Since the invention of rockets, people have never been satisfied with the capacity of rockets, and have always wanted greater capacity, which makes rockets bigger and bigger.

From the rockets that could be pulled away by trucks at the beginning to the Saturn V, which dominated the rocket field for a long time afterward, mankind embarked on the path of giant spectacle worship.

In fact, the Saturn V is not the largest rocket that Merrican has ever designed, and there are even more violent rockets than the Saturn V on the rocket design drawings of the crazy space race era.

At 150 meters tall and 23 meters in diameter, the massive Saturn V pales in comparison, and when placed together, it looks like a strong man and a malnourished child.

Its name is "Sea Dragon".

The capacity of the Sea Dragon rocket reached an astonishing 566 kilometers in a circular orbit of 550 tons at a time, which is about four times the capacity of the Saturn V Super Heavy rocket.

With a huge carrying capacity comes a huge take-off weight, so the Sea Dragon rocket, which has a take-off weight of about 18,000 tons, has become the super rocket with the largest mass and capacity among all the rockets with complete design demonstration so far.

The superweight of 18,000 tons after refueling could not even allow it to stand upright on land, so it had to be built horizontally by the shipyard like a submarine.

Its huge propellant tank provides buoyancy to the rocket, allowing it to float on the surface of the water and be towed by a tug to the launch site, which is a calm part of the sea.

Its first-stage engine nozzle is fitted with an oversized ballast tank, which is filled with water to allow it to stand up in seawater.

The first stage of the Sea Dragon rocket ignites directly in the sea, and after shaking a bunch of sea creatures to death, the first stage of the rocket will send the second stage out of the water, and then the four small engines on the outer wall of the second stage rocket ignite and stabilize the rocket to rise vertically until the entire rocket body is out of the water.

Don't look at it as huge and bulky, in fact, compared to the Saturn V that is thrown away when it is used up, it also has a recovery system that inflates the airbag to slow down.

The first-stage rocket uses a spherical fuel storage tank, which can be embedded in the second-stage engine nozzle to save space, and will open the inflatable airbag to slow down after detaching from the second-stage rocket body.

In fact, its second-stage rocket engine does not have a special nozzle, and after the first-stage rocket is detached, the "arrow body" that wraps the first-stage rocket is the nozzle.

The body of the arrow expands outward and expands into a bell mouth, which is the engine nozzle.

When the second stage rocket is ejected, it will use the blunt head design commonly used in the manned return capsule to resist the heat during re-entry, and then open the inflatable airbag to slow down after re-entry.

Both the first and second stage rockets were recovered by splashing in the seawater, then towed back to the rocket factory by boat for repairs and finally reused.

At that time, its design team believed that a large increase in the rocket load was just the icing on the cake, and the reuse of the rocket body was the most important factor in reducing the launch cost.

From today's perspective, this idea is quite correct.

By the way, there is another way to reduce the cost of the sea dragon, that is, it does not need to build a special transmission tower, because it can't stand on it even if it is built, and it saves this part of the money by launching directly in the sea.

But......

Don't look at the Sea Dragon Rocket, think how advanced it is, in fact, it is really stupid, black and coarse, and it can definitely be made with the technology of the time.

After refueling, it will weigh 18,000 tons? But its first-stage rocket is not a thrust stacked with multiple engines? It only used one engine.

Therefore, the characteristic of the Sea Dragon rocket is that the engine nozzle is larger than the fuel tank, which is very huge!

This engine omits almost all consideration of the word "efficiency"? Simply by increasing the thrust through "quantity stacking", the single engine of the first stage of the Sea Dragon rocket has a thrust of nearly 36,000 tons!!

Its frenzied thrust is 50 times greater than that of the F-1 engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V V!

The thrust of the second stage single-engine also reached 6400 tons? That's 60 times more than the J-2 engine used in the second stage of the Saturn V!

However, because of the extremely simple engine structure, it has a huge thrust and is extremely wasteful of fuel.

Note? Not use, but waste.

So it weighs 18,000 tons after it's filled with fuel? There's a portion of the fuel here that is "wasted" by it.

Fortunately, its estimated R&D and launch costs are tempting.

The price per kilogram of shipping at that time was about $67? That's about $575 per kilogram now.

This is a very attractive data, after all, the ultimate transportation price target of the Falcon recovery rocket developed by Ma Yilong is only 1411 US dollars per kilogram, which is not cheap when it was first used, and it began to decline after more times.

As a matter of fact? The attractive price per kilogram of the Sea Dragon rocket is based on 240 launches.

But even as originally conceived by the Space Shuttle? The Sea Dragon rocket is launched once a month, which is also a 20-year launch estimate.

However, no project during the space race needs to be launched so frequently, and the only possible approach is to build the space station and explore Mars at the same time, but it is clear that Merriken Space Agency will not have the funds to carry out both projects at the same time.

Even later, because Merriken was mired in the rainforest war, even the Apollo 18 and 19 manned lunar missions were canceled? There is no money to invest in a Mars exploration mission.

There is also no similar demand for commercial launches, even if the most massive satellites that humans send into geosynchronous orbit weigh only a few tons? There is simply no need for its super capacity of several hundred tons.

Later people calculated, if the Sea Dragon rocket was drastically reduced to 4 launches per year? Its price will soar to $5,776 per kilogram, which is about $46,000 today.

Is this outrageously expensive? Do you know that the freight per kilogram calculated when the space shuttle was retired was only $18,000? That's more than twice as much as that.

And one of the reasons for the retirement of the space shuttle is that not only did the price not decrease as expected? On the contrary, it is getting more and more expensive.

The Sea Dragon rocket is more expensive than it, how can this be used?

In fact, the Hailong rocket's demonstration team also ignored another factor that could have been controlled, and that was the cost of fuel.

Although the Sea Launch can save the operating costs of the construction of auxiliary buildings, it also means that there are no large storage tanks to store fuel and oxidizers.

Moreover, the thermal conductivity of water is much greater than that of air, so the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen of the Hailong rocket cannot be filled at the dock, otherwise it will almost evaporate when it is dragged to the launch site.

The fuel tank of the Sea Dragon rocket does not have any high-level insulation devices, everything is simple.

In addition, liquid hydrogen is not an easy fuel to transport, and in the era of the demonstration of Hailong technology, the technology of specialized liquid hydrogen carriers was not yet mature, so the only solution at that time was to electrolyze seawater "on the spot" at the launch site to produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

But this method is extremely time-consuming, and it is also extremely energy-intensive, and ordinary ships simply cannot supply that much energy.

Therefore, the technical team also admitted that if the Sea Dragon rocket wanted to be launched, it would have to follow a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to assist, because only the nuclear reactor of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier could provide enough energy to complete the production of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in a reasonable time.

This......

This kind of design that abandons fuel utilization and pursues extreme thrust, although it is a primitive recovery system, still happens to become the "seven inches" of the Sea Dragon rocket, coupled with various factors, the Sea Dragon rocket finally stays on the paper design drawing.

Even if it's a super-jumbo.

Even by design, it can really fly.