The Behemoth That Was Never Built
As interest in space travel increases progressively increasingly ambitious projects get proposed year after year. But the Sea Dragon is perhaps one of the wildest and remarkably feasible designs ever planned.
Proposed by Robert Truax in 1962 the Sea Dragon would have been a two stage super heavy launch vehicle, designed to launch with minimal support and from the middle of the ocean.
The rocket was designed with cost as key consideration, Truax specifically engineered it to be constructed out of more common materials like 8 mm steel sheeting to lower costs. Additionally it would have been partially reusable with the planned recovery of some rocket components.
Focus on the production of a low cost heavy booster is a concept now referred to as a “big dumb booster” and exploits the fact that as a general rule it is more cost effective to use large low tech rockets compared to smaller higher tech rockets, regardless of the lower efficiency.
The rocket would have been built on the shore and towed horizontally to its launch site in the middle of the ocean. At the launch site electrolysis would be used to generate the liquid hydrogen and oxygen portions of the fuel. Once the fuel had been generated and loaded a ballast on the bottom of the rocket would have been flooded flipping the rocket into a vertical position.
The Rocket would have stood a staggering 150 metres tall and been capable of lifting 1.2 million pounds. For comparison the Saturn V, the rocket with the highest payload record ever, was 111 metres tall and could carry 300 thousand pounds, roughly a quarter of the sea Dragon’s payload.
The cost per kilogram of payload delivered to Low Earth Orbit would have been $500 to $5,060 USD per kg in 2020 dollars. For comparison the Falcon 9 rocket’s cost per kilogram delivered to LEO was $2,720.
Though it was never built, the legacy of what Truax and the Sea Dragon stood for: cheap space flight, reusable rockets and access to LEO, lives on in the ideologies of organisations like NASA and SpaceX to this day. The duty of pursuing space flight falls to the youth of this generation, the choice is ours.
References
Bongat, O. (2011, September 16). Saturn V. NASA. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/rocketpark/saturn_v.html
Office of Technology Assessment. (1989). Big Dumb Boosters: A Low-Cost Space Transportation Option? NTIS order.
Schnitt, A. (1997, January 26). Minimum Cost Design for Space Operations. Quark Web. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from http://www.quarkweb.com/foyle/MinimumCostDesign.pdf
Space Technology Laboratories. (1963, January 28). Study of Large Sea-Launch Space Vehicle. Sea Dragon Concept, 1(1).SpaceX. (2016). Falcon 9. SpaceX. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/falcon-9/
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