Indeed, Chesley Bonestell’s art was the defining image of Space and The Future back in the 40s and 50s. And not just him. I watched the Disney Treasures collection recently with all its shows about space exploration, with segments by Werner von Braun and Willy Ley and other prominent rocket guys. All their ships are sleek and streamlined, and their space stations are rounded and bulbous. I recall all the pre-1960s art depicting ships and stations that looked like that. And it wasn’t just idle speculation – von Braun was one of the guiding lights of the fledgling space program, and he was presenting, in those mid-1950s Disney shows (not to mention in magazine articles and books) his Visuion of the Future.
So, comes a decade later, and we actually build ships and send them into space. And it looks nothing like that. The Mercury and Gemini capsules are covereed, not in sleek and smooth curves, but have blatantly ribbed panels and plenty of angles. The freakin’ front of Gemini is FLAT. The rockets themselves aren’t smooth and unbroken dolphin shapes, but have ribs and protrusions and what look like hastily tacked-on conduits all over the outside.
What happened to the notion that you wanted streamlined shapes to minimize drag in going through the atmosphere? Eve if it turned out that you could tolerate bumps and protrusions, why go out of your way (as they seemed to) to put them on? Why did we go from the smooth 50s styling of the Dyna-Soar to the stunted and broken-up shape of the Sopace Shuttle?
Look at George Pal’s 1950s movie The Conquest of Space and the n look at 1968’s (but start much earlier, of course) 2001: A Space Odyssey and you’ll see what I mean. Conquest showed the 1940s and 1950s ideal, and Odyssey showed the extrapolation from 60s enineering. (After 2001 came out, it certainly affected the depiction of spaceships. Clarke’s books were re-issued with 1960s vintage bump-and-protrusion spacecraft on the cover, instead of those now-passe Benestell fish-shaped ships. Spaceships in movies, as one critic put it, now looked as if they were covered in glue and then rolled in a box of model parts.)
So tell me. Hoew did we go from this:
Well, I am not a rocket scientist, but I’ll hazard a guess that engineers figured out that since “rocket ships” spent most of their time either in a vacuum or moving through the atmosphere at supersonic speed desperately trying to slow down, there wasn’t a whole lot of point to all that super-funky streamlining.
Much more sensible to focus on keeping the weight down, the ratio of useable volume to exterior surface high, and other practical stuff - which often mean sticking stuff on the outside, in order to free up space inside for the crew, and to keep lethally dangerous things like tanks of pure oxygen away from the squishies.
Or in short - function, not form. The ‘classic’ designs were sort of Norman Foster spaceships, in that they looked great but would have been appalling to actually live and work in.
But those ships still had to get out through the atmosphere. In fact, the bulk of the boosters were jettisoned while still in the atmosphere, so the argument that “streamlining isn’t necessary because you don’t have to worry about atmospheric drag” won’t wash.
And designers of all that stuff von Braun touted were engineers who were well aware of the fact that strreamlining wouldn’t be needed outside the atmosphere, not pulp magazine illustrators. And we’re not talking spur-of-the-moment designs. These were the results of years of designing and drawing and re-designing.
Yet they did it that way. Why? And why did it change?
I bet weight was a major consideration – if making a rocket look that neat and streamlined-looking added weight you’d have to haul to orbit but didn’t really make a difference otherwise, it’d make no sense to keep it.
Hell, the LEMs were partly made of (many layers) of FOIL. Very special foil, but still, foil. It was because of weight issues.
I think the practical engineering notion of “staging” had something to do with it as well. You need a hell of a lot of fuel to get up off the earth, and therefore a huge container to hold it, which becomes nothing but dead weight once it’s empty. So you design the rockets to jettison that part. How much design energy do you want to put into a giant hunk of metal that receives a few minutes’ use and then is trash?
The X-15 rocket plane was a much sleeker mofo, and that’s reflected in the Space Shuttle, the vehicle itself being a more interesting design. It should be noted that the history of the shuttle answers some of your question. The central liquid fuel tank used to be painted white like the rest of it, but the paint proved too heavy.
One must remember that the Space Shuttle itself was meant only to be one in a series of experimental aircraft, eventually leading to a “single-stage-to-orbit” plane that would have come closer to your ideal.
The LEM was a case where the lack of atmosphere was an issue – they could afford to make it akll angles and exposed foil because there was no atmosphere on the moon, and on the way up it was protected by the shell of the Saturn V. (Even so, the early models and sketches of the LEM all show it with rounded exteriors. That final design was the result of a lot of paring away)
But I find the “weight” issue hard to buy. There are what appear to be pointless ridges and stubs outside that rocket booster. It doesn’t look as if they didn’t want to spend the extra weight to sheath a lot of pipes and extraneous hardware – it frequently looks as if they went out of their way to bolt and weld extra stuyff on the outside of a relatively smooth exterior. (Although why they designed the rocket exteriors with clear angles and breaks, instead of a smoothly varying shape is another question. For that, I could buy that it was easier to make it as a straight-sided tube plus a conical cap, with that abrupt angle where the cone meets the cylinder, rather than a continuously varying rounded form.)
