He won't really care until someone mentions putting them on submarines, then his ears will perk up. And hate it. Until someone points out they'll also need a lot of new submarines. And then his disposition will improve markedly.
Third: While a few such marriages may have actually occurred in that time period, my point was that depicting such a marriage on a TV show would have been very controversial and unusual.
If the development of the ammolox engines proceed without any great hurdles I assume there will be some sort of inertia keeping the propellant combination flying well into the 60s, and perhaps evolving into it's own 'RP-1' mixture for increased performance. I think there was an article on how Russians were looking into 330+ ISP at sea level with an ammonia/acetylene fuel in the 2010s.
Just found this one, and was motivated to go and read LEVIATHAN Rising, which took a fair chunk of my day. Never thought I could be so interested in US inter-service wranglings over obscure 1950s missile programs...
Anyway, great TL. Looking forward to more stories of bold futurism, alt-SF-culture and Mad Rocket Science(TM), layered over a firm base of hubris, ambition, Cold War politics and and bureaucratic backstabbery.
But it was better than the ammonia-acetylene witch’s brew, which Dr. Clark was steadfast he would not be allowed on his test-stands. Or, if he was ordered to do so, he would only do it from a safe distance. Like White Sands. Or the French Riviera.
I would like to tip my protective helmet to those bold people who, in a few scant years, have come up with something that Dr John "Ignition" Clark won't have on his test stands. But I understand his reticence. If the answer to anything is "add large quantities of acetylene to stabilise it", you might just want to reconsider the question.
Dr. Paul Winternitz, a man who would go on to have a very unhealthy interest in boranes – and Robert Truax, also mentioned above. Ammolox, however, was not their first choice for a propellant. That was a combination of hydrazine and liquid oxygen. But in 1949, hydrazine’s propensity to self-detonate when used for regenerative cooling
I do wonder if some of these people went into rocket science because they were quasi-stable borderline suicidal pyromaniacs in the first place, or whether it was brought on by cumulative exposure to exotic fuels...
If the development of the ammolox engines proceed without any great hurdles I assume there will be some sort of inertia keeping the propellant combination flying well into the 60s, and perhaps evolving into it's own 'RP-1' mixture for increased performance. I think there was an article on how Russians were looking into 330+ ISP at sea level with an ammonia/acetylene fuel in the 2010s.
That was basically OTL, though, wasn't it? As the institutional inertia was in the form of the X-15. And there's even less reason for the XLR30 not to be selected ITTL given it will (almost certainly) be an actual, physical, working engine by the time of the X-15 tender given that the XLR34 has done a lot of the legwork of teething the XLR30 and making it actually functional. (As for whether NAA will be chosen to build the X-15 in the first place, that particular detail from LEVIATHAN Rising -- of NAA building the X-15 and the D-674 being spun-off as a separate Navy program -- is still slated to occur.)
Regarding Atsetam -- what I believe the 68%/32% ammonia/acetylene combination the Russians were considering is called -- I'd be skeptical of any headline ISP figures, as I want to say it was intended to run in an RD-161 as higher energy upper-stage. So while the sea-level numbers might be gaudy, that's not what the Russians were talking about using it for, at least at first. And even then, the performance gain for booster applications is probably comparable to sintin, which just begs the question of why you're playing around with that much liquid acetylene in the first place.
Fun fact, though, apropos of absolutely nothing at all: The Soviets sat down and determined, for all but the highest energy missions, the best propellant combination for an upper stage was, in fact, ammonia and liquid flourine. Assuming you used Soviet tankage masses as a baseline. If you threw American balloon-tank witchcraft at the problem, you could get even more mileage from the combination. Probably won't be relevant to anything in the future, I'm sure.
Anyway, great TL. Looking forward to more stories of bold futurism, alt-SF-culture and Mad Rocket Science(TM), layered over a firm base of hubris, ambition, Cold War politics and and bureaucratic backstabbery.
I would like to tip my protective helmet to those bold people who, in a few scant years, have come up with something that Dr John "Ignition" Clark won't have on his test stands. But I understand his reticence. If the answer to anything is "add large quantities of acetylene to stabilise it", you might just want to reconsider the question.
