spacecraft – Page 11 – Aerospace Projects Review Blog

Venus Balloon

Sep 192020

With the recent news of the possible discovery of the signs of possible life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, there is renewed interest in some quarters in the idea of atmospheric probes to sample the air and clouds directly. The most practical way to do this in something resembling a long term is with a balloon. With Venus’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, something usually useless as a lifting gas like nitrogen or oxygen could be used, but hydrogen or helium would work even better there than above Earth.

Such probes have been proposed for a *long* time. Here is art of Martin Marietta design for a Venus balloon from more than fifty years ago.

Martin studied a Buoyant Venus Station as far back as 1967. Included in the study were the instruments to be carried, including “drop sondes,” expendable instrument packages that would be dropped from the station to radio back data from lower down:

“Future Starships”

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Aug 312020

Late 1970’s depictions of “realistic” starships as understood at the time. These include an Orion vehicle (which, despite claims to the contrary, would make a terrible starship, since the specific impulse of a reasonably conceivable Orion is an order of magnitude or two too low for practical interstellar craft), two Bussard ramjets, and a “golden globe” minimum weight starship proposed by Robert L. Forward, whose operating principles I am currently a bit fuzzy on.

Bussard ramjets would use magnetic fields to collect interstellar hydrogen. The hydrogen would be compressed in a fusion reactor, preferably a steady-state one, and used to provide thrust to the starship. For a number of years this concept promised great things, but in recent decades it has been pretty much discounted. On one hand, the magnetic fields are not very likely going to work well at a reasonable mass, and they tend to not form open-mouthed funnels, but rather closed-mouthed “cups,” thus preventing the hydrogen from getting into the engine. Whoops. Second, thrust is unlikely to exceed drag much above maybe a percent or two of lightspeed, meaning a Bussard ramjet might serve as a decent “anchor” or drag brake, but not as an accelerator to relativistic velocities.

Apollo Extension System models

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Aug 262020

This set of models was recently sold on eBay. It depicts a proposed concept for extending the utility of Apollo hardware… in this case, the Command Module and the Ascent Stage of the Lunar Module, by using them in Earth or Lunar orbit in conjunction with a small space laboratory. The Lunar Module would be used as a little space lab of it’s own, with a bolted-on telescope… this idea transformed into the Apollo Telescope Mount on Skylab, which began life as a modified LM. This probably dates from 1965-66. The purpose of the lab was to provide living space for the crew of three, because missions were contemplated lasting several months, providing detailed examination of the Earth or moon. Scientifically useful to be sure, but were the crew packed solely into the CM and LM for that period they’d likely kick the walls out.

Titan II-Scramjet

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Aug 242020

Now here’s an odd thing…

Part of the collection of images from the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, NY, this depicts a Republic Aviation concept circa early 1960’s for putting a scramjet vehicle atop a Titan II first stage. Presumably this is meant to be… I dunno, a space launcher? No wings are in evidence, so cruise flight and a landing seem unlikely. But it would seem a hell of a thing to throw away, so *presumably* it was meant to be recovered somehow. Perhaps it shed the entire payload-containing nosecone and came back using the blunt forward dome of the propellant tank as a heat shield, followed by a splashdown. Dunno.

Also in the collection is the “AX-92 detailed drawing.” Clearly this is an entirely serious proposal, and not at all an example of an artist screwing around for giggles.

Convair Solar Powered Spaceship: 1959

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Aug 222020

A Convair illustration from a magazine article in 1959 depicting a solar powered spaceship. In this case, a spherical mylar “balloon” is used as a reflector. This would be light weight, but since it would need to maintain some level of internal pressurization to continue to hold its shape, it’s unclear just how long it would work before micrometeoroids turn it into leaky Swiss cheese. Additionally, a reflective hemisphere does not have a true optical focal point, rather a focal “line,” so a lot of the sunlight this thing would capture would be lost of inefficiently used. Presumably this design uses the sunlight to boil a working fluid such as mercury; the superheated pressurized gas blows past a turbine to generate electrical power. The gas then flows through a radiator to cool off and recondense back to a fluid. But given that there are no visible radiators, perhaps the idea was to use the sunlight to directly heat a fluid such as hydrogen to an extreme temperature to be used as a propellant. If your materials are up to it and your reflector is good enough, specific impulses in the area of 800 to 1200 seconds should not be unreasonable. But even here the illustration seems lacking… if hydrogen if the fuel, where are the huge tanks? In all likelihood, this illustration was never meant to depict a solid engineering study, but was merely propaganda art.

Aug 212020

Recent eBay procurements

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Aug 132020

One of the main purposes of the Monthly Historical Documents Program/APR Patreon is to get rare aerospace items from eBay. These items are then made available to subscribers/patrons via monthly votes and catalogs.

Below are some of the items I’ve recently paid for (though not as yet received). If you are interested in getting high-rez scans and/or helping me save these sort of things for future generations (as well as keeping my cats in food and litter), please consider signing up for the Monthly Historical Documents Program or the APR Patreon.

July 2020 Rewards now available

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Jul 312020

Rewards have just been posted for APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. Included this time:

1) An early (1969) NASA study of possible Space Shuttle configurations

2) A 1991 Strategic Defense Initiative Office presentation/transcript on the SDI program

3) A good, clear general arrangement diagram of the North American F-107

4) A CAD diagram of the late 1950’s Convair “Landing boat” that often appeared in presentations (art and models) from Krafft Ehricke

If you are a paid-up Patron/Subscriber, you should by now have received a message with a link to your rewards. If you haven’t, let me know.

10-passenger shuttle: 1964

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Jul 142020

In 1963-64, NASA was looking forward to a very bright future. Moon landings within a handful of years, a serious space station or two in the early seventies, manned missions to the vicinity of Mars and/or Venus probably by the early eighties, manned Mars landings not long after. Moon bases, Mars based, nuclear rockets, missions to the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter… in 1964, the rest of the 20th century must’ve looked *fantastic.*

In order to pull all that off, it was clear that NASA would need to launch a *lot* of astronauts. Consequently, a request for proposals went out to the aerospace industry to design the capability to do just that. Boeing, North American, Martin, Lockheed… a great deal of interest was shown and work accomplished. One design produced is illustrated below, a Lockheed design for a two-stage fully reusable spaceplane capable of transporting ten tons of payload or ten passengers to an orbiting space station. The booster stage had a cockpit about where you’d expect; the spaceplane, conversely, had an offset spaceplane so that the crew would have *some* sort of forward view during landing. Both stages used advanced rocket engines; the first stage also had turbojets to get it back to the launch site. As with all pre-Shuttle designs, estimates of turnaround time and minimal launch cost are impressive and a bit depressing in just how fabulously optimistic they were.

An earlier three-stage concept was shown in US Launcher Projects #5.

The future looked bright. And then… LBJ.

DC-3 orbiter

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Jul 012020

The orbiter for the “DC-3” referenced previously. This vehicle had relatively small wings, leading to quite low crossrange. The wings were also simple straight wings, not highly swept deltas; the vehicle could get away with this because it did not “glide” during re-entry, but “belly flopped.” To aid in crossrange and landing, each wing would have a single turbofan in a sealed pod. The payload bay is not shown here, but would be quite small and right behind the cockpit.

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