Next Man Up? The Weirdest Piloted Rocket Ideas
Historical programs and events don’t only provide us further ideas. They provide warnings. Ever since the ides of humans in space left the science fiction stage and people started designing rockets to support human life, there have been new ideas and designs. Some have been brilliant. Some haven’t. Some make one wonder whether the engineers were ever tested for controlled substances.
For this essay, let’s call our astronaut “Buster,” the crash dummy from MythBusters. Buster was blown up and burned when re-creating the perhaps-mythical flight of the Chinese sage Wan Ho, who tried to fly a winged chair propelled by gunpowder rockets. So he’s perfect for this job.
The first half of spaceflight is getting the astronaut to space. There are two basic ideas. One is a capsule mounted on an expendable or reusable booster. It’s easier technically, and it’s long been the default: the latest capsules even manage to look spiffy. The piloted spaceplane is technically much more difficult and complex, and was never pulled off until the U.S. Space Shuttle. Smaller ones may fly soon.
That said, aerospace engineers are an imaginative bunch, and in the early years they put that imagination on the drawing boards. The first ideas came from people with imagination but not the technology to test it out. Pioneering space thinker Konstantin Tsiolkovsky designed a large human-carrying rocket ship. Suborbital rocket ideas included the “Silverbird” space plane by Germans Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt in the late 1930s. It was, if not practical, a beautiful piece of speculative design: the Soviets studied a copy in 1946, and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) looked again in 1985. A piloted version of the V-2 was bandied about at Peenemunde: it could have been tested, but was not, given the wartime priorities and the fact Buster probably would have had to be ordered to test it at gunpoint.
All astronauts to date have been launched using chemically-fueled rockets, a technology originally developed for unguided rockets and then missiles. A “manned missile” was a good approximation of the first spaceship concepts, like the Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest (MISS) (canceled in favor of Project Mercury).
USAF image of MISS
After the Air Force and NASA had staked out their roles in human spaceflight, the Navy remained interested. They apparently decided all the rational ideas were taken, and their engineers/contractors explored taking the “manned missile” term literally, firing astronauts from the missile launch tubes of submarines. This might have been the unlikeliest launcher since Wan Ho’s. Buster would enter a tiny capsule on top of a modified Polaris and be shot into space. Getting a proper thrust to weight ratio was probably impossible, and the ride would have been very harsh. The justification for launching in the first place was meager: with no room for any significant payload except Buster, there wasn’t much he could do except perhaps augment the crew of a larger ship or station. I know there are illustrations of this, but I can’t find one.
Launching a piloted craft from a gun was the idea in Jules’ Verne’s From The Earth to the Moon. Kenneth Anderson’s novel Nemo describes how this might have been built as a real project, although the end would be a flattened pile of junk not many miles from the launch site.
Image: Verne’s Columbiad launch
Robert Heinlein, in his well-researched 1947 The Man Who Sold the Moon, sent rockets up with the help of an electromagnetic catapult built over the cog railway route on Pikes Peak. Versions of that idea have been floated ever since, but no hardware has been built. (Your historian was one of the people who was far too optimistic about this, publishing a paper subtitled, “A Launch Solution on the Way to Reality.”)
We're in a very busy time for human spaceflight, including tourist and other commercial flight. Stranger ideas may follow!