This still doesn’t answer it. Those 1950s sleek von Braun rocket designs were staged rockets – they weren’t pulp fantasies with unlmited fuel and lift capacity. UYet he still made the outside sleek and aerodynamic.
I think part of it was ease of fabrication and economics. Cylindrical shapes are easy to fabricate, cheap, and strong. The U.S Navy faced similar choices in their submarine program. Streamlined designs (Albacore hull) that were optimal for drag, were also more expensive and complicated to build.
Yes. Early rocket research, paralleled by early science fiction, has a recurring theme of the search for a “more energetic fuel”. It seemed to be an implicit assumption that somewhere, somehow, someone would find or invent a fuel that could drive a single stage rocket up, around, and back again. So the craft were designed for atmospheric capability.
When it became clear that no such fuel could be found, and staging would be necessary to achieve orbital speed, the designs changed as well.
Another factor is that a refined design like the 40´s style dea… ejem, rocketships don´t have much development potential.
Nowadays the “ugly” rockets and spacey designs can be upgraded by slapping some new gadget on them; new upper stages, a change on the sensor array of a space probe, stick more antennas and orbital lasers on the ISS; you name it. You do that with a Tin Tin moon rocket and sooner or later it´s going to look awfull.
I’m not so sure about that. The main obstacle to overcome is gravity. Atmospheric drag diminishes as the rocket gains altitude. It is greatest close to the earth’s surface, but that’s where the rocket is going its slowest, minimizing drag’s effect. I wonder, if we plot the density of the atmosphere against the vehicle’s speed as it rises, whether drag emerges as a significant factor.
see my comments in #6 above. Von Braun and his team were practical engineers, with many years of rocket building under their belts. They knew what specific impulse they had.
Please note, people, I’m not asking why they didn’t build the Apollo Moon Rocket like the pulp illustrations of the 1930s – although those illustrators qwere trying to get things right, and often researched things, they weren’t rocket scientists.
The guys who were publishing in the 1950s – Willy Ley, von Braun, and company – WERE. Their visions in the 1950s weren’t snap judgments or schoolboy fantasies. They were supposed to be visions of what was achievable. These were guys who knew that it was easier to construct and buy cylindrical rockets, because they had already been doing this for years in the model rocket societies, and at places like Peenemunde and White Sands. But they still designed sleek streamlined rockets in the 1950s.
Yet, ten years later, things looked completely different.
Another factor was the great leap forward in understanding the aerodynamics of supersonic flight during the 1950s. One of the new concepts was to have a constant cross-sectional area to minimize drag.
I’m going to go with economics. If it is cheaper to build something functional instead of functional and aesthetic, functional alone will win.
Aesthetics will arrive when spaceships become a commodity rather than an experiment.
Look at cars from a hundred years ago compared to cars from the Fifties. First they make them work, then they make them work economically, and then they can become pretty.
:smack: If I had saved my work from my old job, I would be able to calculate it fairly simple. We were doing a test where we shot a slug at about Mach 4 almost directly up. We wanted to estimate the peak height, and maximum theoretical range. The program took into account the change in gravity due to latitude and altitude, plus the change in density of the air based on altitude. The program was simple enough, it just used a feedback loop (in SimuLink) with the previous conditions, and looked up the density of the air and gravity as a function of its position. I wish I still had it, I’d run it for you guys.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. The Mercury/Redstone is a smooth cylinder, with the bare minimum of protrusions necessary. The Gemini/Titan is an even smoother shape. The front is rounded, not flat.
Yes, they could be smoother, but I’m guessing the expense and extra weight is not worth it.
There was a maxim in the early days of aviation that if a plane looked right, it would fly right. Designing a plane was almost more an art than a science in the 1930’s, and there were planes in those days that looked like Art Deco sculptures. (Do a web search for images of a Northrop Gamma or a Beechcraft Staggerwing.) And then science takes over, the designers figure out what works and how much it costs.
Your first picture looks an awful lot like a V-2, which worked all too well.
Of course – the V2 was a working rocket design. Why screw with it? There was a classic piece published in the late forties (and included in the clasic anthology, Adventures in Time and Space) entitled something like “V2: Rocket to the moon”. And, heck, von Braun and many who joined him in the US had actually designed and built the V2. What else would it look like?
But I don’t believe that this is merely a problem with finding you can’t “scale up” a design. Again, these weren’t simple-minded or uninformed guys. The difference in rocket appearance in the 1960s is a pretty complete and fundamental difference.
So far the top contenders seem to be “increased aerodynamic knowledge” and (essentially) “Sell the public with pretty pictures, rather than the Ugly Utilitarian Reality”
