Nova (NASA rocket)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nova was NASA's first serious attempt at a rocket large enough to reach the Moon. On the 27th of January, 1959, engineers spread out designs for an entirely new launcher before President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Its smallest configuration carried four F-1 engines in its lower stage and placed 24 tons on a trajectory toward the lunar surface. Nova was not the rocket that flew Apollo astronauts to the Moon. What replaced it, and why, is a question that runs through the early years of American spaceflight. Years later, NASA would return to the Nova name for a purpose far larger than the Moon.

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• 2. Rival Rockets

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  Wernher von Braun was at the US Army's Redstone Arsenal when he drew up a proposal for a lunar booster he called Juno V. It clustered Jupiter and Redstone-related engines in its lower stage and used a Titan I missile as the second stage. The US Air Force was building a rival concept called the Lunex Project. Lunex envisioned solid-fuel rockets in the lower stage with liquid hydrogen-powered upper stages, using J-2 or M-1 engines. In 1959, the Army concluded it had no immediate need for large boosters. It transferred von Braun's team to NASA, leaving the agency with two large booster programs at once.

  Von Braun's Juno V was renamed Saturn. The name fit a pattern: Saturn is the planet that follows Jupiter. President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of reaching the Moon before the end of the decade. The Air Force's Lunex Project was ended, and NASA was given the mission outright. Nova had been designed around a concept called direct ascent. In this approach, a single large spacecraft would travel to the Moon, land directly on the surface, and return, all without docking with another vehicle. Von Braun preferred assembling the spacecraft in Earth orbit across multiple launches, which reduced the weight any single rocket had to lift. Both plans ran into the same problem. As engineers examined the actual spacecraft hardware, they found the systems would be much heavier than initially expected. The original Saturn design would have needed up to fifteen launches just to put all the parts and fuel into orbit.

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• 3. The Third Option

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  The debate over how to reach the Moon came to a head in 1961, and the outcome surprised everyone. A redesign of both programs had produced a range of new configurations. The most powerful standard Nova design, the 8L, stacked eight F-1 engines in its lower stage and could deliver 68 tons toward the Moon. Some configurations replaced the F-1 engines with large solid rockets. General Dynamics proposed nuclear engines for the upper stages of others. Lunar payloads across the various Nova models ranged between 48 and 75 tons.

  Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, a third option that neither team had championed, was the working group's choice. In LOR, most of the spacecraft would wait in lunar orbit while a smaller lander descended to the surface and climbed back to dock. The mass requirement fell midway between what a Saturn C-3 and a Nova 8L could carry.

  The Saturn C-5 could be manufactured in an existing factory near New Orleans, later known as the Michoud Assembly Facility. Nova's larger diameter would have required building entirely new factories. After studying what each booster would need to place roughly 200,000 lb into low Earth orbit, engineers concluded the Saturn C-5 was the better fit.

  Studies on Nova continued into 1962 as a backup to the Saturn-based plan. They were eventually ended as the Saturn approach became ingrained. For NASA's designers, however, Saturn V was already looking like it might not be big enough for what came next.

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• 4. The Mars Ambition

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  Martin Marietta's smallest Mars design, the 1B, stacked fourteen F-1 engines in its first stage. It would have delivered 662,000 lb to low Earth orbit. The 1B was Martin's most modest proposal in the series. A crewed mission to Mars had appeared to NASA's designers as the obvious next step after Apollo. Saturn V was far too small for such an undertaking. NASA revisited the Nova name for a new series of launchers aimed at the demands of an interplanetary voyage. Unlike the original Nova program, which NASA had designed internally, the new work was contracted to companies that had not received major Apollo contracts.

  General Dynamics and Martin Marietta both took on the work under contract. Philip Bono at Douglas Aircraft chose to send in his own unsolicited proposals as well. The resulting designs ranged from enlarged versions of existing hardware to concepts built around advanced technology still under development, including aerospike engines. The largest configurations targeted a payload of up to 1,296,000 lb to low Earth orbit. These ambitions did not survive the post-Apollo funding environment. Martin Marietta's 1B had targeted a December 1972 operational date. When the program was abandoned in 1964, that milestone was still eight years away.

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• 5. The Nova C8

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  The Nova C8's first stage carries eight F-1 engines and measures 48.8 meters in length, with a diameter of 12.2 meters. Fully fueled, that first stage weighs 3,600,000 kg. The second stage is 42.7 meters long and carries eight J-2 engines burning liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. A single J-2 powers the third stage, which runs for 473 seconds before delivering its payload to the target trajectory.

  The Nova C8 was nearly identical to a Saturn proposal called the Saturn C-8. The two differed mainly in the arrangement of staging engines and in the fin and flaring design on the first stage. The C8's image became the most widely reproduced illustration of the entire Nova series. Many references to Nova point specifically to these post-Apollo designs rather than the 1958 lunar series. The two programs were essentially separate efforts. What the name came to mean was simple: a rocket larger than the Saturn V, regardless of which engines powered it.

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