This year will not only mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, but also that of the last proposal by a Detroit automaker to build a manned spaceship.

Though little remembered today, the Chrysler Space Division was a major player in the early space age and made a serious attempt to win the NASA contract for the next-generation spacecraft to follow the Apollo program.

Chrysler engineers submitted a radical design in fall 1969 for a vehicle that could haul cargo and people to a future space station, return to Earth and be entirely reusable for another 99 flights.

The bell-shaped craft looked like an Apollo capsule with elephantiasis. Unlike a traditional rocket with a small capsule at the top, the basic craft itself was one gargantuan space capsule that launched vertically using internal engines.

To reach orbit, it would have used an unproven propulsion technology called an aerospike engine. To safely land back on Earth, it needed a massive array of 28 jet engines to slow down.

According to at least one space historian, Chrysler's spacecraft may have been too complex and technologically ahead of its time to have worked in real life during the 1970s.

“It’s audacious," said Paul Drye, who has studied the vehicle and publishes a blog about unbuilt space vehicles. "But the engineers wouldn’t have proposed it if they didn’t think it was possible.”

Even 50 years later, nothing like Chrysler's vehicle, known as "Project SERV" for Single-stage Earth-orbital Reusable Vehicle, has ever reached space. The closest thing to it may be entrepreneur Elon Musk's recent proposal for his SpaceX company to build a giant two-stage vehicle for flight to the moon and eventually Mars.

Space experience

Chrysler's SERV advanced to "final review" stage in 1971, but never made it to prototype and ultimately lost to what became NASA's space shuttle program.

The automaker's Space Division, based in New Orleans, had its last hurrah four years later when a Chrysler-built Saturn 1B rocket flew the final Apollo mission, a historic docking with the Soviet Union's Soyuz spacecraft.

Previously, its Saturn 1Bs had been used for dress rehearsal missions in preparation for the moon landings. Even earlier, in the late 1950s and early '60s, Chrysler made Redstone rockets at its Michigan Missile Plant in Sterling Heights, modified versions of which sent astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into suborbital space.

That Sterling Heights plant is now FCA's Sterling Heights Assembly Plant.

Chrysler produced the Saturn 1B rockets at its Michoud Operations Plant in New Orleans, a facility now owned by NASA. Those were different rockets than the more powerful Saturn Vs used for moon missions.

In the years after that final 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Chrysler Space Division dissolved. The automaker went on to end the decade with a federal bailout for its then-struggling car business. After a second crisis and bailout in 2009, the company is now Fiat Chrysler, or FCA.

Missed opportunity?

Although the space shuttle bested Chrysler's proposed spacecraft in design competition, the shuttle failed to achieve its original goals of providing frequent and inexpensive access to space.

The shuttle's first flight was repeatedly delayed until 1981 and the fleet never achieved early projections of as many as 50 space trips per year. Two shuttles and their crews were lost to accidents by the time the program stopped in 2011.

In the end, the shuttles made only three to eight flights per year at a high cost of about $775 million per trip. Today the only way that NASA astronauts can reach the International Space Station is by buying seats on Soyuz spacecraft.

Would Chrysler's spacecraft have been better than the space shuttle?

Space historian Drye considered that possibility and published a detailed analysis of Chrysler's spaceship in his blog "False Steps: The Space Race as it might have been."

In a phone interview from his home outside Toronto, Drye said the Chrysler SERV was an extremely unconventional spacecraft and probably more advanced than the space shuttle that came to be.

“What Chrysler was proposing was a whole step beyond (the shuttle)," Drye said. "The engineers said it was possible, but I’d be really surprised if it worked out the way they expected it to. A lot of the technologies that they were talking about — the aerospike engine, the single-stage to orbit — we still haven’t really pulled off."

He added, "But I’d hate to say you couldn’t have been able to do it, because I’m just a historian, not an engineer."

NASA contract

Chrysler had a $750,000 contract with NASA to undertake feasibility studies for its SERV vehicle.

The spacecraft was to ferry cargo and passengers to a future space station and could operate autonomously when in cargo-only mode.

Under the basic design, passengers would ride in a capsule-like crew module at the top of the main SERV vehicle. This module would later land with the main vehicle.

The advanced design called for developing a small space plane to ride atop the SERV until orbit, when the space plane would separate, travel to the space station on its own and land on a runway back on Earth.

The main vehicle's engine, called an aerospike engine, would have generated even more thrust than the space shuttle's engines.

While a typical rocket engine features a bell nozzle that constricts expanding gasses, an aerospike engine is shaped like a bell turned inside out and upside down. According to NASA, the aerospike design can theoretically provide more efficient thrust as a spacecraft gains altitude in its journey to orbit.

Too many engines?

When returning to Earth, the SERV was to guide itself to a gentle landing by using 28 jet engines. Those engines were to be based on development work done by Detroit Diesel Allison Division in collaboration with Rolls Royce.

Drye said this large number of jet engines could have caused problems for Chrysler's design.

He noted how the Soviets' answer to the American Saturn V, their failed N1 rocket, was done in by its complex assortment of 30 small rocket engines. The Saturn V, in comparison, had five large engines. The N1 exploded each time it launched in the late 1960s and early '70s and was scrapped.

“More or less what stalled the Russian moon landing was they tried to put a whole lot of engines on the bottom of their rocket because they couldn’t build the big ones," he said. "And that never did work out.”

Shuttle at least worked

In his blog, Drye wrote that even considering the space shuttle's many now-known problems, it is hard to say whether NASA made the right or wrong decision when it passed over Chrysler's spaceship.

"The fact remains that with similar bad luck on the SERV, they could have ended up with something that couldn’t fly at all," he said.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect location for Chrysler's Sterling Heights plant that produced Redstone missiles.

ContactJC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.