A piece of Aerojet artwork depicting the NERVA nuclear rocket engine heading to Mars. This is almost certainly artistic license as the vehicle depicted here is a single stumpy upper stage with an aerodynamic fairing. This is mot likely a RIFT (Reactor In Flight Test) configuration, a simple expendable upper stage test configuration meant to be launched atop a Saturn V to prove out the engine.
Found on ebay a while back, a pre-NASA Army Ballistic Missile Agency illustration dated 25 May 1959 depicting the Mercury space capsule, including smaller views of it atop both a Redstone and a Jupiter. In both cases this would be a purely sub-orbital lob. It’s unclear just what’s going on with the nose of the Jupiter version; it does not have the abort tower the Redstone version has. This may be a purely aerodynamic fairing, with abort motors located underneath the capsule in the sizable adapter section.
Scanned from a 35mm slide at the NASA HQ some years ago. The basic shape here (FDL-7/McDonnell Model 176) appeared on a great many McD designs for the latter half of the sixties from small one-man experimental designs on up to full Shuttle-sized craft like this one. It had both sharply swept fixed wings on the bottom and stowable high aspect ratio wings for landing up top.
A piece of color art, scanned from a 35mm slide at NASA HQ some years back. The Lockheed STAR Clipper was an early concept for a reusable 1.5 STO launch vehicle, a predecessor to the Space Shuttle. The STAR Clipper was described and illustrated in unnecessarily *vast* degree in Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N2 and in US Launch Vehicle Projects #2.
The STAR Clipper was an interesting design which was popular and well known for a while, receiving lot of kinda-press… it, or shuttles very much like it in appearance, appeared in a lot of publicity art produced by Lockheed, NASA, the USAF and even other companies. For a while it was the Shuttle Stereotype.
Today, the notion of building a space launch system that uses solid rocket boosters is kinda… silly. Liquids have much higher performance and, as SpaceX has conclusively demonstrated, liquids are quite recoverable and reusable, far easier than solids. But fifty, sixty years ago, solids made a *lot* of sense. They worked, they were reliable, they did not require a whole lot of delicate , constant babying. And for military purposes, they were (and remain) fantastically useful; load them up, stick them in a tube, forget about them for a few years, fire them at a moments notice.
This piece of Aerojet artwork dates from 1961 at the latest and depicts a large solid rocket booster, presumably for space launch. The diameter was 288 inches… larger than the largest actually-tested solid rocket motor at 260″, smaller than the 396″ diameter of the Saturn V (also the diameter of the largest solid rocket motor design I can recall seeing). Note that it uses four nozzles. This is not uncommon on military solids such as the first and second stages of the Minuteman and some sea launched ballistic missiles; it’s costlier and weighs more than a single nozzle, but it give you the same performance at a shorter length. And when your missile is stuffed into a silo or, worse, a submarine, compactness is important. but those missiles all also constrain the maximum dimensions of the nozzle assemblies to be no greater than the motors they are attached to… again, so the missile can fit in a tube. THIS design went another way, with nozzles well outboard. This precludes silo launch. The advantage for a non-silo launched space booster to split up the nozzles like this is unclear. Some small reduction in total length, and some roll control authority.
Vaguely related: US Bomber Projects #17 has an article and diagrams of a somewhat smaller 260″ diameter solid rocket boosted ICBM from Thiokol.
This piece of artwork of the Convair “Outpost” seems to be a little bit later than the others. It depicts an Outpost with a nuclear reactor for a power sources; this is held off at some (not terribly great) distance for the purposes or radiation mitigation.
Another artists impression of the outpost, showing assembly of the laboratory from multiple vehicles and payloads.
Very late 1950’s Convair promo art of their “Outpost” space-base built from an Atlas launch vehicle. This was publicized enthusiastically by the likes of Krafft Ehricke; it preceded the MOL program, and would have resulted in a manned facility somewhat similar in size, thought dissimilar in capability. The MOL was a pre-finished, single-launch space lab, while the “Outpost” as a “wet lab” would have required considerable effort by workers in space suits to finish. To service the Outpost, an Atlas with a Centaur-like upper stage would orbit two wedge-like lifting bodies.
This video tackles the question “why don’t we just make more F-1 rocket engines?” A similar question, “Why don’t we just restart production of the Saturn V” has been common among space fans for *decades.* And the fact is… we can’t.
The video points to the loss of skills and direct knowledge of those who worked the F-1 fifty years ago. When the F-1s were built, it took more than the blueprints; it also took manufacturing instructions. It’s more than juat “weld these parts together,” it’s *how* to weld. And while the blueprints still exist, the notes – and the knowledge stored only in the technicians heads – are long gone. This is a problem I saw directly back in my days working at United Tech and ATK. A story I’ve related before is how through virtually sheer random chance, while working at ATK I was called up by one of the techs hoping that I could direct them to a former co-worker from United Tech, because that co-worker was responsible for the manufacturing instructions on a motor that had been transferred from the one company to the other (because United Tech collapsed and all their programs were transferred to other companies). I got them to explain just what the issue they were having was… and then I burst out laughing because *I* was the guy at United Tech who had figured out how to solve the manufacturing issue. My co-worker had apparently never gotten around to re-writing the instructions, so an important detail had been lost and only rediscovered through an unlikely circumstance. Now, the ATK techs certainly could have figured out a solution, quite possibly the exact same solution, or maybe even a better solution… but they’d never have known if their solution was the “right” one, and Odin only knows how long it would have taken them to work the problem. And in government rocketry, “well, we’re unsure how it was supposed to be done, so we’re doing it this way” is almost never the right answer. Management will Freak The Hell Out.
And along with the loss of knowledge and skills is the loss of *stuff.* If you try to rebuild the Saturn V based on a complete and pristine set of fifty-year-old blueprints, one of many problems you’ll discover is that a lot of the off-the-shelf stuff meant to go in it… doesn’t exist anymore. “Install a MomNPopCo Brand temperature sensor model 14B HERE.” Ooops, they went out of business in 1971. “Wrap with Bleedin’ Lungs Brand six-inch-wide asbestos tape.” Ooops. “Install a HAL 90 computer here.” Ooops, especially because the mass of the thing is require for balance, but that’s not called out in the blueprint because why would it be. “Insulate with bakelite.” Ooops. “Machine from thorium-alloy component 128047h-8 from Bomarc program.” Ooops.
In aerospace, once it’s lost, it’s *very* hard to get back. No more Saturns. No more F-1s. No more SR-71s. No more Avro Arrows or Peacekeeper missiles or F-22s.
See also “FOGBANK.” Never let your nuclear weapons manufacturing programs sit idle.
Long March 8: meant to emulate the Falcon 9 with a vertically-recovered core, but also use vertically-recovered solid rocket boosters (likely via parachute, though art seems to indicate that they too will have landing legs).
Long March 9: intended to be Saturn V class for manned missions to the Moon and beyond.
No indication that the Long March 9 is aiming for reusability, so it seems likely that the Chinese are emulating not the BFR but the SLS. It is too much to hope that China will emulate the spectacular economics of the SLS as well.