The Worst Looking Rockets Ever Designed!

hello it's scott manley here over the years i've talked about a lot of rockets i mean while the us only has a handful of operational launch vehicle there has been hundreds of different designs over the decades and around the globe not all rockets were successful many made it to orbit and some of them were among the ugliest pieces of engineering to ever come out of a discipline where sleek designs are supposed to be required for aerodynamic reasons i mean there's limits as to what you can reasonably do with rocket designs due to the laws of physics and rocket design is usually a team effort which means if you want to churn out an ugly launch vehicle you have to actually assemble an entire team of aesthetically challenged engineers and have them fight against the natural tendency for rockets to look cool so anyway as a break from digging into the math or physics or history or engineering i just wanted to highlight some of the greatest sins in the field of rocket design if you are a student of aerospace engineering then consider these next few minutes to be some examples of things not to do so in no particular order let's start with the atlas able i'm sorry but this looks like a massive mutant bowling pin or something this was early on in the life of the atlas when they were trying to adapt it into a launch vehicle and while the atlas could reach orbit on its own they wanted to then send a spacecraft past the moon so the engineers took the second and third stages from the vanguards and put them on top of the much more powerful atlas booster so yeah there's a whole joke in here by the way about you know how helicopters fly because they're so ugly the ground repels them clearly this doesn't apply to rockets because for the atlas able two of them never made it off the ground because of static failures and three failed in flight and that was a hundred percent perfect unsuccessful launch record granted there was the similar thor able design which you know you did the same idea but used a thor the thor booster is a little skinnier so it looks a lot less ridiculous and yes it does have the benefit of being successful let's be clear though a rocket could be highly successful and still staggeringly ugly at the same time such as the ariane 4. now the first four iterations of ariane were never elegant the size difference between the stages the fairing shape the conical extensions covering the engines that help the aerodynamics but to the detriment of the looks the ariane 4 specifically had the option to use two different types of strap-on boosters on the first stage and in the case of the ar-44 lp i had a pair of fat liquid boosters and two skinny solid boosters to create something that is aesthetically jarring on many levels but this configuration launched many times 25 successful launches the other highly successful rocket which never looked elegant to me was the proton for me it's like soviet architecture in rocket form and i know a lot of people like it and it has launched many historic payloads but i've never gone over the disappointment of realizing that first stage isn't surrounded by strap-on boosters that design is all bolted together on the ground and they use that because the seven tanks have to fit on uh you know rail transport and they couldn't do anything bigger apparently at one point during testing they actually filled this whole thing with vodka so maybe that explains why the engineers were happy to overlook the aesthetic shortcomings of it here's the thing though the proton was known as the ur-500 universal rock and it was actually pretty tame compared to the ur 700 or the ur 900 which just kept on bolting tanks together at random until they had something that was supposed to go to the moon or even mars so consider that had the u.s not won the moon race in 1969 one of these monstrosities might have been built if the n1 kept failing there's some alternate history out there where people are praising the proton and the ur 700 as the rocket that brought us to the moon okay number four is otrag system which was supposed to be made of clusters of pipe like thrust elements this was an interesting idea to bring rocket cost down by standardizing all the parts and clustering them together unfortunately to scale the idea up the result looked like a bundle of drinking straws or in one case a giant silver office block i mean the goal was to make it look cheap or make it cheap but not make it look good otrag was of course somewhat notorious for projects links to african dictators and of course the top-tier dictators like to get their hands on ballistic missiles but what if you took a bunch of scud missiles and bundled them together to make a multi-stage rocket that's what was tried by iraq in the late 1980s they've actually started a civilian satellite program and were trying to get it flown on an ariane 4 but deteriorating international relations meant that it was impossible so instead they began to develop their own launch vehicles based on the scott missile unfortunately the only images i have of this are terrible from your grainy videotapes and old un reports but the drawings i have show a classic example of what happens in kerbal space program when you've only unlocked the small fuel tanks and engines but you need a big launch vehicle it was built around six modified scud missiles five in the first stage one in the second stage and then a third stage which was probably also adapted from another missile there was only one test flight of this and it had a dummy second and third stage but it looks like it failed after 45 seconds possibly because the stage separation system fired early or it lost the will to live they did actually demonstrate that they could make this monstrosity fly but before they progressed to another flight there was that whole gulf war thing and afterwards iraq was forced to give up its long-range missiles to stop them doing bad