You got it right, but it’s worth reading the whole thing:

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own

-James Russell Lowell

Regarding the rest of the recent comments here, all this space talk is interesting technically, but I must say it is silly. “Colonize Mars.” For “resources.” The expense of getting to/from is incredible, no less trying to sustain yourself there. Your return on investment for those resources would be 1/100, at best. The “space race” was helpful in giving us strategic control of the “high ground.” Satellites, materials, advanced computers. But the technological breakthroughs discussed in these comments on how to “get there” are regarding propulsion/energy systems which could be developed for different uses (power generation applications) here, on earth. We don’t need the goal of further space travel to develop better technology in that regard. It’s quaint that y’all still hear sirens calling from Titan, but like Vonnegut (who wrote a book by that name), space travel is dead. It’ll be unmanned or not at all from now on. The original discussion here was about reality, and it is impinging on your vision because people have an abundance of alternatives when it comes to spending money.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m going to request our documents person to do a search on this. However my past experience has been that most of the documents have been shredded.

There’s a very good book out about the development of
the Titan-II ICBM titled: “Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program” by David K. Stumpf. I had previously done a literature search on the Mk-6 RV that the Titan-II carried but was only partially
successful. Then I found Stumpf’s book and was surprised by what he could dig up. I think the secret
to Stumpf’s success was that he accessed material archived in the classified section of the US Air Force Academy Library. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a huge body of single copy paper documents dry-rotting on the shelves of the US Air Force Academy Library that have not been microfilmed or scanned into PDFs. We might be in a “Library of Alexandria” situation where a single fire could wipe out a significant fraction of what the human race knows about aerospace technology.

Have you talked to the people at Army Space and Missile at Huntsville (the real one, not the Atari video game)? Seems that I recall they have kind of a tech library there you can access.

“When Pres Bush’s space explortion initiative first came up I saw Buzz Aldrin on TV advocating a duplicate of Apollo using Shuttle SRBs.”

I suspect Buzz Aldrin was advocating this in the context of a manned Mars program. It is not common knowledge but a big limiter for a heavy payload (manned) Mars lander is the fairing diameter of the launcher to Low Earth Orbit. The martian atmosphere is just dense enough that a designer must worry about aerodynamics. However the martian atmosphere is so thin that getting something to slow down before whacking into the planet’s surface is very difficult. An obvious solution is to make the aeroshell really big and thus reduce the ballistic coefficient. We’ve learned over the years that on-orbit assembly is really not an option (too hard to do with guys in pressure suits). Consequently, a Mars lander needs to be launched as a single piece thus requiring a really big launcher. People have been trying to work around this with deployable decelerators, e.g. ballutes, etc. However ballutes are a very dodgy technology. You really don’t want something flapping around at Mach 10. The decelerator really needs to be rock solid with a well defined thermal protection system.

“The Hera target vehicle contractor is Coleman Aerospace in Orlando. Since Space Vector apparently did the modified Minuteman booster stages for Coleman, I would assume that Coleman handled overall integration, including using the surplus Pershing II RV.”

Thank you. I’ve actually been interacting with some of the folks at L3-Coleman Aerospace. It was through L3-Coleman that I acquired an aerodynamic model for the Pershing-II MaRV or “MTV” as they like to call it. This model is extremely sophisticated (easily the most sophisticated model that I’ve ever worked with). However L3-Coleman did not develop this model on their own but rather inherited it from the original manufacturer (presumably Martin Marietta or Goodyear Aerospace). L3-Coleman has already provided me with the raw aerodynamic coefficients but without the functional forms (the actual equations). For example, there are corrections to the axial and normal body force coefficients based upon the fin deflection angles. However I do not know the functional form to apply those corrections. What I’d really like to obtain is the Martin Marietta / Goodyear Aerospace technical report that provides the functional forms for the aerodynamic model (the aerodynamic data book). This report would have been classified when the Pershing-II MaRV was still a weapon. If standard practice was followed, all copies of the report would have been shreded after Martin Marietta / Goodyear Aerospace ceased to have a financial interest in the Pershing-II MaRV (the report would have been declassified but no longer exists because all copies were shreded). However a retired engineer who was originally involved might have a copy of the report stuck in a box in his garage.

The Hera target vehicle contractor is Coleman Aerospace in Orlando. Since Space Vector apparently did the modified Minuteman booster stages for Coleman, I would assume that Coleman handled overall integration, including using the surplus Pershing II RV. You might give them a call. I used to know a guy there but it has been a while.

When Pres Bush’s space explortion initiative first came up I saw Buzz Aldrin on TV advocating a duplicate of Apollo using Shuttle SRBs.

The WSJ had an interesting article a few weeks back about the replacements of older big fission power reactors by modularized small reactors that don’t even use control rods. You would have several of these in a nuclear power plant rather than one big one, making it much safer and easier to shut one down and still keep the plant up in the event of a need for maintenance. And I guess they are much cheaper and easier to build, too.