The BIS Plan

On the Moon

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The British Interplanetary Society, founded in 1933, was blessed with a fortuitous mixture of circumstances. On the one hand it boasted a membership of highly intelligent individuals with active imaginations. And on the other, English law prohibited civilian rocket experiments, which probably saved several bank accounts and quite a few limbs. While the German Verein fur Raumschiffahrt and the American Rocket Society struggled with meager funds to build working rocket engines, the BIS was free to concentrate on more theoretical projects without picking shrapnel out of their hair.

In 1937, the BIS started work on a Moon project. Their first run at the problem combined ingenuity with a frightening confidence in their ability to convince any sane person to ride in their Moon rocket. This consisted of a capsule perched on top of a rocket made up of nests of about 2500 little solid fueled rockets set to fire in layers and hurl the capsule moonward... assuming that it didn't simply blast it to atoms instead.

In 1949, the BIS revisited their Moon idea and updated it to take into account the advances in rocket technology. The show piece of their final design was their moonlander. Little known today, the BIS moonlander was the first serious spaceship design to break the streamlined cigar shape and set forth a specialised craft whose sole purpose was to land on the airless surface of the Moon.

Unlike earlier speculation, the BIS ship was useless until it was in space. In fact, it could barely support its own weight on Earth. It was designed to be sent up as dead payload atop a booster rocket. Once in Earth orbit, it would shed its aerodynamic cowling and be refueled by a tanker ship. Then the stubby craft with its crew of three and its definitely not streamlined landing legs would set off for the Moon using its relatively small rocket engine. For return, the lower part of the ship would act as the launch pad for the capsule on top, which would either return directly to Earth or rendezvous with a tanker in lunar orbit.

The whole thing sounds remarkably like the Apollo LEM, though not nearly as lumpy.

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