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

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.

A lithograph found on eBay presents a rather unlikely design for a Space Shuttle:

Dating from 1970, the craft shown here in a NASA PR glossy appears to be wholly fanciful.