The acetylene wasn't to stabilize the ammonia: Quite the opposite, in fact! The problem RMI had with ammonia was that it too stable and didn't want to burn consistently. Which led to two separate problems. The first being hard-starts, where an excessive amount of fuel would be added to the combustion chamber during start-up as they figured out the correct O/F ratio, and which -- at their worst -- would cause an engine to develop a case of the explosions. The other, more insidious, problem being that even when they got a motor started, incomplete combustion would lead to unburned fuel pooling in the combustion chamber. Until the pooled fuel decided it wanted to be rocket fuel too, whose touching off would cause the engine's rapid self-disassembly as well.
The acetylene smoothed out the combustion, both by widening the ignition envelope and making sure all of the fuel regularly burned. It just did so at the expense of making a fifth of the fuel liquid acetylene with all of the problems you get with that. "Dangerously unstable" is a rarefied term for Clark and things like ozone (as an oxidizer) were also described that way. He states in Ignition! that the 78/22 ammonia-acetylene fuel did work and was "not used for long", which leaves the reader to wonder just how many firings RMI did of it and how many accidents were had in the process for even Fifties rocketeers to determine the stuff wasn't worth the hassle.
I do wonder if some of these people went into rocket science because they were quasi-stable borderline suicidal pyromaniacs in the first place, or whether it was brought on by cumulative exposure to exotic fuels...
All of this completely omits Frank Parsons, the Solid-Fuel Whisperer, who did in fact blow himself up. So I think the answer to your question is: "Yes".
The acetylene wasn't to stabilize the ammonia: Quite the opposite, in fact! The problem RMI had with ammonia was that it too stable and didn't want to burn consistently.
Should we start a list of things we don't want as rocket fuel?
I'll start FOOF, Di Flourine Di Oxide. The compound currently has no practical applications, but has been of theoretical interest,it does however lead to some interesting theoretical aplications.
Should we start a list of things we don't want as rocket fuel?
I'll start FOOF, Di Flourine Di Oxide. The compound currently has no practical applications, but has been of theoretical interest,it does however lead to some interesting theoretical aplications.
Lose an oxygen atom, though, and you get a fun oxidizer: OF2 is an unironically potent tool for deep space missions, as it can get hydrolox-grade ISP with the right fuel while being space-storable so boil-off isn't a concern. ...the right fuel probably being diborane, so it's just about peak crazy in terms of propellant chemistry.
Funnily enough, Alex Streng -- made famous to modern, non-technical audiences by Things I Won't Work With as the mad lad who did much of the experimental work with FOOF -- will turn up eventually. Because it's the Space Race and we need even more interest in LF2 as an oxidizer, beyond OTL's already highly questionable interest in FLOX for booster applications. The 88% LF2 version of FLOX would've certainly been something, what with all of the hydrofluoric acid that'd've bathed your entire launch complex.
The 1950s and 1960s were perhaps the most interesting decades for rocket fuels, where thousands of patents from civilians to companies were published with the most unheard propellant combinations, from alcohols to sulfides to phosphorus containing compounds and so on.
Though, the most forgotten, or rather ignored in favor of flourine compounds are the boranes, which technically are safer and easier to handle.
This might be an unpopular opinion but nowadays nobody wants to use any 'toxic' fuels as they are a health hazard and dangerous even if they could improve the performance of rockets and deep space probes. (If a rocket fails and you are near it, it won't matter if you die from toxic fumes or from freezing to death from LOX)
So RMI still has OTL's "luck" with both success and failure. Does this mean they don't develop the XLR40 Super-performance engine proposed for the F8 Crusader? That exploding during maintenance (which is looks like was not properly carried out) but still managed to seriously hurt RMI.
Should we start a list of things we don't want as rocket fuel?
I'll start FOOF, Di Flourine Di Oxide. The compound currently has no practical applications, but has been of theoretical interest,it does however lead to some interesting theoretical aplications.
I believe this document has you covered, though to be fair (a) it's fictional (probably) & (b) they were trying to come up with the most lethally insane fuel possible.
Very glad to see you back. Hope IRL treats you well.
While "LEVIATHAN" may have had plans to go a little bit... outrageous... it never did. We never even saw Sputnik fly.
I don't see anything wrong in being daring and even outrageous. We can be outrageous without going ASB. We have so many space TLs that are just moving budgets around and mostly trying to deliver some Space Task Group 1969 ideas by early 2010s. Promise of going even further with no magic and just better planning was so hellishly intriguing in LEVI.
