There's some interest in this old rocket idea, and lots of good ideas buried in it and it's kin.
Didn't find anything specific about it in the archives, but thanks in advance for any pointers or other links or article sources.
The ultimate BDB was the Sea Dragon design of Aerojet Mark Goll
detailed discussion of design philosophy:
Sea-Launched Space Booster Studies Air University Press
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I know, no discussion -but this part is important, and I've seen snippets of this paradigm change in design philosophy elsewhere on ES boards, and this seems to be the source.
Reposted from a repost of a passage from the book "Great Mambo Chickens and the Transhuman Condition"
http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/199610/msg00114.html...
I said to myself, We've been tilting at windmills all this time! Â If all rockets cost the same to make, why try to improve the payload-to-weight ratio? Â If you want more payload, make the rocket bigger."
... About the only thing that *did* vary directly with a rocket's size was the cost of the raw materials that went into making it, but raw materials constituted only *2 percent* of the total cost of a rocket...
...
So if all this was true, if engineering, lab tests, documentation and so forth didn't determine a launch vehicle's price tag, *
what did*? Essentially, three things: parts count, design margins, and innovation.
Other things being equal, the more parts a machine had, the more it was going to cost. The more you wanted it to approach perfection, the more expensive it would end up being. And finally, the newer and more pioneering the design, the more you'd end up paying for it.
...
"Make it big, make it simple, make it reusable. Don't push the state of the art, and don't make it any more reliable than it has to be.
And *
never* mix people and cargo... For people you can have a very small vehicle on which you lavish all your attention; everything else is cargo, and for this all you need is a Big Dumb Booster."
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Winged vs. Ballistic Recovery of Reusable Space Launch Vehicles R.Truax
From the excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica
http://astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htmhttp://astronautix.com/lvfam/truax.htmexcellent site with all sorts of stuff about Shuttle concepts and alternate designs which were proposed
a few which are relevant:
CHRYSLER “S.E.R.V.†[PHASE-A’ SHUTTLE] [1971]NASA-JSC S.P.S. LAUNCH VEHICLES [1976]BOEING “LEOâ€VTVL SSTO [1976]BOEING 2-STAGE VTVL “HLLV†[1976]Main site Marcus Lindroos
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