OK I realized I had wrongly thought we made a promise to put a man in space by the decade's end. Don't know how, but in that case might as well go slow.
[X] [HUMAN] Go with a two-seat spacecraft.
[X] [BOTHER] Divert resources to rebuilding Electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa
It's Korolev's next request, which is arguably
more important than a promise seeing the rewards from completing the last one on schedule.
Counterpoint, when are we gonna make the 30 year booster? 1960, 1965?
The 1960-1965 planning period, yeah. Our next five years are going to be focused on several difficult tasks (weather satellites, venusian probe, martian probe, person in orbit), the recent update's language has my "toeing the line on crunch" warning bells ringing, and there's no pressing need for us to do this. We shouldn't try and run before we can walk, and that means our focus for now should be doing these quick goals with what we can instead of making an unreliable stopgap solution that we replace soon anyways.
You don't just want high performance upper stages, lightweight tanks and high pressure engines, you also talk about reusability, so I think you want to move the R-5 off past the end of this manned spaceflight program.
Yeah, I'm not making a secret of the fact that I would prefer if we tried to limit our objectives for the next five years to what I feel is achievable. Stuff like the interplanetary program is going to take a lot of effort; designing an entirely new rocket at the same time feels like too much. Making a new rocket also is more likely to kill an astronaut - we've got several R-4 launches under our belt, and are going to be doing a
lot more in 1957 with our weather satellite program. The more launches we do, the lower the die roll needed to succeed. If we want to successfully do a two-person capsule, then we're designing an entirely new rocket, launching it enough time with dummy payloads to get reliability numbers down to a good value, and then launching crew into orbit, all by the end of the decade. I don't think we can get the ~2 dozen launches we'd have with the R-4 and R-4a on a new platform, and to me, astronaut safety is the
most important thing here.
I certainly get the impression that you just want to launch this capsule once and then try to forget about manned spaceflight until there's something that needs to be assembled in space and then you want the workforce to appear just in time.
I
do want to launch
this capsule (with an astronaut) only once; we have no idea how well it'll perform yet and are operating under a time crunch. We can then go back to the drawing board and design an improved capsule with improved ergonomics, reliability, ability to perform orbital science, etc.
If by "try to forget about it" you mean "have our primary objective for the 1960-1965 5-year period be to build a safe, reliable, and low-cost launch system for putting crew into space", well...
I'm less optimistic about that-and more practically, I think we'll want a bigger than the R-4 launch vehicle. Because the R-4 is really, really small. It's about the size of Falcon 1, and I don't think that we can actually do a lot of missions with it. Even if you R-4a, I don't think you'll get a significant launch payload out of it. So I want a new rocket, maybe not the final rocket, but something good for an interim.
An interim rocket is inherently not a good rocket. It'll be a costly, rushed development, with poor reliability, and providing us with no actual scientific benefit over a single-crew rocket. Current satellites are all very small, so I'm not sure why you're concerned about a launch payload? When it comes time to launch actual big things like orbital laboratories, those'll require a bigger rocket than the interim rocket anyways.