I fully support your timeline and writing, just saying there is no need to say stuff like "more grounded" at least when it comes to mere think tank level planing and brainstorming.
This might be an unpopular opinion but nowadays nobody wants to use any 'toxic' fuels as they are a health hazard and dangerous even if they could improve the performance of rockets and deep space probes. (If a rocket fails and you are near it, it won't matter if you die from toxic fumes or from freezing to death from LOX)
The counterpoint, of course, being that to a certain degree all rocket fuels are inherently dangerous. A rocket is, at its core, nothing more than a very precisely controlled explosion whose energies are directed to provide thrust. The stuff that goes into the combustion chamber, by its very nature, must be fairly reactive and prone to detonation to make the whole machine work. Even the most benign of the hydrocarbon fuels -- kerosene, methane, and propane -- carry significant handling risks, as kerosene is just a fancy way of saying jet fuel and its combustible fumes, while methane and propane both require either cryogenic or pressurized handling to make them workable. And then there's LH2, which one can write entire treatises on why it's a danger to its users. (There's a reason why hydrazine was considered a wonder fuel and why, even today, strong arguments can be made in favor of it even with its being fairly noxious if you do end up exposed to it.) While bleves are a thing and eternal risk with the best oxidizer on hand, while the "benign" replacement for LOX in most applications -- H2O2 -- will quite happily spontaneously self-detonate via decomposition if it isn't stored just right.
Which is why it's so fun to read about "exotic" rocket fuels, because, given the witch's brews that actually get used, you get to see just how pants-on-head crazy they are that even the guys who have internalized "my day job involves trying to find a better way to make a sustainable explosion" think they're a bit much.
So RMI still has OTL's "luck" with both success and failure. Does this mean they don't develop the XLR40 Super-performance engine proposed for the F8 Crusader? That exploding during maintenance (which is looks like was not properly carried out) but still managed to seriously hurt RMI.
RMI's still RMI, for better or worse. The best metaphor for where the firm is at is that it's gone through its experiences with the XLR99 almost a decade sooner than OTL, as the XLR99 was a rather traumatic experience for the company that forced it -- as a matter of necessity -- to grow-up and start transitioning from a hobbyist early market entrant into being a professional aerospace firm. But by the time that the XLR99 was done, their reputation was in tatters and they'd already been bought by Thiokol, who were not brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect of new liquid-fueled rocket designs. ITTL, the process has been considerably smoother -- cost blowouts notwithstanding, considerable though they may be -- and that, for 1952, the XLR34 is an impressive creature. Certainly compared to the XLR43, which despite its headline thrust, still has peroxide-driven pumps, a far more modest chamber pressure, and a 75/25 alcolox propellant. Time will tell if RMI can have a different fate, but at the very least the XLR30's development -- greenlit by BuAer the moment the XLR34 was accepted -- cannot possibly be more cursed than it was IOTL. As it's hard to get more comically inept than the way that engine was handled by both the Navy and RMI IOTL.
Regarding the XLR40, odds are pretty good they'll still want the contract and will probably get it, given the Navy's general satisfaction with their work product thus far. The butterflies come from the various institutional responses to the XLR34 program, of which there are plenty, as Captain Heinlein was not terribly enthused with the amount of work NRL had to expend keeping the XLR34 on-track. And, of course, there's the money: The Mini-XLR99 Experience that was the XLR34 cost twice what the whole of OTL's Project Viking consumed just to build the Viking II's engine, when it was originally to cost a twentieth of that. That's institutionally intolerable outside of the very specific circumstances NRL found itself in between 1950 and 1952. Especially as the bottomless buckets of money for guided missile development seem to have disappeared, at least for the time being.
So you probably get the XLR40. But whether it'll explode randomly and kill a few people, well, that's another matter entirely...
don't see anything wrong in being daring and even outrageous. We can be outrageous without going ASB. We have so many space TLs that are just moving budgets around and mostly trying to deliver some Space Task Group 1969 ideas by early 2010s. Promise of going even further with no magic and just better planning was so hellishly intriguing in LEVI.
