[AR] Re: clustering big rockets
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 19:29:38 -0500 (EST)
On Sun, 27 Dec 2015, Richard Garcia wrote:
The Energiya went defunct pretty much with the fall of the soviet union,
long before the French and Russians started cooperating on launches...
That was when it was effectively grounded, but the program didn't die
immediately. For some years after the collapse of the USSR, reviving
Energia would have been a reasonable idea, if there had been customers.
But it took a while for organized cooperation to materialize, and there
was still that awkward question of who the Energia customers would be...
After WWII the French wanted their own nuclear weapons and ICBM's. They
did [not] want to depend on foreign powers for nuclear strategic
defense.
Not so much after WWII, but after the Suez crisis of 1956, when it became
clear that (a) the USSR was willing to threaten nuclear attack against
non-nuclear countries to get its way, and (b) the US could not be relied
on to counter-threaten if they weren't part of the dispute. (Britain and
France invaded Egypt after the Soviet-backed regime there nationalized the
Suez Canal. The US hadn't been consulted in advance and didn't like the
idea, and so refused to get involved. Britain had tested a nuclear bomb
but didn't have operational nuclear weapons, and France had nothing, so
they had to back down when the Soviets threatened attack.) France had
been interested in nuclear weapons anyway, but this settled it -- such
humiliation was intolerable, so France had to have its own nuclear bombs
and credible all-French ways of delivering them. The bombs and aircraft
to carry them came first, followed by IRBMs (no need for ICBMs when the
main targets weren't that far away), and eventually by SLBMs and subs to
carry them.
French launchers came a bit later, and were mostly new hardware but drew
heavily on the missile technology base. Desultory efforts had been
underway for a while, but things really went into high gear after the
Symphonie episode -- for some years the US had been saying "no need to
develop your own launchers, we'll launch your satellites for you", but
when the Franco-German Symphonie project asked, the response was "um, er,
we didn't mean *commercial* satellites". The US State Dept. having veto
power over French space activities was intolerable, so France, er excuse
us we meant Europe :-), clearly needed its own independent launch
capability ASAP. Hence Ariane.
Henry
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