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Never Built 1200 Marine Spaceship Rocket - Anywhere in the world in 45 Minutes - ICARUS

Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
0:44 - Human Rockets in WW2
2:40 - Incredible Parter Amazon
3:58 - ICARUS
6:17 - Launching the rocket!
8:07 - Jetpacks?!
8:54 - Hidden Features
9:40 - What Happened?
12:15 - Future Of Earth To Earth Rockets

Carrying 1,200 marines around the world in just 45 minutes, this incredible rocket design would have radically changed the battlefield and made everything from aircraft to battleships obsolete.

But this crazy invention never quite made it off the drawing board and became forgotten in a world obsessed with machines with wings.

This is the never-built ICARUS rocket!

One of the very first was during world war two. Rocket scientist von Bran sketched a rough drawing of three men inside of a V2 nazi rocket, hinting at further aspirations of rocket travel. But this design wouldn't get picked up until nearly 20 years later in 1956.

Using a Jupiter IRBM as the base, this rocket design would instead of a payload transport 18 combat troops 500 miles (800km) into the heart of the battle. It would land using a combination of thrusters and parachutes.

This concept would then be picked up by the army and modified into the Transport Version of the Redstone Short Range Ballistic Missle. But this concept could only carry as many troops as a helicopter and had the same range.

In 1963, engineer Phil Bono took the existing concept of ROMBUS, ground to orbit heavy-lift rocket and modified it for military earth-to-earth operations. It was called Inter-continental Aerospacecraft Range Unlimited System, or ICARUS

It was able to carry 1,200 fully equipped soldiers or 132 tonnes of military equipment within 7600 nautical miles. The rocket would launch and achieve a speed of 17,000 miles per hour, meaning any point in the range could be reached in only 45 minutes.

For this rocket to work, it would require a 70-foot in diameter payload model with six decks - pressurized for the flight. It also had strong landing gear and rockets to allow the spacecraft to land safely.

The commandant of the USMC, General Wallace M. Greene Jr quoted "The impact of this application of space technology of the project of national military power is staggering to contemplate"

By the next year of 1964, the concept was well underway of development, although with a changed name. the powers that be didn't quite like the Icarus legend and thus changed it to Ithacus.

How would it work?

Soldiers would have been 'stacked' on six decks with couches for 200 of each level. The couches would have rotated for each phase of flight, and the soldiers would have been able to comfortably ride the rocket.

There would have been a separate crew compartment for four pilots, located in an ejectable capsule on the side of the rocket.

For a normal mission, the rocket would launch with a 3-g acceleration for 70 seconds. . The rocket would ark at 127 nautical miles, 235 km, above the surface. The spacecraft would then perform it's 10 minutes descent, hitting the atmosphere at 400,000 feet. Once deactivated, it would glide to the landing zone before coming laterally still and stalling over the intended drop zone. At 2,500 feet or 700 meters, the rocket would ignite its engines again and land like the luna module.

The project was intended to be developed alongside the original ROMBUS rocket project - simply becoming an offshoot from that design. As the ROMBUS didn't move ahead, it would have been substantially expensive to go ahead with the ICARUS design.

Hence, why the engineers also worked on a design called the ICARUS Jr. A smaller rocket with the same range but could only carry 170 troops or 33,500 kg of cargo.

The advantage of this smaller design was that it wasn't limited to land-based launch sites. It could actually be launched off the deck of a nuclear aircraft carrier (a modified one).

But unlike these rocket ideas, they never really took off and US space exploration shifted dramatically after Apollo to an idea of a reusable aircraft shuttle. Douglas tried to shift with a concept called the Hyperion, a rocket sled aircraft that launched off a mountain.

There were attempts over each decade to bring the concept back of a manned missile system, such as the Douglas clipper that proved the reusable rocket model

As Space X forges a new pathway to the stars, we can't but help imagine that had this military project gone ahead we might today be decades further in our exploration in space - or we might have entered a new age of war and strife. After all, when countries can be toppled in a manner of minutes, what do borders even mean.