space shuttle – Page 17 – Aerospace Projects Review Blog

So you’ve decided to rescue Skylab…

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Mar 262015

Before Skylab fell out of the sky, a lot of people wondered “why doesn’t NASA just send a Space Shuttle to rendezvous with it and use it as a space station.” In the end, Skylabs orbit decayed earlier than expected due to solar activity heating up the outer atmosphere, increasing drag on the station. Coupled with delays in getting the Shuttle up and running, time simply ran out.

But for a while, the idea of rescuing Skylab and making use of it in orbit made sense. McDonnell-Douglas, for example, turned in a proposal for modifying Skylab with a substantial upgrade in power by way of very large photovoltaic “wings.” This proposal was dated December, 1978, far too close to the July 1979 destruction of Skylab for the idea to have had any hope of implementation.

The McDonnell-Douglas plan would have added additional thermal shielding to the main workshop and a Spacelab module for additional volume. New thermal radiators and docking facilities for the Shuttle would also have been added.

The full-rez version of this diagram has been made available to APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level.

PDF Review: Recent Results in Rocket Flight Technique

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Mar 212015

Eugen Sanger was an Austrian engineer from the early/mid 20th century. While largely forgotten by the vast majority of everybody today, he is remembered, at least in aerospace circles, as the originator of the Silbervogel (“Silverbird”) rocket-powered suborbital bomber. This work was performed during WWII for the German government, and included some substantial rocket testing; the odd thing – though wholly in character for the Nazi regime – was that this work was entirely separate from the development work on the V-2 rocket. Had the efforts been brought together, chances are that German rocketry would have been further advanced by the end of the war.

In 1934, Sanger published a paper on advancement in liquid propellant rocketry, work that would later feed into his Silverbird effort. “Recent Results in Rocket Flight Technique” not only reported upon work done in developing a gas-oil and liquid oxygen burning rocket engine, but also proposals for manned rocket powered aircraft. The paper was originally written in German and granted the catchy title “Neuer Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik,” but it was translated into English by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in April of 1942. Why was it was translated just then? Depending on the speed of the translators, the work may have begun just after the American entry into WWII, which might indicate a bit more interest in German rocketry in certain portions of the US Government than has generally been understood.

The abstract & such for the report can be seen on the NASA Technical Report Server HERE. Or it can be directly downloaded as a 33 meg PDF HERE.

Note: my original plan for this writeup was to include verbiage along the lines of “Sorry that the two-bit black-and-white scan quality is so poor, but whatcha gonna do.” But in looking it up, I found that the original bleah-quality scan has been replaced with a higher quality full-color scan. This is a good thing!

Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.

New Cyanotype Blueprints

bomber, hi-rez, jetliner, launch vehicles, rockets, space shuttle 1 Response »

Mar 122015

I have a batch of new large format cyanotype blueprints coming along (the files for the transparencies are at the print shop now). Weather permitting, I should start producing these in a week or so… but the question is: how many to print up? I’m not yet taking orders, but I am trying to gauge interest. So if you see something here you think you’ll want, please let me know via either comment or email. Remember that as well as the cost of the prints there will also be postage… $10 in the US, $18 elsewhere, regardless of how many prints are ordered.

2707-200 Supersonic Transport, 48 inches by 22: $50

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B-36D, 61 inches by 22: $60

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Shuttle diagrams, set A: 41 inches by 11 (two sheets): $50

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Shuttle diagrams, set B: 41 inches by 11 (five sheets): $125

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Trident SLBM: 49X11, $25

US Bomber Projects #13, US Launcher Projects #01

bomber, Dyna Soar, hypersonic, launch vehicles, Recon, rockets, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane, US Bomber Projects, US Launcher Projects 2 Responses »

Mar 022015

Two new publications in the US Aerospace Projects series are now available.

