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!
source/image(PrtSC): Found And Explained
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. Watch the video from Found And Explained for more info:
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.
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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.//Found And Explained