I don't want to knock people who do what you describe. As it's what any sane person does: You don't have to teach yourself most of what you're working with from scratch and you have a nearly endless variety of ideas, vetted by highly skilled teams of professional engineers, to pick from in terms of what you want. You don't have to do things like run down copies of Advanced Engine Development at Pratt & Whitney and The Viking Rocket Story for basic narrative background. (Both of which are absolutely worth your time, if you've got any interest at all in somewhat obscure astronautical history.) To say nothing of the hell that is trying to get decent sources on something like HATV. And you don't have to make choices like what could be done with, say, HATV had it been attempted to be built. Or what role to offer things like Meteor Junior. Doing an Apollo era -- or post-Apollo era -- space TL lets you have all the fun stuff, the big reusable rockets and Mars missions, without having to spend 25,000 words for the privilege of getting...a different, better-performing engine for the RTV-N-12a.
But there are benefits to building one's foundation one agonizing brick at a time. And I'd say -- to make the subtext just plain text -- that the prospect of launching a two-stage rocket, with a hydrolox upper-stage, in 1952 delivering on the promise of the original LEVIATHAN Rising with a space program that is quite different while still being true to most of the OTL dynamics of the period. There's also the fact that...well...spoilers below. That don't spoil much, but you shouldn't click on it anyway unless you absolutely want the fun taken out of Chapter 4.
Just run a little math for Viking 9. You've got a two-stage sounding rocket. The first-stage has a wet mass of ~14,000 pounds and a dry mass of ~2,000 pounds, with an engine that generates 25,000-lbf of thrust with 232 ISP. Add a second-stage that's got ~2,500 pounds of wet mass and ~750 pounds of dry mass, with an engine that generates 3,000-lbf of thrust with 380 ISP. Add 1,000 pounds for payload to the upper stage. Now calculate the apogee of the payload. And then contemplate just how large of a blender everything about space sciences is about to get thrown into.
I fully support your timeline and writing, just saying there is no need to say stuff like "more grounded" at least when it comes to mere think tank level planing and brainstorming.
"More grounded" chiefly refers to my understanding the history of the technical evolution rocketry and spaceflight. When I started LEVIATHAN Rising, I had a decent understanding of things, and Dunning-Kruger'd myself into thinking I could just force my way with authorial hand-waving through the preliminaries to get to the fun things of cool allohistorical rockets for the Space Race. What actually trying to do that taught me is that -- as a wise person and frequent commentator on space threads (even if he does have a soft spot for the Chair Force) once said -- everything is connected to everything else. Without a deep and thorough understanding of just how people and projects ping-ponged off of each other, you can't really harness the butterflies of changes to do the heavy-lifting of establishing plausibility for the stuff that interests you. Or, at least, making it plausible enough for my own sensibilities. So as I gained that knowledge throughout LEVIATHAN Rising, I came to find I was deeply dissatisfied with my writing thus far. Not because of its crazy sci-fi trappings -- goodness no, you can't have good Fifties timeline without a good deal of outlandishness! -- but the degree to which it simply relied on rank invocations of authorium and hand-waving to make what I wanted to happen happen. "More grounded", as I intend it, should be read as "possessing more verisimilitude".
To the extent that verisimilitude has any place in space timeline that will involve an actual Admiral Heinlein who really, really would like to prevent the Soviets from building spacecraft if he thought he could.
When talking about realism constraints. It doesn't matter what official policy and plans say. Some stuff is just difficult and takes time and money and effort.
Not goofing around and saying "LOX/LH2 upper stages or bust" from the start is already a good step. If you can afford the money and time for it. Though it is idea that existed IRL, but look at how many US launchers used solid or hypergolic upper stages even after RL10 flew first time.
No one is getting a liquid core nuclear engine even close to a test stand until late '70es or early '80es even with unlimited budgets.
"For All Mankind" went full ASB by granting itself magical fusion in early '80es. (It's not He3 availability that's a problem with fusion IRL...)
Nor is anyone building an Orion unless something really extreme happens. Like say detecting a mile wide asteroid with a scheduled date with Atlantic in early '80es during the early '60es. Is astronomy of '60es even capable of such a feat? And why does this sound familiar, I read a story or book where background history was that Apollo and N1 programs were hastily merged to stop a astroid in '70es. Maybe the licenced sequel to Clarke's "Meeting with a medusa"?
Regarding illustrious naval career of Robert A. Heinlein. If someone is working on conceptualizing a serious military presence in LEO they will see fuel depots on their path very quickly.
