Found and photographed at the NASA-HQ historical archive was this painting depicting work being done upon an orbiting S-IVb stage. What’s happening is that small secondary payloads were to be installed in the Instrument Unit which ringed the top of the S-IVb stage below the conical main payload shroud, and they could be accessed by astronauts for use or retrieval. This is described in the Saturn V Payload Planner’s Guide (available HERE).
Some ca. 2011 NASA artwork depicting the hoped-for for flight of the Exploration Flight test (EFT-1) in 2014, showing the Orion capsule and its service module attached to a Delta IV upper stage. The EFT-1 mission will be unmanned, and tossed up to 3,600 miles for two orbits.
No point in developing a nuclear powered turbojet if you don’t have some sort of idea what you’re going to put it in. In the case of the XNJ140E, three of them were to power the Convair NX2. The NX2 was a research aircraft based on prior design work for a subsonic nuclear powered missile carrier, the Model 54 (not a “bomber,” per se, as it had no internal bomb bay and carried powered missiles rather than gravity bombs).
Numerous variants of the NX2 were designed, taking advantage of different nuclear turbojets. The design shown below used three XNJ140E’s to provide cruise propulsion; but for takeoff, two additional chemically fueled turbojets were provided in underwing pods.
The configuration was an unconventional canard layout. This had the advantage of letting the engines occupy the tail of the aircraft, clear of entanglements with wings or stabilizers. After landings the engines could be relatively easily removed from the aircraft for servicing and storage.
A few months ago some news sites went buggo with the declassification of several reports on the Avro-Canada Project 1794, a late 1950’s effort to develop a VTOL supersonic “flying saucer.” See, for example, Wired wildly inaccurately titled: “Declassified at Last: Air Force’s Supersonic Flying Saucer Schematics,” which ignores the fact that this design had been declassified fifteen or more years ago… I got a report from the NASM in the mid/late 1990’s, and have seen it online for *years.* Heck, a year or two back I made available some Avro documents on the topic (to thunderous silence, I’ll add).
While a technical masterpiece, it suffered from one minor flaw… it didn’t work. The “Avrocar” test vehicle proved wholly incapable of flight… it could hover in ground effect, and slowly wobble about, but could not generate enough vertical thrust to lurch clear of the ground.
Anyway, a few months back the National Archives declassified a box of reports, the tech blogosphere went nuts, and very little actually got posted online, just retreads of what the National Archives put in a single blog post. So, here’s some more Project 1794 stuff.
A layout illustration of the General Electric XNJ140E-1 nuclear turbojet. This is the developmental engine, not an operational engine, and does not seem to have a chemical afterburner.
“Code One” is the in-house magazine put out by Lockheed-Fort Worth. They have been adding a lot of good stuff regarding projects to their website over the years, and now have a page devoted specifically to diagrams of unbuilt aircraft:
Only a few just now, but they say that there are a lot more coming.
Previously shown but not understood HERE, in 1961 GE proposed modifying a B-52G to serve as a testbed for a single XNJ140E-1 nuclear turbojet. The very large engine would be contained in a nacelle attached to the port rear fuselage. With eight conventional J57 chemical turbojets, the testbed aircraft would be capable of putting the engine through the altitude and airspeed paces that would be expected of it in the NX-2 nuclear powered bomber demonstrator (35,000 feet and Mach 0.8). This configuration would be capable of sustained nuclear flight.
Another configuration would have a second XNJ140E-1 nuclear turbojet on the other side of the fuselage, and only four J57’s. This aircraft would be capable of pure nuclear flight from takeoff to landing, with the J57’s as emergency backup.
Approximate isodose lines around the nuclear B-52G in powered flight
A Boeing (or possibly North American Aviation) artists concept of what appears to be a space station, but may be an interplanetary spacecraft. While overall it appears to be a Saturn V derived space station (using, apparently, the S-IVb tanks as a basis), on the right there appears to be a bay holding several Viking-style entry capsules. Numerous interplanetary spacecraft designs of the 1960’s had these. The capsules would hold not people, but unmanned landers and rovers. The relatively small size of the solar panels might indicate that this craft was designed for a mission to Venus; the apparent lack of much of a propulsion system might indicate that this was a flyby mission rather than a capture-and-orbit mission.
Note also the centrifuge that takes up the second deck from the “bottom.”
No further data than the painting. Found some years back in the Boeing archive, so possibly North American Aviation. Appears to depict a dry-lab station built from Saturn V components, in this case apparently a shortened S-II stage.The Apollo capsule docked to the side seems a somewhat dubious proposition; there doesn’t appear to be an airlock there.
The use of such a space station as a mounting point for large astronomical telescopes such as shown here is also dubious. Vibrations, everything from solar panels being turned to air circulation systems to fluids being pumped to crewmen bumping around, would contribute to a pretty noisy image.
A painting found at the NASA HQ archive some years back depicting a Dyna Soar re-entering the atmosphere. This was an earlier design, launched sub-orbitally rather than orbitally.
