3/21/2023 0 Comments Nasa rocket stage agena![]() Side-by-side tanks, needing odd shapes and positions to maintain CG on centerline pressure-fed engines with low ISP and heavy propellant tanks It flew the least and has many obvious deficiencies as a satellite booster: Titan Transtage really is the odd man among early US upper stages. I'm not entirely sure why this was, although most likely because its primary payloads were polar orbiting Corona et al which couldn't be flown from the Cape. The suggestion raised in here that Thor-Agena didn't have enough delta V from the Cape for GATV is interesting as is the vehicle's being limited to West Coast launches. But then let's be honest, the thing was an IRBM originally, not an ICBM like Atlas and Titan. In regards to the use of Thor in Gemini, obviously that was never even considered Thor didn't have enough lift capacity for either the main spacecraft or GATV. And remember that NASA used Agena mainly due to lack of other options for planetary probes they'd always intended to use Centaur, but it wasn't operational until '67.Īgenas were also often bus satellites, particularly with DOD missions, though GATV can I suppose count as one despite being the payload itself. Also as mentioned in here, less is known about later Agenas since NASA really didn't use them after the Lunar Orbiter program aside from OGO-3 and SEASAT and they were launching s00per sekrit things like Jumpseat and Rhyolite. Some of these were malfunctions of the Thor/Atlas, but the Agena was extremely troublesome since it was early and the problems of air starting a rocket stage took a while to solve. Much like how Atlas was being standardized around this time as the SLV-3.Ī lot of the early Agena flights up to '63 failed. Agena B (flown 1961-66) was the initial operational variant with stretched propellant tanks and restart capability and of course Agena D (introduced 1963) was a fully standardized variant, except as Dwayne points out, not really since it still had a lot of custom mods for each mission type. Agena A was the first prototype variant flown in 1959-60. ![]()
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