A piece of NASA promo art, dating to around 1964 (plus or minus), showing the Saturn I, Saturn Ib and Saturn V to scale.
A high rez of this can be downloaded here:
Apr 012012
Mar 202012
The latest AIAA-Houston newsletter Horizons, January/February 2012, has a brief article by me on the Phoenix-E tourism SSTO. Free to download!
Mar 172012
A painting from an old issue of “Lockheed horizons” depicts a STAR Clipper 1.5-stage-to-orbit early Space Shuttle design lifting off from a desert launch facility (probably White Sands or Vandenberg).
Much, much more on the STAR Clipper can be found in issue V3N2 of Aerospace Projects Review.
Mar 102012
A Rockwell handout card (late 1980’s to 1990 or so) showing an artists impression of their early NASP configuration. This is the same design as shown HERE, but in painting rather than model form.
You can download 7.9 and 1.1 megabyte JPG files of the illustrations. The links to the JPG files are HERE and HERE. To access them, you will need to enter a username and password. The username: the first word in the body of the text on page 5 of APR issue V1N1. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 11 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
Mar 082012
A late 1950’s NASA concept for utilizing Atlas launch vehicle systems to send a sizable payload to the moon and the planets. While this never came close to being built, it was vaguely similar in concept to the actual Saturn I.
Feb 282012
Another PR card showing an X-30 NASP configuration, this being a 1990 Rockwell configuration. It’s similar to but noticeably fatter than the earlier generic configuration (shown HERE).
You can download 6.7 and 2.2 megabyte JPG files of the illustrations. The links to the JPG files are HERE and HERE. To access them, you will need to enter a username and password. The username: the first word in the body of the text on page 5 of APR issue V1N1. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 11 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
Feb 242012
Another PR card showing an X-30 NASP configuration, this being an early design modeled off of the original du Pont configuration.
You can download 3.15 and 2.2 megabyte JPG files of the illustrations. The links to the JPG files are HERE and HERE. To access them, you will need to enter a username and password. The username: the first word in the body of the text on page 5 of APR issue V1N1. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 11 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
Feb 172012
In the days before the web came to domination, aerospace companies and government organizations would stamp out glossy propaganda/PR informational cards by the truckload. The X-30 NASP (National Aero Space Plane) program was no different. Below is one such card released by NASA. Note that first flight was expected by 2000 or so… just slightly behind schedule at this point. The design shown here is the final publicly revealed configuration, with the wide flat “spatula” nose. Not shown in this – or pretty much any – illustration are the rocket engines needed to put the spaceplane into a circular orbit.
You can download 2.7 and 3.5 megabyte JPG files of the illustrations. The links to the JPG files are HERE and HERE. To access them, you will need to enter a username and password. The username: the first word in the body of the text on page 5 of APR issue V1N1. The password: the first word in the body of the text on page 11 of the same issue. Note that both are case sensitive.
Feb 142012
From 1970, a Grumman Alternate Space Shuttle design that utilizes the S-IC booster from the Saturn V. Quite a number of Space Shuttle concepts called for the S-IC to be used as a first stage booster, as an expendable stage, a partially reusable or fully reusable stage. Shown here, the basic S-IC would be expendable. However, a second option would be to use a modified S-IC where the outer four engines would drop off during ascent and would be recovered. This is the same concept that Boeing proposed for the S-ID stage (see the October 2008 issue of the AIAA-Houston “Horizons” newsletter for more on the S-ID).
The use of a S-IC – stock or modified for partial recovery – would have presented a number of advantages, not least being that the existing Saturn launch facilities could be used. The S-IC would have provided adequate launch performance; the use of recoverable engines would have lowered cost and increased performance. However, the S-IC production line had been shut down for some time, and restarting it would have proven not only politically dubious (restating the S-IC would have led to questions about restarting the rest of the Saturn/Apollo line), but also expensive.
Feb 112012
In October of 1969, General Dynamics/Convair reported to NASA on their Space Shuttle design work. This included a series of vehicles that utilized boosters and orbiters of similar geometry… basically little more than flat-bottomed aeroshells wrapped around the oxygen and hydrogen tanks. Both the booster and orbiter used turbofans stowed in the nose for flyback, and high aspect ratio variable geometry wings.
A number of configurations were studied, including triamese configurations with two boosters that had considerable commonality with the orbiter, to two-stage systems with entirely different boosters and orbiters. Payloads studied ranged from 25,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds. Note in the scale drawings below that the 50K version was virtually the same size as the Saturn V. This was due in part to the all-hydrogen fuel, and part as a consequence of reusability.
