Sea Dragon (rocket)

The Sea Dragon was a 1962 design study for a very large reusable two-stage launch vehicle that would have lifted payloads to low Earth orbit from the open ocean. Robert Truax led the work while employed at Aerojet, as one of several designs in which a rocket is floated out to sea and launched from the water. The idea was a cheap heavy launcher, sometimes called a big dumb booster, built from inexpensive 8 mm steel sheet in an ordinary shipyard and towed to the launch site, where ballast tanks tipped it upright with the payload just above the waterline. At about 150 m long and 23 m wide it would have been the largest rocket ever built, with a first stage burning RP-1 and liquid oxygen and a second stage burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Its claimed payload was up to 550 tonnes to low Earth orbit. Despite interest at NASA and Todd Shipyards the design was never built.