things with them at the time we thought that meant threatening their neighbors but it might equally have been to stymie their engineers who thought that the al abed was a good idea clustering together small rockets to make a bigger rocket has also seen in the us in the form of the conestoga 1620 which looks like a bunch of white crayons held together with black rubber bands i guess the rocket builders were planning on getting a bulk discount on cast or four solid rocket motors because they used seven in the first stage uh seven in the rocket sorry they would ignite four then two and then one as a descended they actually had a number of different designs based on the same idea but this was the only one that ever flew to its credit while the rocket looked squat and ugly on the launch pad when it finally flew failed and was aborted it did produce some very pretty patterns in the sky as the still burning boosters went their separate ways the polar opposite of this is a rocket with a single big solid rocket booster that is the aries x1 which has a big solid rocket booster from a space shuttle with a boilerplate on top that was supposed to represent the planned hydrolox upper stages and the orion capsule so this has the effect of making it resemble a snake that has consumed a substantial meal and is now going to spend the next week digesting it it looks upside down with a fatter stage on the front a lot of this is because of the equally ugly politics that tried to push this as a cargo vehicle for the iss instead of the commercial vehicles which would take flight a year later so far it's the only shuttle-derived launch vehicle to actually fly even if it was cancelled before it could launch again there are a lot of different shuttle derived launch vehicle concepts which never made it off paper which means technically they don't qualify for this but i'm including a couple because technically part of them did actually fly as boosters on the space shuttle and you know there are eyesores that leap off the pages of these white papers the srb x has been described as the single worst shuttle derived launcher ever proposed it was a proposal for a geostationary orbit capable booster for the air force and it probably started out as a sensible idea to build a rocket using the shuttle boosters to boost another core with a shuttle booster on it and then extra upper stages but they wanted to reduce costs by using the existing shuttle launch pads so the boosters had to be the same distance apart on the pad as they would be if they were attached to the space shuttle's external tank and this means that the booster cluster looks like they're trying to stay as far away from each other while working together kind of like they're embarrassed or maybe they sort of develop some sort of social distancing protocol for rockets needless to say this concept lost out to the titan and then there was the jupiter 3 laid out by team vision incorporated in a 2006 paper it was a franken rocket which is served with a massive helping of whiskey tango foxtrot this monster heavy lift vehicle would have a core with a pair of shuttle external tanks and each of those would have their own pair of shuttle boosters attached the bottom of the core would have a set of rs-68 engines which would be fueled from the external tanks which meant that a whole lot dropped off during staging after that they would have another couple of core stages and a massive fairing for 160 tons of payload in the art they make it look like a pair of space shuttles launching the first stage of a saturn v which might sound cool to some i'm sorry it's it's not for the final few ugly rockets let's scale back our dreams and look at some rockets that were never designed to go to space first up the navajo cruise missile an early design for a nuclear cruise missile which just looks ridiculously ungainly on the launch pad it had a rocket booster to get up to speed and then this would drop away and let the supersonic ramjets do the work to bring the payload to the target if you separated the cruise missile from the booster actually did look kind of cool but we're talking about the full package here because it was a test program many of the missiles were painted bright colours to make them easy to see which doesn't really improve on the random mess of wings engines and intakes that was the navajo it never entered service because the atlas icbm could do the same thing in less time even before this we have the v2 hermes which put ram jets on top of a v2 rocket with a monster wedge-shaped wing that forced them to add even bigger fins on the bottom of the v2 for stability and this rocket actually caused a bit of an international incident when during one launch it started going the wrong way and the range safety officer was unable to terminate the flight because one of the rocket designers physically restrained him the rocket ended up flying into mexico and leaving a substantial crater near an airfield it probably didn't help that the engineers had recently been brought over from germany as part of operation paperclip finally to show that nothing is sacred here goddard's historic achievements in rocketry should not let us forget that not only did his first rocket design look bad but it was ass backwards with the engines at the top and the fuel tank at the bottom because he thought that this would be more stable yes the guy that literally invented rocket science also fell for the pendulum rocket fallacy but i can forgive him for this misstep on the way to making history unlike me he didn't have kerbal space program to experiment with first i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 528,571

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Id: nl0QDkAwxWY

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/natedogg787]

Ot's okay, Ariane 4. You'll always be beautiful.. to me.

[u/TommyGames36]

Honestly this video gave me so much inspiration for my KSP playthrough.