Ideas of ISRU will have to wait until they know at least something about surfaces of Moon and Mars. Ideally decades faster than IRL ideas, but sadly not mid '50es. As I said in old thread, avoiding Sputnik panic and Kennedy's speech are critical on putting USA spaceflight on a sustainable but constantly incremental path.
The counterpoint, of course, being that to a certain degree all rocket fuels are inherently dangerous. A rocket is, at its core, nothing more than a very precisely controlled explosion whose energies are directed to provide thrust. The stuff that goes into the combustion chamber, by its very nature, must be fairly reactive and prone to detonation to make the whole machine work. Even the most benign of the hydrocarbon fuels -- kerosene, methane, and propane -- carry significant handling risks, as kerosene is just a fancy way of saying jet fuel and its combustible fumes, while methane and propane both require either cryogenic or pressurized handling to make them workable. And then there's LH2, which one can write entire treatises on why it's a danger to its users. (There's a reason why hydrazine was considered a wonder fuel and why, even today, strong arguments can be made in favor of it even with its being fairly noxious if you do end up exposed to it.) While bleves are a thing and eternal risk with the best oxidizer on hand, while the "benign" replacement for LOX in most applications -- H2O2 -- will quite happily spontaneously self-detonate via decomposition if it isn't stored just right.
Which is why it's so fun to read about "exotic" rocket fuels, because, given the witch's brews that actually get used, you get to see just how pants-on-head crazy they are that even the guys who have internalized "my day job involves trying to find a better way to make a sustainable explosion" think they're a bit much.
Oh so very much yes. Any rocket fuel (or fuel/oxidiser combination) is basically a large quantity of potential free energy in a can, dreaming of the moment it can achieve that potential as a rapidly-expanding cloud of hot gas. And the Rocket Equation being what it is, rocket scientists are always looking for ways to stuff even more energy into the smallest, lightest can possible and - oops, was that your test stand?
Oh so very much yes. Any rocket fuel (or fuel/oxidiser combination) is basically a large quantity of potential free energy in a can, dreaming of the moment it can achieve that potential as a rapidly-expanding cloud of hot gas. And the Rocket Equation being what it is, rocket scientists are always looking for ways to stuff even more energy into the smallest, lightest can possible and - oops, was that your test stand?
Not goofing around and saying "LOX/LH2 upper stages or bust" from the start is already a good step. If you can afford the money and time for it. Though it is idea that existed IRL, but look at how many US launchers used solid or hypergolic upper stages even after RL10 flew first time.
The idea of the hydrolox upper-stage does go back to the very beginning of American space stuff, with it being right there in Douglas's World-Circling Spaceship. The problem was that the only people seriously interested in actually building hydrolox rockets for a long while were the Navy, they were enthralled by the siren's song of the hydrolox SSTO, and the moment where they could do something had passed by the time the money might have been there to get started. We got the RL10 basically by accident, due to P&W's work on Suntan colliding with the the cancellation of the T57 turboprop. Folks from the world of Dreams of Atomic Midshipmen would consider how we got our first Pratt & Whitney expander cycle hydrolox engine -- because you can't not have an RL10-alogue in every space TL -- as utter narrative contrivance, given just how contingent it was.
Re: solids and hypergolics, I think t hat's a bit unfair to RL rocketry development. Reliably starting and sustaining the ignition of a rocket motor is one of the hardest parts of actually designing a rocket, at least in a way that doesn't lead to a rather massive fireball. It's still not easy to do today and we've been at it for seventy-five years. The quest for hypergolics was in no small part to simplify the moving parts of ignition. Solids offered their own advantages in this department too, as well as unparalleled impulse density. So if you lacked a need for a high energy mission, they were perfectly adequate, and removed the need to pull off the tricky feat of lighting a liquid-fueled stage in flight. Hydrolox would turn out to be cheating, with an ignition envelope akin to one that a Boy Scout with flint-and-steel could start, but that wasn't realized for some time and the preference was to avoid needing to provide an ignition source at all if possible.
As for HELIOS, well, the team behind are the same as the OTL gang that was pushing HATV, so you've never lost interest there. There's the institutional need to flex on the Army and Air Force advance the bounds of man's understanding of outer space, well beyond the upper limit of Earth's atmosphere. And if Viking 9 just so happens to take a potentially iconic picture of, say, the entirety of the United States from space in a single frame, isn't it convenient that it's an election year? There's also this guy from NACA Ames -- Harry Allen -- who is unreasonably interested in how the Navy intends to bring Viking 9's payload back down...
