A piece of Bell Helicopter artwork depicting their design for the LHX competition, what became the RAH-66 Comanche. Note that this design featured unusual curved, swept sponsons and a NOTAR (no tail rotor) tail.
The full resolution version of this scan has been made available for $4 patrons at the APR Patreon.
Vincent Burnelli was an aircraft designer who specialized in lifting-fuselage aircraft… instead of a cylindrical tube, his fuselages were fat unswept wing cross-sections. The thinking was that this would reduce drag and increase lift and make the vehicles more structurally sound in the event of a crash; while in some cases testing did show some occasional advantages, on the whole these designs did not provide much if any aerodynamic advantage; and once aircraft started flying high enough to require pressurization, the non-circular cross section made pressurization difficult to achieve cost effectively. Sadly, any advantages these designs may have had have been overshadowed by the largely unhinged conspiracy theories that have sprung up around why they haven’t been adopted.
One of the last of Burnellis designs (from about 1962) was the “GB-888,” a supersonic jetliner of unusual configuration. Artwork reproduced below seems to date from the 1980s; here the SST has been relabeled an “aerospaceplane.” The idea, apparently, was to ride the coattails of the X-30 National Aero Space Plane, which had a *vaguely* similar lifting fuselage configuration. As drawn, of course, the GB-888 would make a terrible ASP… the windows on the sides would be melt nicely on re-entry; the sharp edges would concentrate aerothermal heating loads to a fantastic degree; and putting then engines on the top surface would do a fantastic job of getting them out of the airflow, assuring that the engines would not perform very well at all. Still, it’s interesting art.
I have made the high-rez of this illustration available for $4-level patrons at the APR Patreon.
I have made some adjustments to the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign. The first is that I’ve reduced the number of rewards levels, which I was informed was previously Too Many. More importantly, I have added some new rewards: if you become a patron at $5 or more per month, you receive 10% off all future purchases of APR, US Aerospace Projects and downloadable Documents and Drawings. If you become a patron at $10 per month, you will receive 20% off any such purchases. Check of the APR Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=197906
Additionally, the campaign has reached the point where the rewards are now *three* aerospace documents, one high-rez historical diagram and one all-new CAD diagram per month. This is in addition to the random “Extras” I throw in for $4 and up patrons. The most recent extra is a full-rez restoration of a three-view diagram of a 1978 McDonnell-Douglas concept for modifying Skylab to be serviced by the Space Shuttle. You can see a smaller-rez version of that here: http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=2153
If you sign up now you will get the latest rewards which include:
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.
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.
This one is admittedly a bit different, but might be of some interest and/or use.
No, it’s not actually an official USAF manual. But its author(s) seems to know his subject.
Along with the regularly scheduled “rewards,” APR Patreon patrons at the $4/month level and above also get occasional “extras.” I’ve been migrating them from the Patreon file system (which is a bit cumbersome and clumsy) to a Dropbox system (which is easy). I have just uploaded a number of documents to the Dropbox folder. These were prior extras.
Aereon SST brochure
“Introduction to Kistler” brochure
“Colonization of Space” by O’Neill
Aerial Gatling guns diagrams & info
Soviet article on a ramjet-equipped Sanger “Silverbird”
So if you’re a Patron, they’re available. If you’re not a patron but you want in, please GO HERE.
NASA SP-413, “Space Settlements, A Design Study,” was published in 1977 and brought together the results of a 1975 NASA-Ames Research Center effort to do a preliminary study of a giant torus space station for several thousand permanent inhabitants. It is a basic text on the subject of space colonies, but obtaining a copy of the printed book of course requires money (but not much… a quick check at abebooks.com shows them going for about $8) and online versions have typically been either black-and-white scan PDFs of indifferent quality, or versions rendered into painful HTML format. Fortunately, someone (it’s unclear to me who, though it seems a professional job) has scanned in the book and all the illustrations and reformatted the text into an all-new, clean PDF version.
The PDF can be downloaded HERE.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
A PDF pieced together from scans found on the Secret Projects forum of Senate testimony on the AIM-95 Agile air-to-air missile. Agile was, as the name might suggest, a close-in “dogfighting” missile, an attempt to incorporate the hard lessons learned by the USAF and USN getting their tails kicked in the skies over Viet Nam by scrappy Russian dogfighters pilots by scrappy Vietnamese pilots. The main advantage that the Agile provided over the Sidewinder was that the infra-red seeker was capable of looking further off boresight… in other words, you didn’t need to point the plane at the enemy before the missile could get a lock-on. While the AIM-95 Agile apparently worked just fine, it was simply cheaper to upgrade the Sidewinder.
The AIM-95 would be steered via vectoring the nozzle rather than aerodynamic control fins. Initial targeting was planned to be done by having a sight integrated into the pilots helmet.. where he looked, the missile looked. The AIM-95 was intended for use by the F-14 and then the F-15 as well, but it never entered service.
The PDF file is HERE.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
I have made available for APR Patrons the following:
1) “Titan III B-C-D-E Propulsion Handbook,” from Aerojet, explaing and diagramming just about everything you want to know about the Titan III propulsion systems, from the SRMs to the Transstage. I originally got this via ebay.
(This shows just a small portion of the ~300 page handbook)
2) “Aircraft Descriptive Data for Northrop F-89F.” A collection of then-current data on the projected (and unbuilt) F-89F. This was from a collection gathered by Lockheed to keep tabs on their competitors. Has some “Secret” markings on it. I originally got this via ebay.
3) Skylab diagram. This very large format illustration was found in the NASA HQ and photographed piecemeal and painstakingly reassembled, using text scanned from another copy of the illustration (with a far smaller diagram, but good text).
4) An original layout diagram of the XB-70. It took several years to get this diagram into this shape. It seems pretty good to me.
You can gain access to these by becoming an APR Patron for as little as $1.50 a month. That’s not so very much, is it? Check out the APR Patreon page for more details.