A PDF catalog of the various rocket motors produced by Northrop-Grumman. This includes the Orion, castor, GEM, STAR, ASAS, RSRM and others.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/NG-Propulsion-Products-Catalog.pdf
Includes basic data (including thrust/time curves) and illustrations. Curiously absent are prices and whether or not they take PayPal or Bitcoin. And what’s the shipping cost of, say, a dozen SLS boosters to my island volcano lair?
The National Museum of the USAF has recently posted some interesting videos of their XB-70. Something the museum seems to be doing is filming their exhibits using drones; the angles aren’t always the best, but they do provide angles rarely seen before.
I’ve contacted the publisher and will get a supply of bookazines to be signed. However, since they’re being shipped from Europe, the costs are a bit high so I’ll have to charge a few bucks more than the basic cover price for them. In order to make it worthwhile for those who get them, I plan on including an extra or two. Currently planning on something like an 18X24 print or two of diagrams from the book, scaled up and tinkered with, also numbered and signed. It will be a while before the books get here, so I’ve some time to get the prints just right. And given that a box of books could get wedged into the Suez Canal or redirected into the Bermuda Triangle or impaled on some rebar, I won’t take orders until they are on hand.
I had a local print shop print up nine separate sheets… 2 SR-71A, 1 YF-12A, 1 M21/D21, 1 XF-103, 2 XF-108, 1 A-12, 1 CL-400 Suntan. I also printed up a test sheet with four copies of the same bit of an SR-71, but with the line weights and colors adjusted (I should’ve done that first. Ooops.). Along with adjusting the weights/colors, there will be improvements to the diagrams themselves, additional details and information added. The blue in the windows will be dispensed with… that tiny bit of color triples the cost. Most likely the “bonus” will be one or two sheets of the SR-71A, but if there is enough interest in the others, I’ll figure it out. The prints will also be numbered and signed, and will only be available along with the signed books. They will also be shipped fabulously folded into quarters (as seen in the “lineweight test print” in the photos below) in order to ship with the books.
Please note industry standard feline scale reference.
If you want on the list of people interested in ordering a signed copy when the time comes, send me an email: 
It is available directly through the publisher for £8.99 (Approx $12.41 or €10.34). It is also available through Amazon for pre-order for $12.99. Or it will be available through me for a little more, in a little while.
Back when NASA dreamed big (the early 1960’s), there were many ideas for how to make really, REALLY big space launch systems. Solid rocket motors had a place at the time serving as either the first stage, or strap-on boosters for the first stage, for Saturn-class boosters. Most solid rocket production facilities are far from Cape Canaveral, so getting rockets from the manufacturer to the launch site could be a problem. Due to rail line restrictions, a case diameter of 156 inches was the limit: anything bigger wouldn’t fit through existing tunnels. But Aerojet and other companies had ideas for even bigger solids… I’ve seen drawings for boosters up to 396 inches in diameter, though 260 inches seems to be the largest given serious engineering.
In order to conveniently manufacture and transport these giants, Aerojet set up a manufacturing plant and static test site in Florida. Aerojet built several half-length versions of the 260-inch-diameter boosters, dug a hole in the ground, upended the rockets and fired them towards the center of the Earth, with the results being a small earthquake, a gigantic brown plume of solid rocket exhaust shooting into the sky and no production contract. The first test firing was in September, 1966, by which time NASA’s horizons had contracted substantially.
Solid rockets as an economical way to get to space, especially as a way to launch humans, is a technology whose day has passed. As military technology they remain as valid as ever; unlike liquid rockets, you can stuff a solid rocket into a silo and somewhat ignore it for years and then launch it on a moments notice. Having ICBM-sized boosters stocked up and stored away ready to launch a fleet of replacement GPS, communication and spy satellites when the Chinese swat our current fleet from the sky makes a lot of sense… but using solids to launch missions to the Moon or Mars is now a rather silly notion.
The full rez scan of the photo (and 4 others) has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-07 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.