Regarding illustrious naval career of Robert A. Heinlein. If someone is working on conceptualizing a serious military presence in LEO they will see fuel depots on their path very quickly.
We'll get there. I still have to actually start reading Space Force doctrinal stuff, as from what I gather a lot of what they're doing is stuff that -- at least conceptually -- are natural consequences of looking at the consideration of space as a warfighting domain and would be arrived at in short order by anyone looking at them the same way. You can get some properly rocketpunk shenanigans, at least in the land of theoretical military thought, if you start with the assumption that the Soviets are working on Korolev's OP, as then Uncle Sam clearly needs maneuvering satellites (and the depots necessary to facilitate that) to counter the Soviets' combat sputniks. With the asterisk that for the Fifties every satellite is anticipated to be manned. Which only goes down to the really ones in the Sixties.
Granted, this bears about as much resemblance to actual usability as the USAAC/USAAF's prewar theories on strategic bombing. But that's part of what makes it narratively interesting, as there's lots of room for juxtaposition about what they get right by actually right, what they get right because of broken clocks and blind squirrels, and the considerable amount of stuff they get wrong. Oh so very wrong.
As a public service announcement for followers of Dreams of Atomic Midshipmen, it's Turtledove season! It snuck up on me this year and I'm sure it snuck up on some of the followers of this thread, too. The thread for Best Spaceflight and Technology Timeline nominations is located here. Nominations close on February 15, meaning there's less than 48 hours left to nominate one of the many deserving TLs which haven't gotten that honor yet this year.
And if there is a TL you think is worthy of consideration, you should nominate it, as a strong showing of interest helps justify maintaining the Best Spaceflight and Technology Timeline as its own separate category.
As it's still Turtledove season, I'd just like to offer a heartfelt thanks to everyone who nominated Dreams of Atomic Midshipmen and who's voted in the 2024 Best Spaceflight and Technology Timeline thread. It's always appreciated to know that people are reading these often winding trips down the rabbit hole of rocketry, both real and allohistorical. It also means you're utterly barmy. But if you're going to be crazy, it might as well be for something as totally awesome as spaceflight.
There's still 48 hours left to vote, by the way. The thread to do so is here. You should also check out all of the other nominated timelines: They're worth your time. But if you're reading this TL, the odds are better than you're subbed to most of them already anyway.
As it's still Turtledove season, I'd just like to offer a heartfelt thanks to everyone who nominated Dreams of Atomic Midshipmen and who's voted in the 2024 Best Spaceflight and Technology Timeline thread. It's always appreciated to know that people are reading these often winding trips down the rabbit hole of rocketry, both real and allohistorical. It also means you're utterly barmy. But if you're going to be crazy, it might as well be for something as totally awesome as spaceflight.
There's still 48 hours left to vote, by the way. The thread to do so is here. You should also check out all of the other nominated timelines: They're worth your time. But if you're reading this TL, the odds are better than you're subbed to most of them already anyway.
Thank you for your work on this! Lots of great space timelines here, but most of them are either (understandable and well-researched) Apollo divergences, or else Shuttle TLs.
The 50's really were a golden rocket age that's hard to find info on, and the potential for the Space Age going down another path is undeniable. Sure, Sea Dragon probably would never have been built... but what about a 25-30 Tonne Excalibur with Gas Generator engines?
Or the GE Apollo getting chosen and started a few years earlier?
Or Gerald Bull getting a propellant launch contract in the early 70s?
21) One of the great and enduring mysteries of the Naval Astronautical Service is where the name “BOWDITCH” originated. As no contemporary acronym was used for the program, the most logical theory is that it is an artifact from an era of typed documents when capitalization of program names occurred to draw emphasis to them. Given the NAS’s affinity for acronyms, however, this has not stopped ambitious wordsmiths from trying. The most popular being “Balls, Why Did I Try to Contradict Heinlein?” from a well-regarded episode of I Dream of Jeannie in which a series of magical shenanigans lead to Project BOWDITCH being run as Admiral Heinlein’s personal gulag. (Lieutenant Nelson’s commenting that it’s not a proper acronym due to missing the “O” being what gets him sent there in the first place.)
