Nov 232020
 

Stratolaunch starts building Talon hypersonic plane for Mach 6 flights

Construction is underway of an unmanned rocket-powered aircraft to be carried by the Stratolaunch “Roc” aircraft. The Talon-A is supposed to be something like the proposed X-24C… a lifting body hypersonic platform that can have various experimental units – including scramjets – attached to it. The Roc would be capable of carrying three Talon-A’s at a time, though it seems unlikely that there’s a really good reason to do so.

 

 Posted by at 2:52 pm
Oct 312020
 

Rewards have just been posted for APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribersIncluded:

1: “Manned Aerodynamic Reusable Spaceship (MARS) Vehicle Design” a 1962 Douglas report covering a single stage “orbital airplane” of impressive size and design.

2: “Pretest Information 3.3 Percent 624A Aerodynamic Heating Investigation, NASA Langley Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel.” A 1963 Martin report describing a test of the Titan IIIC/Dyna Soar configuration.

3: Official XB-70 General Arrangement Diagram

4: CAD diagram: a 1974 Lockheed concept for a subscale Space Shuttle Orbiter Mach 9 flight test model, to be dragged behind a YF-12C and booster by an “Avanti” rocket (modification of the D-21B’s booster) with an internal SRAM motor in the orbiter.

If this sort of thing is of interest to you, either because you’d like to obtain these documents or you’d like to help preserve aerospace history (or both) please consider signing on to either the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 2:02 pm
Oct 252020
 

An artists impression of the “DC-3” Space Shuttle concept. This was a two-stage system using two manned flyback vehicles with straight wings and turbofan engines. It was intended to be a low-cost approach, disdaining high performance for simple design and – theoretically – easy maintenance. The orbiter here had two jet engines in the nose for landing and flyback range extension; aerodynamic fairing would cover the inlets until after re-entry, jettisoned once the vehicles had decelerated to below Mach 1. The straight wings would be easy to build and low in weight compared to large delta wings, but of course they wouldn’t provide the same amount of lift. Consequently, the orbiter would less “glide” during the initial re-entry than “belly flop.”

I’ve  uploaded the full-rez version of that to the APR Dropbox, into the 2020-10 APR Extras folder. This is available to any APR Patron or Subscriber at the $4 level and above.

 Posted by at 8:53 pm
Aug 242020
 

Now here’s an odd thing…

Part of the collection of images from the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, NY, this depicts a Republic Aviation concept circa early 1960’s for putting a scramjet vehicle atop a Titan II first stage. Presumably this is meant to be… I dunno, a space launcher? No wings are in evidence, so cruise flight and a landing seem unlikely. But it would seem a hell of a thing to throw away, so *presumably* it was meant to be recovered somehow. Perhaps it shed the entire payload-containing nosecone and came back using the blunt forward dome of the propellant tank as a heat shield, followed by a splashdown. Dunno.

 

Also in the collection is the “AX-92 detailed drawing.” Clearly this is an entirely serious proposal, and not at all an example of an artist screwing around for giggles.

 Posted by at 12:56 am
Aug 212020
 

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 Posted by at 1:00 am
Jul 312020
 
Rewards have just been posted for APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. Included this time:
1) An early (1969) NASA study of possible Space Shuttle configurations
2) A 1991 Strategic Defense Initiative Office presentation/transcript on the SDI program
3) A good, clear general arrangement diagram of the North American F-107
4) A CAD diagram of the late 1950’s Convair “Landing boat” that often appeared in presentations (art and models) from Krafft Ehricke
If you are a paid-up Patron/Subscriber, you should by now have received a message with a link to your rewards. If you haven’t, let me know.
 Posted by at 7:57 pm
Jul 142020
 

In 1963-64, NASA was looking forward to a very bright future. Moon landings within a handful of years, a serious space station or two in the early seventies, manned missions to the vicinity of Mars and/or Venus probably by the early eighties, manned Mars landings not long after. Moon bases, Mars based, nuclear rockets, missions to the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter… in 1964, the rest of the 20th century must’ve looked *fantastic.*

In order to pull all that off, it was clear that NASA would need to launch a *lot* of astronauts. Consequently, a request for proposals went out to the aerospace industry to design the capability to do just that. Boeing, North American, Martin, Lockheed… a great deal of interest was shown and work accomplished. One design produced is illustrated below, a Lockheed design for a two-stage fully reusable spaceplane capable of transporting ten tons of payload or ten passengers to an orbiting space station. The booster stage had a cockpit about where you’d expect; the spaceplane, conversely, had an offset spaceplane so that the crew would have *some* sort of forward view during landing. Both stages used advanced rocket engines; the first stage also had turbojets to get it back to the launch site. As with all pre-Shuttle designs, estimates of turnaround time and minimal launch cost are impressive and a bit depressing in just how fabulously optimistic they were.

An earlier three-stage concept was shown in US Launcher Projects #5.

The future looked bright. And then… LBJ.

 Posted by at 6:30 pm
Jul 012020
 

The orbiter for the “DC-3” referenced previously. This vehicle had relatively small wings, leading to quite low crossrange. The wings were also simple straight wings, not highly swept deltas; the vehicle could get away with this because it did not “glide” during re-entry, but “belly flopped.” To aid in crossrange and landing, each wing would have a single turbofan in a sealed pod. The payload bay is not shown here, but would be quite small and right behind the cockpit.

 Posted by at 11:46 pm
Jun 262020
 

Before the Convair Atlas ICBM proved that it was possible for a rocket to reach out across the world and deposit some canned sunlight reliably close to commie targets, it was understood that the only way to accomplish the task was with pilots and bombardiers. But by the mid 1950’s the idea of subsonic manned bombers sneaking into the heart of the Soviet Union without getting swatted was starting to seem nonsensical. So Bell Aircraft, under the direction of former V-2 program director Walter Dornberger, dreamed up the MX-2276: a three-stage manned rocket bomber. Looking akin to an evolved Sanger Antipodal Bomber, the MX-2276 used two manned and winged stages, with an unmanned expendable stage in between. The final stage would carry a single gliding nuclear warhead deep into the USSR, using the human crew to attain some measure of accuracy.

But then the Atlas came along and ruined all that.

The idea persisted, however, turning first into the Bomber Missile (BoMi) then the Rocket Bomber (RoBo) then Dyna Soar. With each step it became less fantastical, and also less of a dedicated weapon system; by the end of the Dyna Soar, it was a one-man experimental re-entry vehicle launched by a fully expendable Titan IIIC. Since then the idea of a “rocket bomber” has popped up from time to time, but never with the level of seriousness displayed in the mid/late 1950’s. For more on the whole BoMi program, see Aerospace projects Review issues V2N2, V2N3 and V2N4. APR issue V3N4 gives a pretty complete rundown of the final Model 2050E Dyna Soar.

 Posted by at 12:10 am
Jun 102020
 

In 1969, Maxime Faget of NASA-Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) produced a concept for a simplified version of the Space Shuttles then being designed. The idea at the time was that the Shuttle would be a two-stage vehicle, both being fully reusable manned flyback vehicles. The Orbiter would be much larger than the Orbiter that actually got built because it included substantial hydrogen/oxygen tankage. The boosters were generally *vast* vehicles larger than the C-5 Galaxy meant to fly higher and faster than the X-15. Optimistic to be sure. Faget’s “DC-3” design had the same basic architecture but attempted to produce a smaller, cheaper, less complex and more realistic design. The design, produced in-house at NASA, was picked up by both North American and McDonnell Douglas, who designed their own variations on the theme.

Here is the basic configuration of the NASA-MSC “DC-3:”

 Posted by at 1:40 am