This 1959 Boeing booster concept not only did away with the cockpit, but also the jet engines and the wings. Instead, this was a simpler design intended for ocean splashdown and recovery. Aerodynamic flaps maintained stability.
Sep 302012
Sep 292012
Base Point #2 concept from Boeing/North American in 1959, showing a glide-back booster.
Sep 242012
Tony Chong has an article up on his blog describing the Northrop N-205 design, a T-38 massively altered into an all-rocket powered vehicle designed to launch itself to the edge of space.
Talons in Space: Northrop’s N-205 Proposal
Sep 232012
Same basic concept for the booster, but with a cockpit and canards. A manned booster rather than unmanned.
Sep 192012
A variant of the previous design, with the upper stage carried on the back rather than on the nose. Otherwise broadly similar.
Sep 172012
A 1959 design, produced by North American Aviation for Boeing, for a reusable Dyna Soar booster. The launch vehicle, powered by two Rocketdyne E-1 engines, could put this very early Boeing Dyna Soar vehicle into a 300 nautical mile polar orbit.
Sep 042012
From slides at the NASA HQ archive, two photos of a Convair “Triamese” space shuttle concept. See HERE for more on the Triamese.
Sep 022012
OK, here’s one of the projects I’ve been working on of late… scanning and repairing the old “Collier’s space series” articles from the early 1950’s for reprinting in the AIAA-Houston section newsletter. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time these have been republished in clear, high-rez and full color format since the original release.
For those unaware, in the early 1950’s Collier’s magazine (similar to “The Saturday Evening Post”) ran a series of articles written by the likes of Willy Ley and Werner von Braun, illustrated by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman, describing what the future of manned space exploration may look like. Their vision was, to put it mildly, grandiose, and far exceeded what the actual space program became and did… but the impact on the public of these articles helped lead to the space program becoming popular with the public… and the government. The designs that were produced, such as the Ferry Rocket and “Wheel” space stations, are comfortably described as “iconic.”
The July/August 2012 issue of AIAA-Houston Horizons reprints the complete first Collier’s article from March 22, 1952. The original magazine layout included numerous ads and extraneous bits that were edited out of this reprint, and in several cases replaced with “Mini-APR” articles, several of which tie directly into the Collier’s series. This first article includes about 30 pages of the original Collier’s stuff. Future issues of Horizons will carry the complete set of Collier’s article,s including the Moon exploration and Mars exploration articles.
As always, Horizons is a free-to-download PDF. New for this issue, it is available in both high and low resolution.
Feel free to spread the word about this. The more it is downloaded from the AIAA site, the more interest is shown in it, the more might be done with this in the future.
Aug 262012
A quick overview of the North American Aviation X-15A-3, the delta winged X-15 proposal from 1966:
Aug 172012
From an Aerojet booklet from 1987, a basic sketch overview of the National AeroSpace Plane.
