NASA STUDY SUMMARY-"Study of Hydrogen Slush or Gel for Manned Mars Flyby"

Here's an interesting report from Halloween of 68 on using three modified S-IVB stages (modified for longer orbital lifetimes of up to 30 days) stacked in orbit to launch a manned spacecraft on a Mars flyby... The three S-IVC stages would be launched atop two-stage Saturn V vehicles with the third stage as payload, fully fuelled and ready to go. The manned spacecraft would be launched by another Saturn V. The three stages would be stacked in orbit with the manned spacecraft, and ignited and staged sequentially to inject the stack first into an elongated 3 hour earth orbit and then into Trans-Mars Injection trajectory.

The study shows that using sub-chilled hydrogen liquid got a 6% improvement in performance, and including frozen hydrogen suspended in the liquid as a "slush" would increase performance by 7% over the standard liquid hydrogen used on Saturn V.

Enjoy! OL JR

View attachment NASA Study Summary- A Study of Hydrogen Slush or Gel for S-IVC Manned Mars Flyby.txt

Pic one is the OLV-- Orbital Launch Vehicle, assembled in orbit and ready for injection to Mars... three S-IVC stages topped by the manned spacecraft.


Pic two is the burn mode plans for the OLV-- the first S-IVC is burned to depletion and jettisoned, the second is burned just long enough to inject into a 3 hour highly elliptical Earth orbit, then ignited again at perigee to make fullest use of the Oberth effect for Trans-Mars Injection (TMI). When the second S-IVC has burned out, it's jettisoned and the third S-IVC ignited and burned to depletion to achieve TMI velocity, and then jettisoned.


Pic three is the mods necessary to make an S-IVB into an S-IVC... and the mods necessary for it to be used for the OLV-- including extra APU's for manuevering and the aero-nosecone for atmospheric flight.


Pic four is one of the foldout drawings of the S-IVC-- in this case, showing the FOUR APU's on the S-IVC (the regular Saturn V S-IVB used only an opposing pair of APU's). They also installed four more APU's on the nosecone adapter of the S-IVC.


Pic five is the nosecone end of the S-IVC, showing the forward APU's and the nosecone for atmospheric flight.


More to come...
OL JR

Pic one is the middle section of the foldout, showing the S-IVC barrel section...


Pic two is the aft end of the S-IVC foldout, showing the transtage option in the S-II/S-IVC conical adapter-- this version wasn't adopted but proposed... it would have included a pair of small manuevering engines in the transtage section to perform orbital injection and trim manuevers in the orbit for rendezvous with the other stages for orbital assembly, rather than igniting the J-2S to do the manuevers...


That's it for this one...

later! OL JR