I recently acquired diagrams of a B-52 with six high-bypass turbofans. Sadly, the diagram lacks data on *which* engines those were, and when the design was made. So: does this look familiar?
Could be any of several, I think.
The full diagrams have been posted into the 2016-01 folder on the APR Patron Dropbox site. If interested, this and many, many other high-rez aerospace goodies are available to all APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and higher. So, check it out…
Somewhere north of 20 years ago I received a package in the mail from Martin-Marietta containing stuff on their then-current NIMF study. NIMF was a mangled acronym for Nuclear Rocket Using Indigenous Martian Fuel; basically a propellant tank, structure, landing gear and a nuclear rocket engine, to be used for landing a payload on Mars and for flying or hopping around. The propellant would be liquid carbon dioxide, easily compressed from the Martian atmosphere; the performance would be, by conventional liquid hydrogen nuclear rocket standards, reasonably awful, but it would be adequate to lurch back into Mars orbit or to do long range hops.
Two main designs seem to have been studied: a conical “ballistic” vehicle that would be a dedicated “hopper,” landing on its tail, and a winded vehicle that would land vertically in a horizontal attitude. This latter design was sent to me in the form of diagrams and five computer renders. The renders – early 1990’s vintage – came as viewgraph transparencies, clearly photographs of a computer monitor. The winged vehicle had simple shock absorbers for landing gear, terminating in dishes rather than wheels meaning that a rolling start or stop was impossible. The available information sadly doesn’t explain how the thing was supposed to land vertically.
The full-rez scans of the viewgraphs have been made available to APR Patrons in the 2016-01 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
A NASA illustration (probably from 1964-66) showing the Saturn launch vehicles planned for the Apollo program. Note that the Saturn Ib shows the Lunar Module ascent stage, sans descent stage. This could have led to some interesting mission possibilities.
The full-rez scan has been made available to APR Patrons in the 2015-12 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
Here’s something I have some vague recollection of posting before, but couldn’t find after a cursory search: a sketch of the seating arrangement of a 3-man A-4 rocket (might be the A-8 derivative). This is a scan of a photocopy of a photocopy; the original photocopy was found in the files of a researcher at the NASM twenty or so years ago. It’s thought that the sketch was originally made by Werner von Braun during WWII.
Little data is provided; range is given as 500 km. *Presumably* this would have been a winged, landing-gear-equipped derivative of the A-4; replacing the warhead of the V-2 with just three guys seems like a waste of three guys, as well as a not terribly effective weapons system.
The full-rez scan (such as it is) has been made available to APR Patrons in the 2015-12 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
Just under the wire, rewards for November have been made available to APR patrons. Three documents and one large-format diagram, and one all-new CAD diagram, have been posted:
If you’d like to help out and gain access to these and past and future rewards, please check out the APR Patreon.
A few months ago, Airbus Defence and Space Sas received a US patent for a nearly hypersonic passenger transport. The vehicle has a number of different engines… rocket engines for vertical boost and acceleration, ramjets for hypersonic cruise, turbojets for subsonic flight including takeoff and landing. It would take off conventionally with turbojets, fire the rocket to shoot almost vertically to about 35 kilometers altitude (going supersonic in the process), then level off and cruise under ramjet power at Mach 4.5. The extreme altitude, about 3 times higher than normal jetliner traffic, would mean that the sonic boom should be greatly attenuated by the time it got to the surface.
The wingtip fins would rotate through 90 degrees to maintain center of pressure from subsonic through supersonic.
Unusually for a patent, this one provides dimensions. Fuselage length (dimension 11 in Figure 1) is 52.995 meters; overall length (dimension 110, Figure 3) is 57.63 meters; maximum span (dimension 126, Figure 5) is 27.188 meters.
Interestingly, the design looks like a mishmash of WWII-era designs… the “gothic wing” designed by Michael Gluhareff of Sikorsky merged with the wingtips of the Blohm & Voss P.208-2 or Skoda-Kauba SL-6.
This is US Patent 907661B2. At the moment the Google page for this patent seems a little non-functional; the PDF of the patent won’t download for me. Fortunately, the page for the patent application is functioning just fine. You can download the PDF file of the patent application directly from THIS LINK RIGHT HERE.
Some pages of diagrams:
Here is a video description of the design.
The interior views of the vehicle show one of the problems with rocket-boosted transport aircraft: The majority of the interior volume isn’t people and cargo, but propellant.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon. If this sort of thing interests you, please consider signing up… not only will you help fund the search for obscure aerospace history, you’ll gain access to a lot of interesting stuff, not available elsewhere.
Not exactly a “PDF” review, but this should be of interest to many here: “Missiles & Rockets” magazine, a weekly periodical published from 1958 into 1968, was much like Aviation Week except with a more specific focus. And it has been made available on archive.org. I’ve found the search function to be somewhat ineffective, but the system allows for fairly straightforward navigation along with easy downloading of individual pages as high-rez JPEGs. The collection is not complete, sadly; it doesn’t look like it’s being completed, but there are nevertheless a fair number of issues available.
https://archive.org/details/misslesandrockets&tab=collection
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
All through the 1960’s – or at least up until the last few years, when “Great Society” spending ate into NASA’s budget – the assumption was that NASA would soon have numerous space stations in orbit and some preliminary lunar bases, with Mars missions soon to follow. In order to support those, NASA would have to have a cost effective means to launch sizable crews into orbit. A number of approaches were proposed, including Big Gemini and, in the end, the Space Shuttle. One approach that probably would have been quite workable was to simply scale up the Apollo capsule into something capable of holding more than three; a slight scaleup seats six, a further scaleup seats twelve. These would have been launched atop the Saturn Ib and/or Saturn V boosters, and would come with their own basic orbital maneuvering systems, and could carry up some amount of cargo in the conical transition/propulsion sections. At the end of the mission, the capsule would return to Earth for recovery, refurbishment and reuse; the propulsion module would be allowed to burn up.
Of course, none of these were ever built.
The full resolution versions of these artworks have been posted into the 2015-10 folder in the APR Extras Dropbox. Please check out the APR Patreon!
A Convair illustration of the Model 54, a proposed operational version of the NX-2 nuclear powered aircraft. The Model 54 was a missile carrier, but with an internal bomb bay. It was also strictly subsonic, so its survivability over Soviet territory would undoubtedly have been seen as minimal in the supersonic-obsessed 1950’s. By carrying long-range cruise missiles (type unclear), the Model 54 could spend days orbiting outside Soviet controlled airspace and, when war breaks out, dash in at low altitude, unleash its missiles hundreds of missiles from the target (and from the air defenses), and then run home. Of course, the Model 54 was never built.
A full-rez version of this has been made available to $4+ Patrons of the APR Patreon, in the 2015-10 Extras Dropbox folder. If you’re interested in obtaining this, and/or helping the cause of preserving aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
Black-and-white copy of a piece of artwork depicting two Boeing Model 733 SST concepts. Circa 1963 or so.
A high-rez version of this has been posted to the APR Patreon Dropbox “2015-09 APR Extras” folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons.