Now available: US Bomber Projects #13. This issue includes:

Ryan Model 162: A VTOL strike/recon plane
Boeing Orbital Bomb: a nuclear-tipped re-entry glider
Northrop Atomic Wing: an asymetric nuclear powered design
Consolidated Vultee High Speed Flying Boat: an early post-war Skate design
Martin Model 189: a canard version of the B-26 Marauder
Boeing Model 464-046: A six-engined B-52 predecessor
Curtis F-87C: a night fighter with bomber abilities
Boeing Model 701-247: a supersonic antecedent of the B-59

USBP #13 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:

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Also available: US Launch Vehicle Projects #01. The premiere issue of this new series includes:

Pre-Saturn Phase III Vehicles: 1958 concpet for clustered Atlas boosters
Boeing “Big Onion”: an SSTO to launch SPS
Northrop TAV: an in-flight propellant transfer spaceplane
Martin Orbit Project: A 1946 concept for a hydrogen fueled SSTO
Saturn V derived HLLV for FLO: A brief Saturn V revival in the early 1990s
MSC Orbiter 020: An early Shuttle with straight wings and a single SRB
Hammerhead ET: a way for the Shuttle to transport outsized payloads
Loral Aquarius: A way to make space launch cheap

USLP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:

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US Spacecraft Projects #2: Spaceplanes

Dyna Soar, rockets, space shuttle, space station, spacecraft, spaceplane, US Spacecraft Projects 1 Response »

Jan 222015

Now available: US Spacecraft Projects #02, the “Spaceplane Special.” This is done in the same style as the other US Aerospace Projects publications, but this issue is focused specifically on lifting spacecraft… and is more than twice as long as usual with more data and more diagrams.

USSP #02 includes:

Boeing Personnel/Cargo Glider: When you have space industry, you need a space bus
Convair Manned Orbiting Reconnaissance System: A 1958 concept for a recon spaceplane
North American D435-1-4: The delta winged X-15A-3 (not a true spaceplane… but still, relevant)
General Electric R-3 Lenticular Apollo: A 1962 Apollo concept for a lifting body lunar ship
General Dynamics VL-3A: a 1966 space station logistics transport
SRI Space Cruiser: An early 1980’s minimum manned spacecraft for the military
Boeing Model 844-2050E Dyna Soar: The almost-built spaceplane from 1963
Rockwell MRCC Orbiter: the do-everything concept, modified with additional rockets and propellant

USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:

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Very Early NASA computer animation

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Dec 162014

A NASA propaganda film from the very early 1970’s looking ahead to 1985, using the very latest in computer animation technology to depict a space shuttle in orbit.

[youtube 98pthkn9A6M]

This film was excerpted and used in an interview of sorts with Maxime Faget circa December 1972, and was posted and discussed around four years ago HERE.

Patreon Bonus: Soviet Sanger

bomber, hypersonic, Patreon, rockets, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane 1 Response »

Oct 232014

Many years back I was given a photocopy of a Soviet journal article describing a Soviet version of the WWII-era “Silverbird.” The Silverbird was the brainchild of Austrian rocket engineer Eugen Sanger and was a concept for a hypersonic rocket powered “spaceplane” capable of dropping bombs halfway around the world. In the years immediately after the war, the report Sanger wrote proved to be influential on policymakers and engineers, especially in the USSR.

This article describes a Silverbird modified with sizable ramjet engines mounted to the wingtips. Sadly, I can’t read a single word of Russian, so I can’t make heads or tails of it apart from the illustrations. One notation indicates that this may date from 1947. The vehicle described would seem to be the “Keldysh Bomber.”

I have scanned the article and posted it as a PDF on my Patreon for patrons at the $1.50 level (c’mon… that’s $1.50 a month! Mere pennies a day!).

PDF Review: STS tiles. Every. Single. Vertex.

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Oct 162014

This is the second of four “PDF Reviews” I plan to have in October, to make up for the lack of any in September. The idea is to present interesting online resources for those interested in the sort of aerospace oddities that you can find in the pages of Aerospace Projects Review. This little project is supported through my Patreon campaign; at current levels, I’ll post two such reviews per month. If you’d like to see more, or just want to contribute to help me along, please consider becoming a patron.

