clv updated to compensate for lack of ssme's?

Rather then the side-mounted shuttle-c looking thing, the idea would be as such:
Two 4 seg srbs with Shuttle ET with j2-x at the center, with the CEV stack atop it.  Lots of wiggleroom for weight gain.

By keeping the 4 segment solids for the time being, there would still be time to decide to go with a quad 4-segment srb longfellow behemoth for CaLV or continue readying the five segment srb for Ares V use. It would also allow, in the future, the chance to fall back on the 5-segment/J2-X upperstage CLV "stick" if it proved to be more economical (as it almost certainly would). As it is, this wouldn't require much in the way of pad changes and could still be developed quickly, esp with no significant changes to the current SRB's.

We could have no human spaceflight lag at all.

I looked into this awhile back, except I kept the 5 RS-68s. THe problem with that was you were basically building the CaLV. I like your idea, really does sound like mixing the Ariane V with the Shuttle. I did a render in paint using some CaLV images. Please note that center engine in that image is the Vulcan from the Ariane V, just pretend that it is a J-2.

Big Gemini would look nice atop that. Atop Atlas it is ugly

[gladiator1332]

Here is an interesting image...that middle launch vehicle looks quite familiar!

[gladiator1332]

Made a small update to the original render in order to make it match the above image a bit more:

[publiusr]

See if you can do Ross's slightly larger DSD version in a big format.