This one is a bit different from usual. Instead of a report full of art and diagrams and charts and, well, sentences, this one has none of those. Instead, what it does have is 5,271 pages of data. Data, specifically, on the X-Y-Z positions of every single vertex of every single tile on the Shuttle. Of what value is that? Well, someone with a whole lot of patience could, I presume, feed this data into a 3D modeling program and produce a *really* accurate model of at least part of the Space Shuttle. So… knock yourself out.

Orbiter Coordinates of All the Vertices on the Outer Mold Line (OML) of Each of the OV-ID5 Tiles

The abstract page is HERE.

The direct download link for the PDF file is HERE.

Instant Aerospace Archive

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Sep 092014

Well, here’s a new one. I’ve been put in touch with a guy who has an entire aerospace archive he’s selling off. He wants $4000 for the complete set of stuff, a catalog of which is included here as a PDF (the items actually available in the collection are bounded in red). There’s some undeniably interesting stuff in there that I really want, but $4K is well beyond what I can pony up. But I think this stuff might be of interest to a whole lot of other folks. So what I’m thinking… crowdsource this purchase.

There are two groups of documents that I think would be of most interest, so I will provide high-rez scans of the docs for $150 for group A, $100 for group B, or $225 for both).

Group A: shown on page 3, “Space Shuttle Systems Handbook” and “Hubble Space Telescope Systems Description Handbook.” These are fairly enormous collections of diagrams; the original sales price of these two items back in 1993 was $558. I’ve seen a much more recent version of the Shuttle Handbook,” and it was fairly spectacular.

Group B: shown on page 6, a number of “Shuttle Systems Data Reports” which would seem to illustrate just about everything on the Shuttle program. These I have *not* seen personally, so I’m kinda guessing here. The total sales price in 1993 was $258.

As for all the other stuff: I think the best approach would be to auction them off – after scanning, of course – to those who have bought in for either Group A or B. Right now I’m not asking for cash. There are some details I need to confirm first (such as getting photos of the collection… not that I don’t trust the guy, but I don’t trust anybody). But I *do* want to gauge interest, to see if I will actually be able to afford the full $4K. So if you’d like to get in on this, please send an email to scottlowther@ix.netcom.com letting me know if you wants Group A, Group B or both. If I go ahead with this, I’ll need the funds up front.

WSN catalog

Garret Shuttle Ad

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Aug 122014

From 1973, a magazine ad for the Garrett Corporation (avionics manufacturer) showing Robert McCall paintings of the Space Shuttle system as then envisioned. At that point, the basics of the Space Transportation System were worked out, but the details were up in the air…

As shown here – which appears to represent a Rockwell design – the Orbiter features a “ridge” down the centerline of the cargo bay doors. This was originally where the manipulator arm (or “arms” as shown here) was supposed to go. The cargo bay was a cylindrical volume, and when filled with a cylindrical payload there would obviously be no room for an arm. So the arm had to fit *outside* that cylindrical volume.

Additional details: it was originally thought that exposed RCS thrusters on the sides of the nose would get roasted on re-entry, so they were hidden behind doors in earlier designs. The proboscis at the front o the ET was a solid rocket motor, used to de-orbit the tank. As originally envisioned, the tank would make it to orbit, or nearly so; it would need to be propulsively de-orbited so that it would come down over the ocean and cause no damage. In the end, the role of the orbital maneuvering system was bumped up so that staging off the ET was carried out just a bit below stable orbit; as a result the ET would naturally re-enter over the Indian Ocean without further effort.

And a lot of early art depicted the Shuttle with lots and lots of paint. Not only on the External Tank, but on the *underside* of the orbiter. I assume that this is just artistic license rather than anyone actually believing that white paint would survive re-entry.

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